Aidoo’s short stories are remarkable for her uses of orality. Aidoo’s unique form of oral textuality guides and governs the thematic exploration of sociocultural, gender, and political issues facing postcolonial Ghanaian society. Even as Aidoo’s plays “capitalize,” as Lloyd Brown puts it, “on the dramatic art of storytelling,” her integration of the narrative and the dramatic are noteworthy in her short stories (Brown 1981, 84).

Aidoo recognizes the all-inclusiveness of the oral storyteller’s artistry, combining dramatic representation, plot, character, and suspense. Moreover, as Brown rightly notes, “This art is social in the most literal sense.” The artist/narrator is present before his/her audience, and “the story itself reflects and perpetuates the moral and cultural values of the audience” (84).

Aidoo’s rootedness in Akan oral traditions and folk forms serves her creativity in experimenting insightfully with, and in mixing, literary forms of prose, poetry, and drama in her short stories. There are no rigid boundaries in oral traditions, which flow optimally from prose, into poetry, into narrative, into dramatic interlude, into song. Aidoo creatively transmutes several characteristics of orality—conversing with the listeners, audience participation, communal voices as chorus, dramatic dialogue, repetition—into written, “heard” texts, her own dynamic form of oral textuality. The stories can be performed as dramatic readings with one narrator taking on different character roles, or with several readers playing different characters. As in drama, characters appear in Aidoo’s stories fully formed, at times without names, at times playing the role of communal, choral commentators, at other times, engaged in a lively discussion of some dilemma facing society. For instance, Aidoo opens “The Message” with a striking medley of voices discussing, dialoguing, repeating, and trying to figure out exactly what has been conveyed to Maami Amfoa in “this tengram [telegram] thing”:

‘Look here my sister, it should not be said but they say they opened her up.’

‘They opened her up?’

‘Yes, opened her up.’

‘And the baby removed?’

‘Yes, the baby removed.’

‘Yes, the baby removed.’

‘I say . . .’

‘They do not say, my sister.’

‘Have you heard it?’

‘What?’

‘This and this and that . . .’

‘A-a-ah! that is it . . .’ (38)

Aidoo does not name these communal voices; their identities are conveyed in their anxious voices as they introduce the story before we meet Maami Amfoa. The suspense builds up almost to the end of the tale when we are relieved to learn that Maami’s only granddaughter has survived, giving birth to twins by cesarean section.

Orality is conveyed also by Aidoo’s representation of communal voices, where she deliberately leaves the speakers’ identities unspecified. She then skillfully intersperses Maami’s own thoughts, often her unspoken fears, as in the line, “My Lord, hold me tight. . . .” Maami is so terrified in this alien space called hospital that she cannot even speak.