1. Lecture Code: PS_L.19
ENGL 559: Postcolonial Studies UNIT 4: Postcolonial African Literature Our Sister Killjoy, Or Reflections from a Black-Eyed Squint by Ama Ata Aidoo
Min Pun, PhD, Associate Professor
Dept of English, PN Campus
Pokhara
31 December 2018

2. The Author: Ama Ata Aidoo
Born in 1942, Ama Ata Aidoo is a Ghanaian writer and scholar. She is a poet, novelist, and playwright.
She was also a former Minister of Education in Ghana.
She is now a Professor of English at the University of Cape Coast.
She voiced concerns over a variety of social and political issues at the forefront of Ghanaian society.
Often her female characters in her literary works are depicted with strong will and distinct personalities.

3. About the Novel
Our Sister Killjoy: or Reflections from a Black-eyed Squint is her first novel of Ghanaian author Ama Ata Aidoo, published in The novel features the history of Africa while touching upon the themes of exile, exploitation, slavery and post-independence struggle.
The novel is a work that talks of an unheard issue in much literature - the exile of African woman. Sissie gives us the eyes, and we look at her as she looks at others. It is a work to confront those who have forgotten their duties towards their homeland.
So combining prose, poetry and letter writing, Aidoo’s novel suggests those expatriates who have forgotten their duty to their native land.

4. Contd…. Aidoo’s Our Sister Killjoy is divided into four chapters:
Into a Bad Dream
The Plums
From Our Sister Killjoy
A Love Letter

5. List of Characters in the Novel
Sissie - Sissie, or as she is referred to in the novel’s title and first section as “Our Sister,” is the protagonist of Our Sister Killjoy. She is the main character in the novel. The novel begins with the arrival of Sissie as an exchange student from Ghana University to study in Germany. She also spends time in England during the course of the novel, though it is not clearly stated whether she herself is studying there or simply visiting with other students there.

6. Contd….
Marija Somner – She is a German woman whose husband is never home and who begins to fall in love with Sissie. Everyday she picks plums of the tree in her yard, and she feeds them to Sissie. Marija thinks that Ghana is near Canada and laughs at her own ignorance. She confesses her love for Sissie, who rejects her and goes to Munich.
Kunle – He is a self-exiled Ghanaian who believes that apartheid can be solved by the technology of the West. Sissie is disgusted by Kunle, whom she thinks has internalized his own racism and now looks down on Africa as lesser than, believing the colonizaing world is better than his home country. He gets an accident and dies at the end of the novel.

7. Contd….
Sammy – In Germany, Sissie meets Sammy, a boy who is also from Ghana and whose real name she does not catch. Sissie is unnerved by Sammy, whom she feels has lost touch with his home country and has been place at the party to sing the praises of life in Europe.

8. Plot Summary
In the first chapter “Into a Bad Dream”, the female character Sissie travels to Germany. The novel begins with the arrival of Sissie as an exchange student from Ghana University to study in Germany. She is welcomed with a party, where she is ridiculed by the presence of her African countrymen who live there and have adopted the European culture. She meets Sammy from Ghana.
In the second chapter “The Plums”, Sissie befriends a lady Marija Sommer. Marija brings her Plums and other fruits every day. Marija eventually falls in love with Sissie as the exotic foreigner. When Sissie leaves for her next stop in Munich, Marija becomes disappointed and lonely.

9. Contd….
In the third chapter “From Our Sister Killjoy”, Sissie’s third stop is London; she feels the place as an old colonial home. This section familiarizes the readers with Sissie’s meeting to African self- exiles. She pities their living condition. She meets Kunle, who dies in a car accident later.
In the fourth chapter “A Love Letter”, the narrator introduces the readers to Sissie’s lover. It’s a mock-dialogue, conveying her experiences and learning to her lover. The section ends with Sissie deciding not to send the letter and only convey what she has seen to the people back home.

10. Themes The Politics of Exile Exploitation Slavery
Post-independence Struggle
A strategy for deconolonization

11. Analysis of the Novel: From A Postcolonial Approach
In the novel, Aidoo’s novel tells the story of Sissie, a young African woman who goes to Europe to better herself and receive a proper European education.
In the process, she discovers the realities of colonization, Europe’s effect on the young Africans it sponsors, and how both white Europeans and black African have been mistaught about the realities of race and racism in their everyday lives.
Aidoo’s fiction and plays deal extensively with the struggle she sees between West Africa and Western nations culturally, politically, and economically, and the effects of colonization on African people.

12. Contd…
Aidoo questions the reasons of exile. Everything is seen through the squinted eyes of a modern, educated African woman Sissie. She comes across experiences that are enriching, baffling, demoralizing - a variety of positive and negative ones.
Through a combination of prose, poetry and letter writing, Sissie confronts those exiles who have forgotten their duty to their native land and reports back to her home community what she sees in the land of the colonizers.

13. Contd…
Even after the decolonization of Africa, Europe remained a shadow, it was as if the colonizers were only making it up for the Africans they offered study grants or scholarship abroad. Thinking of this as an opportunity, Africans takes chances of living the life abroad plus their aspiration to go abroad, imagining comfortable and luxurious life.
But Sissie, our protagonist was totally different unlike those who are in living in comfort in Europe there she was, in spite of her squint eye, she was able to see the of European intentions behind the those scholarship grants and study abroad.

14. Conclusion
Aidoo’s protagonists are all women working against the stereotypes that bind them, who, like Sissie, show a strong front against racism, sexism, and Western biases.
Even after independence in Africa, the grip of colonizers that are not purposely removed was continuously eating up African identity itself for generations and generations.
The novel portrays the face of Africa after independence where Ghana as the first sub-Saharan African colony of Britain that attained freedom from the colonizers was shown as imprisoned by discriminative education, western ideology and brain drain that seems to hinder their progress.

15. Contd…
To conclude, in Our Sister Killjoy, Ama Ata Aidoo domesticates the novel as a strategy for decolonization by re-presenting the “story of Africa”; employing a narrative style and engaging with subject matter that asserts the difference of Africa and Africans from Europeans.
Through the character of Sissie, Aidoo challenges Western metaphysics and epistemology on which colonization and its notions of Otherness are grounded. She reverses the colonial travel narrative and criticizes colonization and its lasting impacts on Africa, the “artificiality” of life and the “coldness” of existence in the West, and Western advancement and technology.

16. Associate Professor, Dept of English Tribhuvan University
Min Pun, PhD
Associate Professor, Dept of English
Tribhuvan University
Prithvi Narayan Campus, Pokhara
Website: