In the following essay on Ama Ata Aidoo's No Sweetness Here, Ode Ogede describes Ata Aidoo's work as a defense of both culture and womanhood, and defends the use orality as a means of achieving a textual representation of the particular forms of orality that draws on the "aesthetics of orality."

In her book African Novels and the Question of Orality, Eileen Julien bitterly attacks the notion that there is anything particularly African about orality or anything essentially oral about African culture. The "oral form," she contends, "is not the concrete literary simulacrum of African essence but is, rather, a manifestation of social consciousness, vision, and possibility allowed by particular moments and niches in African sociocultural life." Despite her doubts about the wisdom of associating orality with Africa, Julien does acknowledge that the manifestation of oral forms in the work of African writers is common, but rarely...