A stylistic analysis of Ama Ata Aidoo’s short stories “in the cutting of a drink”, “the message”and “certain winds from the south”

Abstract

This study analyses Ama Ata Aidoo’s short stories, “In the Cutting of a Drink”, “The Message” and “Certain Winds from the South” from a stylistic point of view. It employs the devices of foregrounding to analyze the short stories based on the checklist of linguistic and stylistic categories proposed by Leech and Short (2007). The study sought to identify the significant linguistic features in the text, what the linguistic features have been used for, and how the foregrounded features contribute to the development of the themes of the stories. The study finds that Ama Ata Aidoo uses specialized or localized vocabulary in the three short stories and that she uses concrete nouns extensively to give physical appeal to especially the settings of the short stories. She uses various sentence types for specific purposes. She has a way of weaving round by describing things, events, places and even feelings through the use of various subordinate clauses instead of naming them. The author adopts the traditional folktale style of narrating her stories and prefers the first-person narrator point of view. Ama Ata Aidoo succeeds in making her stories authentically African as she uses various linguistic features to bring out themes such as the rural- urban divide that promotes migration, change of identity and moral decadence that characterized post-independent Ghana. She emphasizes the ritual of pitying in the local community which indicates love and concern for one another in the rural setting which contrasts greatly with ‘no one cares’ attitude of city life.