Lawrence Perrine is of the view that not every novel is worth serious attention. Some are written mainly for the reader to read and pass time. Such literature, according to him, does not aim to take the reader into the reality of the world, rather it takes the reader away from the reality, immersing him or her in a whole new world. He believes that such literature which he refers to as Escape Literature does not worth any serious attention as he describes it as miniature golf. The Interpretative Literature on the other hand, seeks to help the reader understand deeper questions of life, death, hate, love, sorrow and other elements of human existence. It is truth, universally acknowledged that imaginative literature is a mirror of life since writers of such literature do not write in a vacuum. Such literature that represents the society which the reader reads and understands the author’s society is the interpretative literature. Amma Darko’s Faceless aptly represents the author’s society; one who is conversant with Ghana after revolution would appreciate the work as sharing his or her experiences while he or she who has never been to Ghana will read the novel and understand the state of Ghana in the contemporary era. Reading the novel, one feels he or she witnesses the happenings in the society directly. Child prostitution and negligence of parenting as it is the case in many parts of African societies particularly in Ghana as vivified by the author is a worrisome issue. In Faceless, the author vividly x-rays the pathetic issue in such a way that its devastating effects on societies would be seen for solution to be. Fofo, the main character at the age fourteen, has started living in the street with her sister Babay T heralded by the actions of Maa Tsuru, a woman who gave birth to them, a woman but actually not a mother.

Fofo and Baby T. continues to suffer the perils associated with street life especially sleeping with men old enough to be their grandfather in order to survive. The more devastating issue is that at this age, the female children are raped, beaten and their hard earned money retrieved from them. Having been jilted by her husband, Kwei, leaving her to take care of four children alone, Maa Tsuru accepts another man, Kpakpo to her house and begins to make more children to the detriment of her other children. Kpakpo begins to sexually assault his step daughter Baby T who goes to Onko, a sham living in the compound to confide in him, believing him to be a savior. Onko takes advantage of her and sexually assaults her. Kpakpo conspires and has Baby T sold to Poison, a street lord who uses her for his selfish interest. Left with no option, Fofo begins to steal and she is also assaulted by Poison and her earning, taken. Baby T. is murdered for refusing to sleep with Onko who has come with a motif. Fate brings Fofo who disguises as a boy to rub Kabiria, a member of the staff of MUTE, a nongovernmental organization interested in the welfare of young ones especially the female child. Kabiria saves Fofo from the mobs ready to carry out jungle justice. She gets MUTE to rehabilitate Fofo and MUTE as well, investigates the tragic death of Baby T. The novel makes it obvious that indeed, the way one makes one’s bed shall one sleep on it and of course, it calls on the parents to wake up to their responsibilities as parents and shun producing the children they could not carter for. Amma Darko in the novel, has so meticulously mirrored the realities of the society in the fiction in a way that we read, feel for the society and then make amends. As an interpretative fiction, the novel does not in any way, exaggerate any episode, rather, facts are realistically presented as they happen.

Theoretical Framework

The novel can be analyzed using any approach such as sociological approach, realistic approach, formalism, Marxist approach and feministic approach. These approaches are appropriate for analyzing novel. However, the researcher is of the view that among all the approaches, feministic approach is most appropriate as the work centres mainly on issues pertaining to women. Feminist criticism, according to Abram, M.H. was not inaugurated until in the 1960s and it is a struggle for the recognition of women’s cultural roles and achievements and for women’s social and political rights, marked by such books as Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), john Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women (1869) and the American Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845) (p. 93). Feminism arose as a result that women believed that they have been marginalized by men and in the literatures written by men, women were always presented as appendages of men and they were always subjugated. The issue of subjugation of women as observed by Abrams [1] wasn’t a thing peculiar to a particular region; all over the world, women were always represented as inferior to men, thus in the Bible, not minding the enormous task of women, they were never recognized. As time went by, women began to feel bad for how they are treated and in his A Glossary of Literary Terms, Abrams states that an important precursor in feminist criticism was Virginia Woolf, who, in addition to her fiction, wrote A Room of One’s Own (1929) and numerous other essays on women authors and on the cultural, economic and educational disabilities within what she called a “patriarchal” society, dominated by men, that have hindered or prevented women from realizing their productive and creative possibilities (93). According to Nwahunanya Chinyere [2] in Literary Criticism, Critical Theory and Post-Colonial African Literature, feminist criticism champions the downtrodden on the “war of sexes” and critiques patriarchal (or phallocentric) texts while projecting neglected “pro-women” literary works. Feminism criticizes the dominant male hegemony which both posits an innate (but culturally represented) “female” way of writing, reading and thinking and sees sex and gender as socially conditioned and linguistically constructed” (39).

To consolidate on the fact that feminism is a global issue, Abrams goes further to state that in America, modern feminist criticism was inaugurated by Mary Ellmann’s deft and witty discussion, in Thinking about Women (1968), about the derogatory stereotypes of women in literature written by men and also about alternative and subversive representations that occur in some writings by women. According to Dobie [3] in Theory into Practice: an Introduction to Literary Criticism, “For centuries, Western culture had operated on the assumption that women were interior creatures. Leading thinkers, from Aristotle to Charles Darwin, reiterated that women were lesser beings and one does not have to look hard to find comments from writers, theologians and other public figures that disparage and degrade women (103). Perhaps, the more worrisome issue to the concerned women was the denigrating statement of the Greek ecclesiast John Chrysostom (ca. AD 347-407). Dobie disclosed that he called women “a foe to friendship, an inescapable punishment, a necessary evil,” and Ecclesiasticus, a book of the biblical apocrypha, states, “All wickedness is but little to the wickedness of a woman.” The Roman theologian Tertullian (ca. AD 160-230) lectured to women that “the judgment of God upon your sex endures even today; and with it inevitably endured your position of criminal at the bar of justice. You are the gate to the devil” (103). 

The facts above and of course, the fact that the entire book of Genesis blames Eve for the loss of paradise, show that women subjugation had existed long before civilization. With the advent of civilization, women began to fight against the subjugation and to strive for liberation. In Africa, men in their works, present women as inferior who are manhandled by men characters. Achebe [4], in his early novels, presents women as such. In his Things Fall Apart, for instance, Okonkwo, the hero of the novel beats his wives at every little provocation. African women writers began to protest in their works, presenting women as almost angels while men are “devils”. Flora Nwapa became the forerunner of this new form of literature in Africa. In Faceless, Amma Darko presents the female characters as suffering misfortunes created for them by the men whom she presents all through the novel as wolves.

Faceless as an Interpretative Literature

According to Laurence Perrine [5], “…the first question to ask about fiction is, why bother to read it? With life as short as it is, with so many pressing demands on our time, with books of information, inspiration, instruction and discussion waiting to be read, why should we spend precious time on works of imagination?” (3) The questions beg for answers and they raise a lot of consciousness on the part of the readers. Perrine, in a bid to supply the answers as well as make bare, what he means by interpretative literature, has this to say:

But unless fiction gives something more than pleasure, it hardly justifies itself as a subject of college study. Unless it expands or refines our minds or quickens our sense of life, its value is not appreciably greater than that of miniature golf, bridge, or ping-pong. To have a compelling claim on our attention, it must yield not only enjoyment but understanding.

The experience of humankind through the ages is that literature may furnish such understanding and do so effectively-that the depiction of imagined experiences can provide authentic insights. “The truest history,” said Diderot of the novels of Samuel Richardson, “is full of falsehoods and your romance is full of truths.” But the bulk of fiction does not present such insights. Only some does. Initially, therefore, fiction may be classified into two broad categories: Literature of escape and literature of interpretation (5).

The interpretative literature, he says, is written to broaden and deepen and sharpen our awareness of life. While escape literature takes us away from the real world: it enables us temporarily to forget our trouble. Interpretative literature takes us, through the imagination, deeper into the real world: it enables us to understand our troubles…. Interpretative literature, in addition to the pleasure that it offers, also offers understanding of life. Faceless vividly mirrors the currents situation in Ghana. A good reading of the novel exposes to one who has not been to Ghana, the fact that in Ghana, child prostitution is not frowned at by the Ghanaian government. Fofo and her sister, Baby T, including other street girls and boys (usually children of about fourteen years) are everywhere in the streets, exposed to the hardships associated to street life. The government is aware of this and yet, never cared to take any action. These children are basically from broken homes and the woman, when she could no longer take care of the children, allow them to go to the street and hustle with other vulnerable children. The young vulnerable children die in the street without the government doing anything about it. The case of Baby T is a gory experience. Baby T was murdered by Onko for refusing to have sex with him and was dumped at Agbogbloshie. No government agents care to ascertain the cause of her death. The fictional presentation of the gory experience by Darko is not different from the real happenings in real place, Agbogboshie in Ghana. Kabiria, in her discussion with her customer at Agbogboshie market, as a mother, feels empathic as her customer narrates Baby T’s tragic death. The woman says to Kabiria:

“Very sad, I tell you. I saw her. Unbelievable. Her face was so mutilated…. And her head… ah! That too was completely shaven.” She shook her head slowly. “In fact, the hair on every part of her body was gone. Ah, Madam, I tell you, whoever did that to her could not have had a soul. The person definitely has no soul. Then the following day, fresh blood and some white feathers were found there. A white fowl was apparently slaughtered there secretly the night after. If you ask me, it was to appease the girl’s soul. Anyway, so as I said, don’t pass there” (42). 

Killing the white fowl to appease the dead girl as evident in their conversation, evidently shows the Ghanaian belief in the existence of life after death. Africans believe in the existence of ghost and ghost stories are told to get the unwary aware of the existence of ghosts for them to be mindful of how they deal with their fellow humans. Killing fellow human beings for one’s selfish interest is a regular occurrence in Africa. In real life, some believe that once a sacrifice is made, the spirit of the departed is silenced and made incapacitated from seeking revenge on those that killed him or her. Amma Darko makes it vivid that no matter the amount of sacrifices made, no evil doer will exonerate being punished for his sacrilege. Since the death of Baby T, Onko keeps living in perpetual fear until his eventual ignominious exit. Towards the end of the novel, gnawed by remorse, he commits suicide and hangs himself. 

Woman Versus Mother

Ms. Kamame’s view on page 109 of the novel, raises curiosity of the reader to understand the disparity between the concepts, mother and woman. In her conversation with Slyv Po, Ms. Kamame says to Slyv Po, “…. And if women who should act mature do not, can you imagine what is going on out there with all the immature but sexually active girls? But the question of attitude also has to do with one of the most distorted beliefs and perception: the equating of the essence of womanhood to reproduction. Let’s have a little litmus test here. Who is frowned upon more in the society? The single unmarried mother or the childless married woman? According to Wikipidia Online Dictionary, a woman is simply a female adult. A woman is a woman simply because nature has made her so. Every female child would be made a woman by nature. A woman may have children but would not take care of the children. Some women are mothers while many others are not. Darko makes it categorical, in Faceless, what the responsibility of mother, not a woman is in a dialogue betweenMs. Kamame and Slyv Po. In a response to Slyv Po, Ms. Kamame says: “… the responsibility of the mother doubles. She becomes the only caretaker of the child’s emotional, physical and financial needs.” (108) A mother, therefore, is a woman who inhabits or performs the role of bearing some relation to their children, who may or may not be their biological offspring. The definition is clear; women could have children because nature made it that a woman can have children, but they hardly perform the expected roles of mothers. Mothers take care of their children and take care of other children around them. This is made vivid by Amma Darko in Faceless with the two major characters in the novel – Maa Tsuru and Kabiria. Maa Tsuru, as a woman, has continued to produce children from different men who she never cared for. She is among the women who believe that God gives children. She is married to Kwei who abandons her after four children with the belief that she is cursed. She accepts Kpakpo her lover to her house and prefers to keep Kpakpo to keeping her own children. Even when Baby T, her elder daughter complains to her that Kpakpo attempted to rape her, she never bothered. The house becomes uncomfortable for her children, the daughters take to the street and become street girls. As a woman and not a mother, Maa Tsuru is comfortable staying with her lover in her house while her children suffer the trauma and harshness of the street. Her lover, Kpakpo, aggrieved that Baby T refused to surrender her body to him, sells her to Poison and Maa Tsuru is comfortable enjoying the money given to her not worried about the pains her daughter is going through. 

Kabiria is a mother not because she is privileged; she is a mother because she is empathic about children. She cares for her children and cares for other people’s children as well. As a mother, she does everything to maintain her home not minding that her husband doesn’t help matters. Adade, her husband is well paid but he cares less about the family. A mere woman like Maa Tsuru would always fight it with him if they were to be married. We notice that indeed, Maa Tsuru is just a woman and not a mother not minding the number of children she has produced. No mother would have the mind to push her child to the street knowing full well the perils associated with street life. Even when Fofo comes to her after being raped by Poison, her reaction isn’t such expected of a mother. She does not seek any credible means of saving her daughter any further humiliation, rather, she keeps asking her out, thus, “Fofo, go away. Go somewhere far away from here where he can never find you.” (22) Imagine asking a girl child of about fourteen years to go away to a faraway place without anybody to offer her security and without any money. Only women, not mothers could do such But Kabiria, as a mother, endures. She believes that it is her responsibility in spite all odds, to keep the home. Anyidoho [6], in the Introduction at the beginning of the novel, writes: “Regrettably, not much sense comes out of the mouth of their father, Adade. In fact, each time he opens his mouth, we are afraid he is going to say something quite silly, quite selfish, or plain boring…” (xvi). As a mother and not mere woman, Kabiria happily takes care of her children, virtually carrying out all the responsibilities of parents alone, including taking her children to school in an old 1975 VW Beetle nicknamed Creamy which disgraces her on regular basis. She does not mind that her husband is architect driving a cute car and does not help her even to drive the children to school. Adade, like other Ghanaian men, believes that the career of his wife ends in kitchen. On page 10 of the novel, Kabiria is described as “The mother, wife, worker and battered-car owner that she was, no day passed that Kabiria didn’t wonder how come the good Lord created a day to be made up of only twenty-four hours, because from dawn to dusk, domestic schedules gobbled her up; office duties ate her alive; her three children devoured her with their sometimes realistic and many times very unrealistic demands; while the icing on the cake, their father, needed to do no more than simply be her regular husband and she was in a perpetual quandary.” Many instances abound to show that Adade is only a figurehead to Kabiria. He does not offer her any assistance as a husband. Kabiria spends almost all her earnings at MUTE, the NGO where she works in maintain the home. In a dialogue with her husband, one understands that indeed, she is an ideal mother and a wife. According to the novel, “It was after one of Creamy’s many plastic surgeries, which left it so tattooed that it required urgent re-spraying. Unable to squeeze anything out of her meager salary, she sought help from Adade.” (15) 

Adade’s response, “Don’t you receive a salary?” is typical of unsupportive husband as Adade. Not minding all, Kabiria still endures and continues to maintain her position as a wife and a passionate mother. She again demonstrates the virtue of motherhood and not that of womanhood with the way she handles her children. When she discovers that Obea her daughter has started reading adult pamphlets which she conceals from her, the way she handles the matter is apt. She goes back to Obea’s room, picks the book, looks at it and replaces the book. Not yelling at Obea as some women would do, makes Obea to feel at ease to discuss with her. 

Kabiria is not just a mother because she is married to Adade and she has three amazing children; she is a mother because she has the features of a mother which includes having empathy for other people’s children. She has sympathy for Fofo who rubbed her. Fofo has disguised as a boy as not to be recognized by Poison who has been trailing her. The unsuspecting Kabiria isn’t aware of the robbery probably because her mind is focused on whether Creamy, as usual, will disappoint her. Darko perfectly describes the episode thus:

Kabiria shifted to make way. Then obeying her instinct, turned swiftly. Her eyes fell directly upon the face of a boy, fourteen or fifteen thereabouts. She became jittery. There was something peculiar about him and about the way he gawked at her from under the old and crumpled baseball cap he wore. Their eyes locked for a second. Then he turned and resumed shouting, “Agoo–agoo–” with renewed urgency. He was in great haste to vamoose from the scene. Suddenly, a woman screamed, “Get him! don’t let him go! He’s got somebody’s purse” (44).

The thief apprehended, as a mother and not a woman, Kabiria pleads with the mobs not to whip him. She even offers some money to the tug to spear the boy who later turns to be Fofo. Not minding that she doesn’t have much money on her, she still manages to give Fofo some money to eat and promises to come back to see her the following day with determination, as a mother to draw the attention of MUTE to rehabilitate her. 

To further consolidate the fact that mother is not necessarily a married woman with children, Dina, the founder of MUTE is a mother not minding that she has no child of her own and she is not living with her husband. She is empathetic about children and the fact that the street children are vulnerable gives her concern. Together with Kabiria, Aggie, Vickie and Slyv Po of Harvest FM, Dina succeeds in ascertaining the killer of Baby T and MUTE sees to the rehabilitation Fofo. As a feminist literature, female characters are made sympathetic and they are presented as almost saints and angels while the male characters with the exception of Slyv Po, are presented as devils starting from Poison to Onko, the charlatan who keeps deceiving the unwary girls into sleeping with them. 

Juxtaposing the families of Kabiria and Maa Tsuru, we understand why despite everything, Kabiria is happy living with her husband; she understands the need for a united home. That is why she is a mother. When a family is disintegrated, the children suffer the perils. Kabiria’s children are united, well behaved and exemplary, not basically because Kabiria is lucky but because they are products of a united home with Kabiria performing her duty as a wife to Adade and mother to the children. In the case of Maa Tsuru, Amma Darko writes, “Take our case study, Fofo. Where is her father? What about Maa Tsuru who has gone on to make more children even knowing Fofo and her sister were surviving on the streets?” (110)

As a feminist novel, the writer goes further to hype men’s gross irresponsibility, somehow subtly exonerating women. As the dialogue in Harvest FM’s phoning programme continues, Slyv Po says “…. Why do many fathers refuse to care for their children, aside from the excuse of poverty?”

Kamame says in response, “We came across situations where fathers were earning adequate incomes but were refusing to care for their children because they no longer loved their mothers. Meanwhile, they had gone to marry other women and making new babies….” She further makes the foolishness of men so obvious by presenting men as irrational beings. As the programme progresses, Ms Kamame says, “We met a woman whose husband had left her, after several years of marriage, with six children. He claimed he had a vision from God in which it was revealed to him that his wife was an adultress, that he had fathered none of the six children. One week later, he announced another vision. This time, he said God had revealed the new woman he should marry to him. The new woman turned out to be a young member whom everyone knew he had been eyeing since he joined the church….” (110).

Literature as an Agent of Reformation

In his Literature and Literate, Uche Nnyagu [7] states that literature is venerated for its many roles which include helping the audience to understand the world in which they live (364). If we understand our society, life becomes easy. When things go the wrong way in the society, it is the role of literature remedy the trend. That is why it is said that creative writers are gadflies; they use satire to correct impressions. Shortly after independence, African politicians became so corrupt that African writers began to show their disappointment in their works. Hence the theme of post-colonial literature became “Post-colonial disillusionment.” Ayi Kwei Armah [8] a Ghanaian wrote The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, where he lampoons and ridicules the corrupt Ghanaian politicians for correction to be made. We understand clearly the transformation that has taken place in Ghana after the era of Ayi Kwei Armah. In The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, the poor masses in Ghana who suffer the heat of the corruption could not do anything to help themselves. Everyone is involved in a way or the other in the corruption. In Faceless, certain organizations like MUTE have sprung up to help the vulnerable children. 

Writers are aware that the onus is on them to help ensure a better society. Thus, Amma Darko [9] believes that in a society where there are many juvenile delinquents, everyone is at risk. According to Kamame, “… because the consequence of the phenomenon affects the entire society of which you are an integral part. Ours is a society where the family is the nucleus of our culture. These children are growing up outside the culture of bonding to the family. The physical and psychological effect of the detachment is to render them easily susceptible to survival through jungle street tactics and foul means. Then you and I who thought it was their problem alone wake up one day to the rude realization that we have no choice but to share this same one country with them” (112). 

Having identified the problem of the society to be producing children that would not be cared for, Darko proffers solution via the mouth of Slyv Po who says in the public radio, “Dear listeners, from Australia to Zimbabwe, I am yet to hear of a child who asked to be born, if you are not ready to love and cherish and provide adequately for a child, why bring it into the world at all (112). He suggests abstinence as the best solution or where impossible, “You can also visit the offices of the Planned Parenthood Association of Ghana (112).

In conclusion, Amma Darko, has, through Faceless, given the reader the true picture of the Ghanaian society. Although it is a work of imagination, like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in Purple Hibiscus and Uche Nnyagu in At the Centre of No-Man’s- Land, she simply mirrored the exact happenings in Ghana including using existing and identifiable places in Ghana as the fictional settings. This method made the novel real and vivid and projecting male characters as wolves and female characters, angels justifies the researcher’s choice of feminist approach as the theoretical framework.

1. Abrams, M.H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. Boston: Thomson Wadsworth, 2005. Print.

2. Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. Harlow: Heinemann, 2008. Print.

3. Anyidoho, K. “Introduction.” Faceless, by Amma Darko, Sub-Saharan Publishers, 2003.

4. Armah, A.K. The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968. Print.

5. Darko, A. Faceless. Legon: Sub-Saharan Publishers, 2003. Print.

6. Dobie, A.B. Theory into Practice: An Introduction to Literary Criticism. USA: Wadsworth, 2012. Print.

7. Nnyagu, Uche. Literature and Literate. Germany: Scholars, 2018. Print.

8. Nwahunanya, C. Literary Criticism, Critical Theory and Postcolonial African Literature. Owerri: Springfield, 2007. Print.

9. Perrine, L. Literature: Structure, Sound and Sense. New York: Harcourt, 1978. Print