![]() Fofo, the protagonist, is fed up with this sodomy lifestyle. The children often yearn for parental care and love from people, but these seem to be luxury as those who ought to show them true tender loving care are the very ones who take advantage of them. As such, to “escape their pain” they often engage in drunkenness and debauchery which depict their hopelessness and level of depravity as ‘streetizens’ of Sodom and Gomorrah. Life on the street is nothing short of a nightmare from which the victims often wish to wake-up from. The girl-child is often more at risk because she is subjected to all forms of abuse from the irresponsible male figures around her. Life on the street makes the children susceptible to all sorts of crime and immorality. As Ms Kamame observes, poverty is not enough reason to abandon one’s children the major factors for this menace are ignorance, distorted beliefs and perceptions, and sheer irresponsibility of parents, especially with the issue of absentee fathers and misplaced priorities of members of the society. The tale is an eye-opener into the making of street children. This is a bold step towards earning an honest living, charting a new path for herself and realizing her dream of having a secure roof over her head, well protected from the grips of street lords like Macho and Poison. Narrated from an omniscient third-person point of view, the story opens with Fofo’s life on the street of Accra on a Sunday night with a resolve to break free from “an ever-increasing hopelessness” to try her chance at restoring her self-dignity by choosing to pick up “her newly acquired job” to wash carrots at the vegetable wholesale market. The chapters are divided into three parts tagged as “Book”. ![]() The novel has twenty-five chapters plus an epilogue. Unfortunately, the Government has no enduring system or legislation to protect the children’s right to a decent life or lack the will to implement such where such laws exist. Children who are churned into the streets come from a family who ought to have shielded them from the vagaries of this world. ![]() The novel is a great indictment on the African family system and values, and the neglect of African leadership respectively. Her major focus in Faceless is about the growing challenge of street children in African urban centres, the danger it portends for the society, and how this problem could be nipped in the bud. She has shown her solidarity for women empowerment in every facet of life through her works. ![]() These features make any of her works pleasurable to read.Īs a committed female African writer, Darko’s stories are woven around the plights of women and young girls in an oppressive and androcentric society. Her works are a perfect composite of “the high-culture literature of the classroom and low-culture popular fiction” depicted with a generous dose of imagination and realism and spiced with a lot of humour. However, she is popularly recognized in Africa as the author of Faceless, her third offering to African Literature. Her first two novels clearly proclaimed her grand entry into the field of African Literature, sparsely dotted by female writers. Most of her works have German, French, and Spanish translations thereby opening her literary world to a wider audience outside the English speaking enclave.ĭarko’s works vividly portray contemporary issues which focus on family life concerning women, and the girl-child in particular. Amma Darko has indeed broadened the horizon in African literary writing with a glowing career as displayed through her oeuvre: Beyond the Horizon (1995), The Housemaid (1998), Faceless (2003), Not Without Flowers (2007), and Between Two Worlds (2015). ![]() Interestingly, Beyond the Horizon was first published in German as Der Verkaufie Traum in 1991, four years before the original English translation was published. Having cut her teeth with the publication of Beyond the Horizon under the Heinemann African Writers’ Series in 1995, Amma Darko has successfully stepped into the shoes of her Ghanaian’s literary Amazons in the mould of Efua Sutherland and Ama Ata Aidoo. ![]()
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