My parents, who lived and studied in New York in the 1970s, were part of an elite group of Zimbabweans and Africans who were able to escape their nations’ protracted liberation wars and pursue knowledge abroad. Along the way, many of them acquired some Western sensibilities. Growing up, my mother famously made the cosmopolitan meals she had learnt of in her time abroad: scalloped potatoes, chicken curries, cornbread. My father taught me the art of squeezing wedges of lemon over warm fish and engaged me in intellectual debates about Dickens and Shakespeare. But even as they became global citizens, they remained rooted to home, returning to their newly independent nations to help build the Black labor force with their needed skills and knowledge back home. Others would remain overseas, sometimes becoming more and more unmoored from the continent.

Our Sister Killjoy, published in 1977, is your exploration of the mental and social angst that can set in on such a journey. The protagonist, Sissie, experiences the same when she leaves Ghana for Europe in pursuit of academic and life experience. I imagine Sissie to be a mold of my own parents — but also of yourself, as you too lived abroad before returning to Ghana, becoming a minister and an intellectual as part of your ascendency as a crucial African voice.

You narrate Sissie’s reflections in an unconventional fusion of poetic verse and prose, a choice that underscores the unsettling nature of her discoveries of this foreign world — a world that has been presented to her as a utopia. But as the title of the prologue conveys, Sissie sees it as anything but that.

If there is a European (or American) dream, Sissie does not subscribe to it. She is not enamoured by the weather and the ways of foreign lands, and she does not approve of how animals are treated and fed better than other fellow human beings. She becomes angry, then very angry “at whatever drives our people to leave their warm homes to stay for long periods, and sometimes even permanently, in such chilly places. Winter in. Winter out…” All these people, Sissie thinks, “[r]unning very fast just to remain where they are.”

Through this characterization, you convey the dysfunction of the colonial and even postcolonial project. In one of the most pronounced examples in my memory, you call English “— a/ Doubtful weapon fashioned/ Elsewhere to give might to a/ Soul that is already/ Fled.” And you caution that “if we are not careful, we would burn out our brawn and brains trying to prove what [they] describe as ‘our worth’ and we won’t get a flicker of recognition from those cold blue eyes.” In a later interview, which you gave in the 1990s, you note how going to America is still seen — all those years after Sissie’s critique — as going to heaven.

Your contemporaries — fellow pioneering pan-African African writers like Chinua Achebe — speak to these themes, but you discuss them from a Black woman’s standpoint, bringing out ideas and language often missing from the masculine point of view that dominates our public discourse. In Changes, you write into existence Esi, maritally separated and navigating the challenges of finding male partnership. And there is the strong-willed Anowa (in the eponymous book) who refuses to marry and to live by societal timelines and standards. And, of course, there is Sissie.

The characters in your work are from a generation contending with the end of the 20th century — people like myself born after the independence of our nations and navigating this sharp turn in our contexts. But your narratives translate seamlessly across space and time, revealing the language of the twin ruses of postcoloniality and decoloniality — ornate ideas that cannot erase the dissociation that all of us subjects of the colonial project will continue to experience for generations, for lifetimes, to come.

You were ahead of your time in discussing same-sex attraction among women, something many African writers would still shy away from today. Even as Sissie’s experiences of the West are traumatizing, they are not without some pleasurable moments; you write sensuously of the “size, sheen and succulence” of the plums Marija harvests from “that beautiful and black Bavarian soil.” Of the sensations of yearning Sissie feels for this same German confidante, who while far removed from her own lived reality, also exists within the precarities of patriarchy and of longing for freedom.

For
Here under the sun,
Being a woman
Has not
Is not
Cannot
Never will be
Child’s game.

These words remind me of one of my few personal experiences of you. In one, we are at dinner in Accra, a group of intellectual women and creatives. We are worldly women, seemingly unencumbered by society’s expectations of us: writers, poets, thinkers; tattooed, dreadlocked, pierced, unmanned, unrestricted. Yet the waiter who serves our table and churns out the list of menu items resolutely omits sharing information about the range of alcoholic beverages on offer.

“Would you not offer us wine if we had men here?”

He is perplexed by your temerity.

Our sister killjoy.

But if he had known of you and your works — this is a common misfortune that so many widely read African writers are poorly known of in their own homelands — he would have understood the lifelong commitment you had made to your emancipatory politics; your dedication to bringing to life strong female archetypes through your writing.

As you wrote in a 1992 essay,“In the meantime, no one wants to hear African women discuss their problems. In Harare, a journalist recently wrote an incredible outburst that began with “Women, women, women, will they ever stop moaning?” He then went on to ask “whether [our] women will ever stop weeping to find solutions to their problems so they won’t weep again?” He ended by declaring grandly that “it serves no purpose trying to convince each other that women are oppressed. There are better issues to focus on.” A full comment on this piece could make a sizable book.”

I imagine the form of that book. Avant garde as your work always was. Unflinching. Unyielding. Perhaps beginning thus:

Dear Editor, I was disappointed and perplexed to see you publishing such unwarranted and sexist commentary about women’s issues in your newspaper. The year is 1992! 1992! This is shameful!

It is exactly 20 years later when we have the incident with the waiter in Accra.

And it would not surprise me one bit to open the same newspaper you quoted from back then and find, today, yet another Harare journalist decrying women’s freedom of expression in today’s contemporary society. Over the years, I have felt my own sizable books of rage brewing within. This is 30 years later now! 30 years later! It is shameful.

Many of us have deeply felt the loss of you. You lent your voice to many spaces and issues, writing with such richness about lives and perspectives that would otherwise have been erased from our collective memory. In so doing, you created — and continue — to make space for so many more killjoys to find their freedom.

We give thanks.