Our Sister Killjoy

Writings

Aidoo's plays include The Dilemma of a Ghost, produced at Legon in 1964 (first published in 1965) and Pittsburgh in 1988, and Anowa, published in 1971 and produced at the Gate Theatre in London in 1991.[26][36]

Her works of fiction particularly deal with the tension between Western and African worldviews. Her first novel, Our Sister Killjoy, was published in 1977 and remains one of her most popular works. It is notable for portraying a dissenting perspective on sexuality in Africa, and especially LGBT in Africa. Whereas one popular idea on the continent is that homosexuality is alien to Africa and an intrusion of ideas of Western culture into a pure, inherently heterosexual "African" culture, Aidoo portrays the main character of Killjoy as indulging in lesbian fantasies of her own, and maintaining sympathetic relationships with lesbian characters.[37]

Many of Aidoo's other protagonists are also women who defy the stereotypical women's roles of their time, as in her play Anowa. Her novel Changes: A Love Story won the 1992 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Book (Africa).[38] She was also an accomplished poet—her collection Someone Talking to Sometime won the Nelson Mandela Prize for Poetry in 1987[39]—and the author of several children's books.

Aidoo contributed the piece "To be a woman" to the 1984 anthology Sisterhood Is Global: The International Women's Movement Anthology, edited by Robin Morgan.[40] Her story "Two Sisters" appears in the 1992 anthology Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby.[41]

In 2000, Aidoo founded the Mbaasem Foundation, a non-governmental organization based in Ghana with a mission "to support the development and sustainability of African women writers and their artistic output",[5] which she ran together with her daughter Kinna Likimani[42] and a board of management.[43]

Aidoo was editor of the anthology African Love Stories (Ayebia, 2006),[44] a collection of 21 stories by writers including Chika Unigwe, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Doreen Baingana, Nawal El Saadawi, Helen Oyeyemi, Leila Aboulela, Molara Ogundipe, Monica Arac de Nyeko, Sarah Ladipo Manyika, Sefi Atta, Sindiwe Magona, and Véronique Tadjo.[45][46] In 2012, Aidoo published Diplomatic Pounds & Other Stories, a compilation of short stories.[47]


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