Male-bashing and narrative subjectivity in Amma Darko’s first three novels

Amma Darko follows in the tracks of the two leading Ghanaian women writers, Efua Sutherland and Ama Ata Aidoo. However, as a writer, Darko differs in her approach to social, political and cultural issues. Her first three novels, Beyond the Horizon (1995), The Housemaid (1998) and Faceless (2003), all present and contest the culture of patriarchy. In her works, women are victims of rape, battery, betrayal, abandonment by irresponsible husbands, economic exploitation and obnoxious cultural practices. This perpetrator-victim relationship leaves women consigned to fear, trauma, suffering and death. All three novels thus adopt rhetorical violence and narrative subjectivity as a way of confronting and demolishing male dominance and exploitation.