The Dilemma of a Ghost | |
---|---|
Written by | Ama Ata Aidoo |
Date premiered | 1964 |
Place premiered | University of Ghana, Legon, Ghana |
Original language | English |
The Dilemma of a Ghost [1] is a play by Ghanaian writer Ama Ata Aidoo that was first performed in March 1964 for three nights at the Open Air Theatre of the University of Ghana, Legon, where the author was in her final year of studies, a few months away from graduating. [2] [3] [4] The play was published by Longman the following year, making Aidoo the first published African woman dramatist. [5] It was subsequently published in an edition with Aidoo's second play, Anowa (1970), both works dealing with the differences between Western culture and African traditions. [6]
A domestic satire, The Dilemma of a Ghost concerns a Ghanaian student returning from education abroad with his Black American wife, and her struggle coming to terms with her cultural past in her new African home. [7] [8] Simon Gikandi writes that the play "is both structurally and thematically related to the traditional dilemma tale. By focusing on the questions and problems of appropriate moral behavior, the dilemma tale invites the audience to adjudicate between conflicting possibilities of action. The drama centers on the problems of childbearing, infidelity, and exogamy that arise when Ato Yawson, the protagonist, returns to Ghana with an Afro-American wife, Eulalie Rush. The consequences of this unannounced marriage symbolize both the private and the public dilemmas of the postcolonial subject and her or his society. ... The ideological and stereotypical assumptions of both Eulalie and her new in-laws give rise to the seemingly irreconcilable encounter between the West (the United States) and Africa (Ghana)." [9]
Mpalive-Hangson Msiska notes that while the play "focuses on the dilemma of a man caught between two histories and two cultures, Aidoo is also concerned with the predicament of women who are not so much caught between cultures and histories as no longer having a place in either world. This double non-belonging, as opposed to split allegiance, might be spoken of as the dilemma of the daughter figure, as opposed to son and mother figures." [10]
Ama Ata Aidoo was a Ghanaian author, poet, playwright, politician, and academic. She was Secretary for Education in Ghana from 1982 to 1983 under Jerry Rawlings's PNDC administration. Her first play, The Dilemma of a Ghost, was published in 1965, making Aidoo the first published female African dramatist. As a novelist, she won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize in 1992 with the novel Changes. In 2000, she established the Mbaasem Foundation in Accra to promote and support the work of African women writers.
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Anowa is a play by Ghanaian writer Ama Ata Aidoo that was published in 1970, after Aidoo returned from Stanford University in California to teach at the University of Cape Coast. Anowa is based on a traditional Ghanaian tale of a daughter who rejects suitors proposed by her parents Osam and Badua, and marries a stranger who ultimately is revealed as the Devil in disguise. The play is set in the 1870s on the Gold Coast, and tells the story of the heroine Anowa's failed marriage to the slave trader Kofi Ako.
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