Ama Ata Aidoo published Our Sister Killjoy in 1979. Though a novel, it reflected her own experiences abroad. She explained in an interview, “I created [Sissie], it’s inevitable that a certain part of me will be reflected in her. But it is not an autobiographical work.” It is a mixture of poetry and prose, defying rigid boundaries of literary genres. Aidoo has suggested it is a work of fiction in four parts, not quite a novel.
Aidoo began writing Killjoy in 1972 when she was teaching full-time and had a baby daughter at home so she was not able to work on it often. When she traveled to the United States to be a Consultant Professor for an ethnic program in New York and Washington, D.C., she was able to devote more time to the novel, and by 1975 when she returned to Ghana, she had more of the work written. She left the manuscript with Longman before leaving for Ghana, and that was published in 1977.
At the time of its publication, reviews were mostly negative (if reviewers deigned to cover it at all). Aidoo saw this response as a commentary on her gender; her own department chair told her that Killjoy was good enough for “all these women’s studies programs.” She explained, “I am convinced that if Killjoy or anything like it had been written by a man, as we say in these parts, no one would have been able to sleep a wink these last couple of years, for all the noise would have been made about it.”
Of the novel she explained that she didn’t think she would have been able to write something like it in her later years, telling an interviewer, “so happy that one can apply one's self, one's mind this way. But I am perhaps relieved that I wrote Killjoy and other things when I did because now I am so conscious of the gravity of these issues that I wonder if I would still be able to put them through the medium of an imaginative work. I can do articles, polemical pieces, but I think in a way a book like Killjoy I may not be able to write now because I think I am too clear about people's objections to this form of writing. On the one hand, although I'm still aware of what the problems are, I'm also a little more aware of people not wanting to really hear about them. And I am conscious of inhibitions. I am a little more inhibited than when I wrote Killjoy. I'm glad I wrote it when I did.”
The novel now frequently appears in university courses and is well-regarded by scholars, critics, and writers.
