| Being an important African female writer of the first generation,Ama Ata Aidoo(1944-)has witnessed the process of Ghana’s independence from British colonization.However,she has also learned about the deception of the independence.In her representative work Changes: A Love Story,Ghanaian social condition and the status of women are revealed through the story of the protagonist’s subversive choice of marriage.Ghana people’s ideological confusion is also revealed because of the isolation with traditional culture under western education and the effect of neocolonism.Aidoo criticizes the corrupted governance,the hypocrisy of national bourgeoisie,and the hidden neocolonialism after Ghana’s independence,which she takes as the hindrance to Ghana’s construction and to Africa’s development.Aidoo emphasizes the importance of feminism for independent national construction and free social development.She even advocates that every man and every woman should be a feminist.This ideology can be revealed from the analysis of Changes under the lens of feminist narratology with Susan Lanser’s theory on three modes of narrative voice.With the combination of the dialogic feature in African orature,the omniscient performative narrator participates positively in the interaction with readers,showing sympathy for characters’ suffering and delivering wisdom from traditional culture.Besides,it reflects vividly the social problems with the conflation of poetic lines and dramatic dialogue in the novel,setting up the performative narrator’s authorial image for moral instruction and cultural inheritance.Thus Aidoo creates a unique style of African fiction,which is the best revelation of her commitment to the development of African orature.Grandmother’s eloquent speech in the narrative arrangement reveals the dilemma of the development of African feminism.In Lanser’s theory,the female community usually lives out of the heterosexual marriage,excluding men from the group.However,the Ghana traditional culture does not permit the existence of unmarried women in the rural area,and in the city there is no public space for them too.Aidoo constructs an African female community livingin traditional marriage.The rural mothers form a natural female group.With the foreground of the characters’ education and the procedure of marriage negotiation,the rural mothers’ authority is set up in their importance of cultural inheritance.But the hard existence under the patriarchal marriage makes them alienated in the hierarchy relationship.The Western education gives birth to a new female working group in the city.With economic independence they have the ability to act against patriarchal marriage.The protagonist recognizes the importance of sisterhood,which indicates the hope to build a new space for women’s identity.It is not easy to set up female authority with personal voice.The absence of personal voice in Changes is in accordance with the subversive image of the protagonist,and also illustrates African women’s apprehension in self-expression because of their problem of subjectivity and public identification. |
