Sin embargo, durante su estancia en Europa descubrirá a través de Marija que los contrastes culturales son a menudo desconcertantes.

Todo el mundo a su alrededor le recuerda que es una privilegiada, que viajar es una oportunidad única «para mejorar», que Europa es un mundo fantástico al que África debe mirar como referente. Sissie es escogida para un programa de becas en Europa y siente como si fuese «una especie de ensayo para un viaje al paraíso». Te está deseando la muerte en tanto persona creativa». «Cuando un crítico se niega a hablar de tu obra, es un acto de violencia. For me, it could have been even smaller and tighter with a little of the disorienting stream-of-consciousness-fat trimmed off. It's a 'little' book - only 134 pages - but it packs a punch. I'm bound to read Our Sister Killjoy again. Books written by writers from different African countries 40 -60 years apart (think of Nigerian writer China Achebe’s Things Fall Apart) continue to illustrate that black African encounters with western imperial powers - whether British or American -continue to be layered and fragmenting, if not rich and psyche-boggling. Before reading this I had just read Imbole Mbue’s (Cameroonian) Behold the Dreamers, and some of that was still on my mind.

Reading this book 40 years after its original publication I find it eerie that dominant Eurocentric attitudes, systems, and languages continue to complicate black identities in the multi-voiced ever-interrogating dialogue that Ama Ata Aidoo (Ghanaian) employed in this work. Ama Ata Aidoo is of my parents’ generation so I tried, while reading, to imagine back to 1977 when Our Sister Killjoy was first published to consider how black women across the diaspora were writing about their experience.

Our sister killjoy