Contemporary Literary Criticism | Aidoo, Ama Ata - Maria Olaussen (essay date summer 2002)

Maria Olaussen (essay date summer 2002)

SOURCE: Olaussen, Maria. “‘About Lovers in Accra’—Urban Intimacy in Ama Ata Aidoo's Changes: A Love Story.” Research in African Literatures 33, no. 2 (summer 2002): 61-80.

[In the following essay, Olaussen argues that Changes: A Love Story presents an “utopian” vision of the deconstruction of traditional sexual roles in postcolonial Africa.]

“What does a woman want?” If Sigmund Freud did not have an answer to that question, that is not the case with the mothers in Ama Ata Aidoo's novel Changes: A Love Story. The fact that their daughter is an educated woman in a lucrative job with great prospects for her future has a profound influence on how these rural women see her “real” needs and desires. But their advice and admonitions are based on the reality of women's lives in a male dominated world. According to the mothers, an educated woman expects “something...

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