Changes: A Love Story

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

Changes: A Love Story (SparkNotes Literature Guide) by Ama Ata Aidoo
Making the reading experience fun!

Created by Harvard students for students everywhere, SparkNotes is a new breed of study guide: smarter, better, faster.

Geared to what today's students need to know, SparkNotes provides:

chapter-by-chapter analysis
explanations of key themes, motifs, and symbols
a review quiz and essay topics

Lively and accessible, these guides are perfect for late-night studying and writing papers.

Publisher: Union Square & Co.

Print pages: 80

Sample

Ama Ata Aidoo was born in 1942 in pre-independence Ghana. The daughter of a village chief in the town of Abeadzi Kyiakor, Aidoo was raised in a comfortable and progressive household that not only supported but also encouraged her education. Aidoo’s father opened the first school in their village, and sent Aidoo to the prestigious Wesley Girls High School in Cape Coast, where she first began to consider herself a writer. She published her first short story in 1958 after winning a writing competition, which encouraged her to keep writing. Three years later, Aidoo entered the University of Ghana at Legon where she continued to write short stories, poetry, and plays. In 1964, Aidoo’s first play, The Dilemma of a Ghost, was staged and later published. The play was one of Aidoo’s earliest explorations of several prominent themes that would dominate her later works. In the play, two young college graduates, one Ghanaian and the other African-American, fall in love and marry. This sets off an exploration of cultural differences and colonial legacies. Aidoo’s work led to the formation of a strong, female literary presence that would be vital to her work and to African literature as a whole.

Following Aidoo’s graduation from the University of Ghana in 1964, she worked as a research fellow at the Institute for African Studies. Six years earlier, Chinua Achebe published his novel Things Fall Apart. Achebe’s novel marked a dramatic turning point in African literature. With its incorporation of both African and Western literary traditions, Things Fall Apart served as a model for discussing Africa’s colonial legacy while simultaneously reaffirming the traditional values of African culture. This novel offered the first and most significant example of the style of postcolonial African literature.

As Ghana and most of. . .