Ama Ata Aidoo and the Black-eyed Squint: Satire and Subversion in Our Sister Killjoy

Abstract

Ama Ata Aidoo is known for openly questioning the legacy of British colonialism in Africa, and this constitutes the main subject-matter of her large narrative, poetic and dramatic oeuvre. In her first novel, Our Sister Killjoy (1977), Aidoo defies the European representational models which deny the history of the continent and continues to perpetuate racial stereotypes as means of exclusion. The aim of this article is to examine the ways in which thanks to a poignant and masterly use of irony and satire Aidoo destabilizes three important European genres: travel narratives, the novel of formation, and the epistolary novel. I contend that the presence of a narrative voice deeply rooted on African oral traditions and that irreverently interrogates the contradictions of a universalist colonial discourse opens a satirical space in which the protagonist can only adopt an ethical and moral stance against the purported superiority of European culture. Using the trope of the squint, an out-of-focus gaze which inverts and subverts European values, Aidoo poignantly identifies the paradoxes underlying the postcolonial condition.