Foregrounding The Old Woman Figure: An Analysis of Selected Texts of Ama Ata Aidoo

Abstract

This textual research is premised on the fact that research on Aidoo’s works in recent years has not devoted much attention to the old woman figure who has been repeatedly represented in most of her works across the three genres of literature. The study sets out to examine Aidoo’s The Dilemma of a Ghost, Anowa, Changes, The Girl Who Can and Other Stories, and “Ghana: Where the Bead Speaks”, which are purposively sampled to explore how Nana is foregrounded and the roles assigned her to perform in them. The study is underpinned by ethnopoetics. The analysis reveals that Aidoo’s representation of the old woman figure perfectly situates her in an ethnopoetic context to perform the archetypal roles as the repository of wisdom, an omniscient narrator, a historian, the custodian of customs and traditions, and an agent of change. Another outcome of the study is that the old woman is foregrounded through imagery, repetition, suspense, her language, her name, and how she is introduced into the various texts. This research would be one of the references for students interested in using ethnopoetics and foregrounding to explore the old woman figure in other literary genres. In addition, the study is a contribution to the theory by demonstrating the extent to which ethnopoetics is useful to the analysis of Ghanaian texts. It again shows how foregrounding is used as a style to project the old woman figure in the selected texts.