Summary
Note: Aidoo moves between poetry and prose, sometimes with only a single line on a page.
The narrator says it is hard to talk to a “moderate” Black person when they can only regurgitate what they learned from their bosses. The academic pseudo-intellectual is also dangerous and tedious, spouting off things about “universal truth, universal art, universal literature and the Gross National Product” (6) before he tells you that you’re too young to understand. This is disappointing.
Home and Europe are a long way away from each other, but Sissie is going. Right away the Ghanaian embassy seemed to have wanted Sissie to go to the European country, and had shown a lot of interest in her. The ambassador himself invited her to his home, throwing a party with crisp table linens and shining glasses and European wine. The ambassador, his wife, another European man whom she learned was the First Secretary, his wife, and an African man attended the dinner. The African man’s name was Sammy and it was clear he’d been at these dinners before. He laughed a lot and had been to the European country before. Everyone made it clear she was very lucky to have been selected for the trip. She fidgeted in her chair as he laughed and told stories. She would meet a lot of Sammys in her day.
A week after she left, the local newspaper published her picture and a story about her trip.
On the plane, the airline hostess asked her if she wanted to join her friends at the back. She did not know the two Nigerian men but she did not want to make an awkward situation so she went. She told herself the hostess knew what she was doing and was only trying to make everyone more comfortable.
They crossed over Africa, the Mediterranean sea, and arrived in Europe in the morning. As they flew over the Alps, Sissie was overwhelmed by their height.
In Frankfurt there was time to kill before the train, so Sissie wandered around. She was amazed by the shops and wares, not to mention the noises of the streets. She heard someone say something in German about a “Black girl,” and she was surprised to realize they meant her. For her part, the crowd around her “had the colour of the pickled pig parts that used to come from foreign places to the markets at home” (12). First she wanted to vomit, then she was ashamed of her reaction.
It was at this moment that she would now always see color and difference, and that people used these differences to be mean. They used these differences to get land, mines, gold, clothes, jewels, houses. They used differences to justify harsher voices, stronger commands, and ultimately had the power to say who lived and who died—and also where, when, and how.
Analysis
In Ama Ata Aidoo’s novel Our Sister Killjoy, the protagonist, Sissie, takes an archetypal there-and-back-again journey, traveling from Ghana to Europe in order to get a European education, and back to Ghana where she will use that education in service of her people. Like most of these stories of travel and adventure, Sissie grows intellectually, undertakes many new and sometimes disconcerting experiences, refines her worldview, and develops her voice. What differentiates Sissie, though, from other Africans who undertake the journey to Europe—the “been-tos”—is that she decides to go back home at all, as many Africans stay in Europe hoping for money and reputation and admiration from the former imperialists.
From the beginning of the text when she evinces her discomfort with the trappings of wealth and glamour associated with her scholarship, we see that Sissie is no Sammy and no Kunle. She is a “killjoy,” an African woman who refuses to compromise on her increasingly critical views of Europeans, neocolonialism, African elites, the “been-tos,” and more.
This “killjoy” attitude isn’t completely developed at first. Sissie can only say of Sammy that he spoke the Europeans’ “language and was familiar with them in a way that made her uneasy” (9), and that as he talked she “shivered and fidgeted in her chair” (9). When on the plane heading to Germany, she also does not speak up when the flight attendant assumes she is a friend of two other Black men in the back of the plane and tells her she ought to join them. Sissie concludes that “to have refused to join them would have created an awkward situation, wouldn't it?” (10). In the city waiting for the train to take her to the village she will be living and working in, she takes a walk and allows herself to be impressed by the “Cloths. Perfume. Flowers. Fruits…Music. Sounds. Noises” (12). Yet this wide-eyed amble also includes an epiphany for her: she hears a woman tell her daughter that Sissie is a “black girl,” and then cannot help but look around herself and notice how people’s white skins “had the colour of the pickled pig parts that used to come from foreign places to the markets at home…And she wanted to vomit” (12). From this moment on, she knew that people would always see difference, and in that seeing would find “an excuse to be mean” (13).
It is important to mention not just the elements of the novel like plot and character, but also its unique structure, which is apparent from page one. First of all, there is an omniscient third-person narrator that gives us insights into Sissie’s thoughts, and there is also a more aggressive outside narrative force that is perhaps Aidoo or Sissie once she’s further developed her consciousness. Second, there is a blend of prose and poetry and song, and a myriad of tones.
Scholars have much to say about all of this. Chioma Opara suggests, “Aidoo combines prose, song, poetry and sketch in this novel” perhaps in order to give “a structural reflection of the diverse reproductive and productive roles played by women in society.” Pumla Dineo Gqola claims, “agency is evident in the experimental structure of the narrative which fuses poetry and prose. The task of representing Black women in postcolonial ways is challenging since it demands from us that we create and refashion forms of representation which continue to break new ground. Faced with the inadequacy of existing forms, Aidoo has noted about Our Sister Killjoy, 'There was simply no way I could have written that book in any other style.'” Similarly, Touria Khannous notes, the “radical break of the novel from realist narrative techniques, through its mixture of prose and poetry, is an initiation into a new understanding of modern Ghana. Aidoo’s postcolonial feminist views on both colonialism and nationalism, and the political context in which she writes, are emphasized through such techniques,” and Kofi Owusu says that even though the story is ostensibly about one woman—Sissie—the text is “anything but univocal. A close examination of the text's four-part structure, for example, reveals the range of critical languages that are echoed in, and may be brought to bear on, the text.” Gay Wilentz says, “it is hard to call this compilation of poetic anger, political commentary, journal entries, oral voicings and letter writings a 'novel' in the traditional sense. Rather, it appears to be a formulation of an African prose poem which reverberates with sounds of the orature in the written language and personal dialogue-illustrating Aidoo's comment that ‘we don't always have to write for readers, we can write for listeners.'”
