In my mother's house: A study of selected works by Ama Ata Aidoo and Buchi Emecheta (Ghana, Nigeria)

African women writers openly lament, question, and criticise the neglect of their work; they also attack this neglect through the act of writing. Texts by African women writers seek to reclaim women's marginal positions and show them “as spaces of strength within and between which they fluctuate” (Nfah-Abbenyi 150). Post-colonial theory and most Western feminist theories have so far failed to problematize the position of African women. Through their act of writing these women's texts also provide insight into the ongoing debate in post-colonial-theory and Western feminist theories. In these texts we also see the interrelatedness of the problems that confront women and those that face the continent. The women contemplate an African womanism.; This study looks at texts by Ama Ata Aidoo and Buchi Emecheta, two of Africa's prolific writers. I offer a self-interpellative reading, a reading foregrounded in the “real history” of text and (con)text (Susan Andrade 94). I weave autobiography into my reading; this strategy gives me an approach that does not convey an “un-self-conscious appropriation” (Alcoff 24) of women's experiences. The autobiographical narrative does not only enable me to know the literature I study here through myself and myself through the literature, it also provides me with a “movement toward a politics of location,” (Freedman, Frey and Murphy Zaubar 10), and establishes a link between the personal and the political.; In the Introduction I argue for a critical approach that takes the cultural grounding of texts produced by African women into consideration. Chapter One is an autobiographical reading of Aidoo's No Sweetness Here. Chapter Two is a surveyic reading of Emecheta's Head Above Water and The Joys of Motherhood. This chapter serves as a bridge to my detailed reading of Aidoo's Changes: A Love Story and Our Sister Killjoy in Chapters Three and Four. I demonstrate through the reading of these texts that while these women reclaim space for themselves in African society, they address problems that face the continent as a whole.