The Social, Political and Aesthetic Value of Ama Ata Aidoo’s Poetry in Someone Talking To Sometime
Abstract
Although Ama Ata Aidoo (1942-2023) is a well-known writer who has been extensively studied,
her poetic work seems to have been neglected, especially her first collection of poems, Someone Talking
to Sometime (1985), which received the Nelson Mandela Poetry Prize in 1987 and has not been translated
in Spain. Hence, this article intends to unravel the meaning and importance of this work as well as to unveil
Aidoo’s ideological and emotional lyricism by translating one of her poems.
Someone Talking to Sometime reveals an abstract poetry, full of metaphors, and at the same time direct and expeditious. Its analysis imposes a division into six aspects that characterise it and allow a deeper studyof each of them: the different references, the varied subject matter, the dualisms, the denunciation, the perception of blackness, and the description of Africa and its society.
Consequently, the study will allow to reconstruct Aidoo’s vision of Africa, the diaspora, the West and the African woman, as well as to show the value poetry had for her, used both as a weapon of denunciation and a
channel for expressing her conflicting feelings towards Africa.
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