44 pages • 1 hour read
Ama Ata AidooOur Sister Killjoy
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1977A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Dedication-Chapter 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Dedication Summary
Content Warning: This section includes discussions of anti-Black racism.
The text of Our Sister Killjoy is written partly in prose and partly in verse. Most of the prose sections are written in the third person, while the verse sections are narrated in the first person by Sissie. The two styles are blended; most pages contain both poetry and prose, interwoven seamlessly.
Our Sister Killjoy is dedicated to two people: Nanabanyin Tandoh and author Roger Genoud. Ata Ama Aidoo describes the intense grief she felt when she learned of Genoud’s death. She felt that “there was no cloth / strong enough to / hold [her] spilling intestines in” (vi).
Chapter 1 Summary: “Into a Bad Dream”
The narrator describes, in abstract terms, how frustrating it is to debate politics with a fellow Black person who merely parrots European political ideas instead of thinking critically. Such people, after condescendingly explaining their opinions on “[t]he need for law and order […] The sanctity of the U.N. charter; The population explosion” (6) and more will then dismiss their interlocutor as too young and naïve to be properly informed.
Sissie is a young Ghanaian woman preparing to travel to Europe. She will be studying and volunteering abroad. It is the mid-1960s, and many European countries are deliberately making it easy for African students to travel and study abroad as part of a post-colonial effort “to make good again” (8). Sissie gets her passport approved very quickly, and a European ambassador from an unspecified country throws a dinner party for her just before her departure.
The party seems unusually fancy. There, Sissie meets a Ghanaian man that the white people refer to as “Sammy.” Sammy has previously spent a lot of time in Europe. He is obsequious and continually sings Europe’s praises, making Sissie feel profoundly uneasy. She does not enjoy the food she is served. Since Sissie is going abroad, people feel that she has “made it.”
To get to Europe, Sissie has to get on a plane that starts its journey in South Africa and refuels in West Africa. Few such flights will stop over in Accra, Ghana’s capital city, because Ghana, under the leadership of Kwame Nkrumah, has poor relations with South Africa. Sissie takes a plane to Lagos, Nigeria, before boarding her second flight to Frankfurt. She is seated next to two white South Africans. Once the plane is in the air, the flight attendant asks if Sissie wants “to join [her] two friends at the back” (10) of the plane, though Sissie is traveling alone. Not wanting to cause a fuss, she goes to the back of the plane, where she meets two Nigerian men from the same study abroad program.
The flight travels overnight across the north of Africa, crossing over Europe in the early morning. Sissie is struck by the view of the Alps from the air. In the Frankfurt airport, a functionary meets Sissie and the Nigerian men. He brings them to a train station, where Sissie takes a moment to look at the extraordinary excess of consumer goods in the shops. She overhears a woman refer to her as “das Schwartze Mädchen” (12), meaning “the Black girl.” Abruptly, Sissie becomes aware that everyone around her is white; she retains this awareness of race for the rest of her life, recognizing its inescapable influence on world politics and on white people’s “Power to decide / Who is to live / Who is to die / Where / When / How” (16).
Dedication-Chapter 1 Analysis
Our Sister Killjoy begins with Sissie preparing to go to Europe to study, where she will have to navigate her Post-Colonial African Identity in a new context. The details and timeline of her program remain vague, and it is not even clear where she is going to study. From the start, Sissie is skeptical of the idea that Europe is a paradise or that European values are superior or universal. She can already recognize when a Black person is regurgitating “only what he has learnt from his bosses” (6) and is unable to truly think for himself. When she meets Sammy, this feeling solidifies; she describes his voice as “wet with longing” (9) for Europe, and he is desperate for the approval of the European ambassadors.
Sissie is aware that the study abroad program is, in theory, a way for Europe to repair relations with a newly independent Ghana by allowing a select few African students to join the ranks of the European-educated elite. Paradoxically, this apparent benevolence actually serves to reify European influence over Africa and establish Europe as the imperial core, placing Africa eternally on the periphery. These educational opportunities might seem valuable, but in Sissie’s view, they indicate that true decolonization has not yet occurred.
Hypocrisy and Shame play a major role in Sissie’s journey. Although the European ambassador is eager to help her travel to Europe, the flight attendant sends her to the back of the plane so that her presence does not offend white South Africans. She is treated like an honored guest at the dinner party with Sammy, but then expected to accept racist treatment on her flight. South Africa, at the time, was under the Apartheid regime, a white supremacist government that enforced strict racial segregation. Sissie has to fly to Nigeria in order to board a flight to Europe because many flights to Europe originated in South Africa; at the time, Ghana had restricted flights from South Africa in protest against Apartheid.
When Sissie arrives in Germany, she becomes aware for the first time in her life of “differences in human colouring” (13): Everyone around her is white, while she is Black. She is disgusted by the white skin around her, comparing it to pig skin, and is then ashamed by her reaction because it is a way of accepting that these physical characteristics denote meaningful differences among people. Sissie’s experience in the train station in Germany also sets off the first of her experiences with The Effects of Isolation and Alienation as an African in Europe. This is the first instance where Sissie is truly struck by the visual difference between herself and white people. She recognizes that skin color is the justification for racism, white supremacy, and segregation, all of which look to isolate and alienate Black people from one another, their land, and the so-called civilized world.
Though her study abroad program is meant to bridge the divide between Europe and Africa, Sissie is already aware that Europeans still have all the power. Her education is actually about fully recognizing and accepting ongoing European racial and cultural hegemony and then bringing that acceptance back to Ghana. Sissie is isolated and alienated in Europe not only because of the color of her skin, but because of what the color of her skin represents to Europeans: weakness, racial inferiority, and a country of resources ripe for plunder.
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