No Sweetness Here and Other Stories

by Ama Ata Aidoo

  Aidoo’s first published story, “To Us a Child Is Born,” won a Christmas story competition in 1958, when she was sixteen. Her second story, “No Sweetness Here,” brought her an invitation four years later to the historic 1962 African Writers’ Workshop held at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria. Aidoo was quite overwhelmed, introduced as “the writer from Ghana” (as she remarked at a recent African Writers’ Conference at Brown University). Here she met several famous male writers—Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Christopher Okigbo. Aidoo returned to Ghana and wrote The Dilemma of a Ghost, which was produced in 1964 at the University of Ghana and published in 1965. Her consciousness of black history, of the cultural and historical links among black peoples in the diaspora, motivated this remarkable first drama which placed Aidoo at age twenty-three among the new generation of predominantly male African writers. The historical link between Africans and African Americans that Aidoo explores in this early drama was guided by her astute political vision of black peoples in the diaspora. From this first work, and through all subsequent work, Aidoo claims “a responsibility and I feel that it’s the same type of responsibility I think black people all over feel” (quoted in Pieterse and Duerden 1972, 20).

  The Dilemma of a Ghost presents African-American Eulalie Rush, who marries Ghanaian Ato Yawson and returns to her “roots” in Africa. In 1964 such pride in African ancestry, in blackness, and in the discovery of African antecedents in African-American culture, were new concepts in the United States. Even at this early stage, Aidoo recognized that “the whole question of how it was that so many of our people could be enslaved and sold is very very important. I’ve always thought that it is an area that must be probed. It probably holds one of the keys to our future” (James 1990, 20–21). In her formative years in her parents’ progressive home, and in Nkrumah’s Ghana, awareness about connections among black people in the diaspora were not unusual. “Maybe it is because,” she remarks, “I come from a people from whom, for some reason, the connection with African-America or the Caribbean was a living thing, something of which we were always aware. In Nkrumah’s Ghana one met African Americans and people from the Caribbean. In my father’s house we were always getting visitors from all over” (James 1990, 20).

  Aidoo graduated from the University of Ghana in 1964 and then attended a creative writing program at Stanford University. She was married and has one daughter. “Being a mother,” remarks Aidoo, “has been a singularly enriching experience” (James 1990, 13). As a writer and a teacher, she has worked in numerous university settings. In 1968 and 1969 she taught in the School of Drama of the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and in the English department of the University of Nairobi in Kenya. She worked as coordinator of the African literature program at Cape Coast from 1972 to 1982. More recently, she has been a writer-in-residence or visiting professor at the University of Richmond, Virginia, Oberlin College, and Brandeis University.

  In Ghana, Allan notes, “from 1972 to 1979, Aidoo held directorships at the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation, the Arts Council of Ghana, and the Medical and Dental Council. This period of social activism culminated in her appointment as Minister of Education in 1982” (193). Aidoo took that post because, as she remarks in her interview with James, “I believe that education is the key to everything. Whereas I do not discount my work as a writer or the possibility of doing things with my writing, I thought that out there as minister, or whatever, you have a direct access to state power, to affect things and to direct them immediately . . . but . . . you can’t do that on your own, you are linked to other forces” (11). Aidoo recognized that the entire educational “structure needed shaking up, revolutionizing” (Modebe 1991, 40).

  After a year as minister of education, and because she wanted uninterrupted time to work on her writing, she left Ghana for Zimbabwe. But Aidoo always divides her time among teaching, writing, and activist work. Hence, even as she worked on her novel Changes (published in 1991 in Britain and in 1993 in the United States), she worked with “the Zimbabwean Women Writers’ Union, the Ministry of Education, and women’s tie-dye groups,” activities which demonstrate that “Aidoo remains steeped,” remarks Allan, “in African cultural life” (193).

  Urbanization in Post-Independence Ghana

  My Brother,

  let’s just have

  —another cup of tea—

  And if

  this is

  the

  neo-colonial crime

  ask for

  whose art it was

  Before the British

  stole

  it.

  (Someone Talking to Sometime, 25)

  All of Aidoo’s creative concerns deal with Ghanaian society. Ghana, formerly known as the Gold Coast, was the first African colony to gain independence from the British in 1957. Nationalism and anticolonial struggles led to independence, and sadly to what Neil Lazarus terms “the mourning after” (Lazarus 1990, 1). Given the historical onslaught of colonialism and the neocolonialism and imperialism that continues today, Ghana, like other postcolonial nations of West Africa, is caught in a long and unhappy transition. Colonial rule introduced a capitalist wage-economy, English law, English language, and English mores where quite different cultural realities existed.1 The colonial interruption of Africa’s history was a violent one—not only in terms of economic plunder, but in the far more devastating and lingering impact of psychological colonization that persisted long after the so-called departure of colonial masters.2

  Aidoo’s vision of this history governs all her work. In her two early dramas, The Dilemma of a Ghost (1965) and Anowa (1970), she spans vast time periods and geographies to describe slavery and colonization. Evocative and dramatic artistic works, these plays boldly raise issues of Europe’s accountability for “underdeveloping Africa,” to use Walter Rodney’s phrase.

  One of the major social effects of colonization was urbanization. No Sweetness Here, first published in 1970, is especially sensitive to problems resulting from the shift of rural people to urban centers, the accompanying loss of traditional mores, and the transition to modern ways. Aidoo’s complex vision also recognizes that the notion of “transition” can be a cop-out—a society can be transitioning endlessly.3 In these stories, Aidoo does not escape into easy binary oppositions: tradition/modernity, rural/urban. Rather, she probes the places in which these postcolonial conditions overlap and intersect. Her work traverses the geographies of rural farming environments and urban, sky-lined landscapes, as these locations are often co-inhabited by her characters. Even as “city folk,” they come from rural origins. Often through astute uses of irony, wit, and humor, Aidoo renders both nurturing and destructive collisions when rural folk enter cities and vice versa.

  Similarly, Aidoo views modernization as multifaceted, and not necessarily beneficial. Modernization often functions as a sword that the colonizer wields by its handle, leaving the colonized to grasp the blade. One icon of modernization is the building of roads that link villages to cities, and as readers we travel extensively with Aidoo’s characters—from the north of Ghana to the south, from a village near Cape Coast into the city. Aidoo’s dramatic narratives put us as readers on a lorry, breathing the fumes, feeling the road as experienced by an elderly woman undertaking this journey for the first time in her life. The external journeys mirror the interior landscapes of the characters entering new regions geographically and mentally in the alienating world of the city.

  While there are no white characters in No Sweetness Here, colonialism exists as part of internalized mentalities, psychological and economic burdens left behind by Europeans. Whiteness is most clearly a psychological burden for the educated class, schooled in the English language and Western classics. It is an ironic reality of the postcolonial condition (as depicted also by other postcolonial writers such as Zimbabwean Tsitsi Dangarembga in her novel Nervous Conditions) that this educated class is simultaneously privileged and disadvantaged. It can abuse its privileges as the “big men”
in Aidoo’s stories do by sexually using young women, or as corrupt politicians who exploit the nation. This educated class is disadvantaged in that it is often caught in conflicts between traditional ways and more modern values that challenge certain restrictive aspects of tradition. This type of dilemma faces educated women doubly, since they can be ostracized further from their communities for challenging the patriarchal status quo.

  The Oral Tradition

  We cannot assume that all literature should be written. One doesn’t have to be so patronizing about oral literature. . . . The art of the speaking voice can be brought back so easily. . . . We don’t always have to write for readers, we can write for listeners (Aidoo in Pieterse and Duerden 1972, 23–24).

  Aidoo passionately believes in “oral narration as an artistic mode” (James 1990, 23). Although she belongs among African and postcolonial writers who speak their own mother tongues but who use the English language for their creative work—a legacy of British colonization—she believes that “the dynamism of orality” is what “Africa can give to the world” (James 1990, 23).4

  While African literature in English can be dated to when most African nations became independent in the 1960s, the recentness of these English-language traditions must be distinguished from the much older cultural heritages, often oral, of the African continent. Many precolonial African cultures, predominantly oral, lost ancient oral literary traditions rendered invisible by racism and a Western belief in the superiority of written language and literature. Along with such erasure of language went devastating denials of culture and identity.

  Unlike most women writers, who are comfortable with the novel form, Aidoo is happiest with drama, perhaps because the dramatic form with heard voices, dialogue, and audience participation links her most closely to orality:

  Probably I am unhappiest with the novel simply because it is too many words. I think that once my uncertainties with poetry as a form and its accessibility have been resolved, what I mean, if I wasn’t so busy worrying about poetry not being accessible, I am very happy with poetry. But I am happiest of all with drama. Given some other circumstances I would have liked to write more plays. (James 1990, 22)

  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.

  Even as Aidoo’s ear recreates the voices of recited tales, she draws distinctively upon the oral tradition of the dilemma tale for her dramas and short stories as she probes problems facing society. According to Brown, the dilemma tale “usually poses difficult questions of moral or legal significance. These questions are usually debated both by the narrator and the audience—and on this basis the dilemma is a good example of the highly functional nature of oral art in traditional Africa” (85). William Bascom comments on his study of dilemma tales from the Akan region in Ghana: “They are prose narratives that leave the listeners with a choice among alternatives. . . . The choices are difficult ones and usually involve discrimination on ethical, moral, or legal grounds.” Bascom further notes that these tales additionally function to train the listeners “in the skills of argumentation and debate,” useful in settling disputes within the home or in courts of law (quoted in Brown 1981, 85). The dilemma tale often poses unanswerable questions or provokes debates that “really function,” notes Brown, “as a kind of intellectual exercise that develops and continually stimulates the audience’s ability to discuss such dilemmas in everyday existence” (85–86).

  Dilemmas of Modernity: Through the Prisms of Colonialism, Independence, and Postcolonialism

  The eleven stories of No Sweetness Here explore several dilemmas that resonate differently for women and men, for the very young, the elderly, and those in the middle of their lives—the latter perhaps caught most painfully in a society moving from traditional values to modern ways.

  The opening and closing narratives where the West is insidiously and pervasively present in terms of racism, economic exploitation, and psychological colonization provide a frame for No Sweetness Here. In the initial and concluding stories of the collection, Western-educated Africans returning home or living abroad are the focus. Through their confused eyes, the dilemmas are sharpened for the readers. Several major dilemmas appear in Aidoo’s stories that probe forth-rightly, and often with wit and humor, post-independence disillusionment and confusion of gender roles as they relate to race and class, the ambivalence of modernization as “progress,” and conflicts in gender and kinship roles in newly developed urban areas, particularly in women’s limited work options in cities. The dilemmas of the ascendancy of Western-educated “big men”—corrupt politicians who exploit the nation and young women—are also explored, as are women’s trials as mothers, prostitutes, and wives. For example, in “For Whom Things Did Not Change,” Zirigu faces post-independence disillusionment at the new black ruling class that did not consider him deserving of modern amenities like electricity and a good lavatory. The same story also probes the dilemmas of changing gender roles as they relate to race and class. Profound differences of class and ed
ucation override racial commonality between the black, Western-educated Kobina and the black Zirigu as the older man addresses the younger as “My White Massa!” Zirigu expects Kobina to eat “white man chop,” as is the norm for white and black masters of Kobina’s class (16). While Zirigu is adept at cooking white peoples’ food—that is his job—he is horrified by Kobina’s request for local food. Cooking local food is woman’s work!

  Differences between the two men are embodied in Aidoo’s uses of language in this story—Zirigu uses broken pidgin English when he speaks as servant to his master Kobina, but standard English when communicating as an equal (even as a superior in terms of his male privilege) when talking to his wife. Aidoo subtly criticizes Kobina’s well-intentioned, though naive, desire to effect overnight a radical transformation of class and education barriers and hierarchies between Zirigu and himself. Unfortunately, in reality, the social change from white masters to black masters leaves everything else intact. Class and education rather than race, then, govern social relations. Most new black masters expect the same servility from Zirigu that he had shown to the white colonial masters. This black bourgeois class has moved beyond the traditional value of showing respect for elders.

  Another modern dilemma, “big men” abusing and sexualizing women by luring them with new, flashy cars and new, flashy salaries, also comes under Aidoo’s severe invective. In “For Whom Things Did Not Change,” Setu expresses her outrage: “It is good I never had a daughter. Because if I had had a daughter, and I knew a big man was doing unholy things with her, then with a matchet in my own hand, I would have cut that big man to pieces myself!” (11) And, given Aidoo’s typically complex perspective, she has Setu identify other participants who are accountable for this moral disease corroding the social fabric—avaricious families who “try to profit by their daughters.” Setu’s strong condemnation is resounding: “I spit upon such big men! I spit upon such mothers! I spit upon such daughters!”’(13)