Our Sister Killjoy Reading Order

Our Sister Killjoy (1977) by Ama Ata Aidoo is the great Ghanaian experimental novel — a hybrid work that moves between prose narrative, lyric poetry, and epistolary fiction to follow Sissie, a young Ghanaian woman, on a scholarship trip to Germany and England in the 1970s. Sissie is acutely and uncomfortably conscious of her position as an African woman in Europe: she resists the romantic projections of the Europeans who want her to be grateful, exotic, or sexually available; she resists the pressure to become assimilated; she is equally critical of the African men who have come to Europe and stayed, seduced by comfort and the prestige of European life into a kind of permanent diaspora that abandons the continent that formed them. Aidoo's formal choices are inseparable from her critique: the novel refuses to present itself as a conventional realist narrative because the conventions of the European novel are part of what she is arguing against. The prose sections are analytical and incisive; the lyric sections give Sissie's inner life a beauty that the analytical voice cannot contain; the long letter that closes the novel addresses the African men who have remained in Europe directly and furiously. The novel was commercially and critically ignored on publication; it has been gradually recognized as one of the essential African literary texts of the twentieth century, and Aidoo is now recognized as one of the foundational figures of African feminist and postcolonial literature.