Cross-Generational Sororities: Honouring the Feminist Legacy of Ama Ata Aidoo in Ayobami Adebayo’s Stay with Me (2017)

Abstract

Ama Ata Aidoo remains a celebrated feminist icon in Africa’s literary scene. Among her plays, novels and short stories, we come across (self-)empowered, determined and insubordinate women who rebel against certain forms of patriarchal violence such as oppressive marriages, rape or “arrested” sexuality in post-Independence Ghana and in the diaspora. Aidoo’s “transformative feminism” (Arndt 2002) also engages with concomitant issues to the woman-question like nation-building, transculturation or nationalism. In this article, I aim to explore how Aidoo’s works have influenced contemporary writers such as Nigerian author Ayobami Adebayo. In her debut novel Stay with Me (2017), Adebayo engages with a central theme in African literature, motherhood and child rearing, in her exploration of a Yoruba woman who is firstly conceived as barren and, after engendering several terminally-ill children, a “failed” (non-)woman. Whereas Aidoo portrays women who are despised and ostracised due to their childlessness, exploring women who are described as “witches” in this process of female demonisation, Adebayo re-appropriates the figure of the outcast to actually reclaim the agency patriarchy denies transgressive women, thus positivising the idea of the doomed childless woman. I seek to examine how Aidoo’s seminal works, namely her plays Anowa (1970) and The Dilemma of a Ghost (1965), her novel Changes: A Love Story (1991) and her short story collection No Sweetness Here and Other Stories (1970), have influenced Adebayo’s 2017 novel regarding the foundational theme of African motherhood. In this space of cross-generational sororities, Adebayo naturally picks up on a number of key issues discussed in Aidoo’s works such as women’s struggle for liberation or the tradition vs. modernity dilemma in which women are no longer represented as procreative, self-sacrificing and marriage-oriented selves, but I would also contend that the former actualises some of the topics touched upon by her literary godmother, thus cementing a new African feminist consciousness.