"Going home is another story": Constructions of Nation and Gender in Ama Ata Aidoo's Changes

Abstract

Both the title and the epigraph quote from Aidoo's last collection of poems, an Angry Letter in January (1992), a volume in which the experience of exile, questions of place and belonging, of home and identity, reverberate like wailing off a wall. A committed political activist in the Ghanaian revolution of 1981, for several years subsequently, Aidoo lived elsewhere than Ghana (in Zimbabwe, to be precise). Though Aidoo merits a place in the company of her peers - those African writers like Achebe, Soyinka, Armah, Sembene, Farah, Ngugi et al, whose work has proceeded in step with the post-Independence histories of their countries - she has until recently been similarly displaced in terms of her literary reputation.