In “Something to Talk About on the Way to the Funeral,” two friends think back fondly of Auntie Araba’s life, and are critical of the “educated big men” in their society who “have never been up to much good” (115). Education, rather than challenging patriarchal privilege, ironically reinforces it, for “was it not a lawyer-or-a-doctor-or something-like-that who was at the bottom of all Auntie Araba’s troubles?” (119) This new educated class acquires a little learning and much more arrogance. When Ato, “this big scholar,” gets Mansa pregnant, her “father nearly killed her” (120). Unfortunately, Mansa loses the opportunity to finish her schooling after the child is born, and as the storyteller remarks, “Mansa was a good girl. Not like one of these yetse-yetse things who think putting a toe in a classroom turns them into goddesses” (121).
Aidoo does not romanticize sexually objectified “girl-friends,” nor does she regard them as victims. Rather, Aidoo recognizes the dilemma of being a woman in a changing patriarchal society. Mansa in “In the Cutting of a Drink” embraces prostitution amoralistically: “Any kind of work is work,” she remarks to the narrator, who also learns that he must accept his sister’s choice (37).
In urban areas, “big men” who have “girl-friends” indulge in visiting relationships that are very different from traditional polygamy that, with all its problems, requires male responsibility. There is no accountability for precarious sexual contacts; they are as unstable as the new fragile nation-states and their governments. Mercy’s lover in “Two Sisters” is a powerful and rich politician when she takes up with him. When he is deposed in a coup, he becomes a nobody and Mercy changes allegiances to the newly powerful Captain Ashey. Even as she is complicitous in being sexually used by these “big men,” she also relishes their power. Although Aidoo’s representation makes such exploitative men accountable for their acts, she does not solely blame these men. She portrays women like Mercy, who use their bodies as weapons to acquire material wealth and to climb the social ladder.
In the same story, Connie, a respectable wife, also faces dilemmas of changing sexual mores in urban areas. She tolerates her husband’s infidelities when she is pregnant with their second child. His reaction during her first pregnancy, even though he regrets it later, is strikingly abusive: “During her first pregnancy, he kept saying after the third month or so that the sight of her tummy the last thing before he slept always gave him nightmares” (97).
The particular dilemmas of mothers figure into a remarkable cluster of stories: a traditional child-custody dispute in “No Sweetness Here,” the repeated burden of childbearing in “A Gift from Somewhere,” and the comfort of children when men leave wives to a life of loneliness in “Certain Winds from the South.” The narrator of “No Sweetness Here” is a respected local teacher, and as an outsider, she can look into village disputes objectively. She can also break certain communal codes such as the “indecent” act of dwelling upon “a boy’s beauty.” But, “Kwesi’s beauty was indecent,” she adds logically (57).
This title story is placed carefully in the middle of the collection as though Aidoo is making certain that her reader-listener has already been sensitized through the preceding stories. Kwesi’s mother, Maami Ama, decides to face a formal divorce despite the risk of losing custody of her only son. She gets no support against her husband’s abuse. Though her own mother tells her that “in marriage, a woman must sometimes be a fool,” Maami Ama decides to fight back: “I have been a fool for far too long a time” (61).
“A Gift from Somewhere” draws a circle in the opposite direction from “No Sweetness Here,” beginning with potential death and ending with life and hope. And in “Certain Winds from the South,” Aidoo uses a striking narrative technique to convey women’s loneliness when abandoned by their husbands, who are lured away from their villages to the south to earn a living. As M’ma Asana talks aloud, or contemplates in silence, other characters are given life through her words and thoughts. Aidoo uses this dramatic device where one actor takes on various roles, where one body embodies other voices and gestures. This is a strategy different from the one used in “No Sweetness Here.” There, many characters speak in their own voices to express their views about who should get custody of Kwesi—his mother, his father’s family, the teacher, and the general community. It is especially important for all to speak in their own voices because the teacher-narrator is an outsider, and perhaps she might misunderstand their customs. Also, as an educated woman she is set apart from the village folk.
But in “Certain Winds from the South,” M’ma Asana tells the story and speaks the responses of other characters. For instance, when her husband leaves Hawa and her newborn son, Fuseni, M’ma has to convey the news:
‘Hawa, ah-ah, are you crying? Why are you crying? That your husband has left you to go and work . . . I do not understand, you say? Maybe I do not . . . See, now you have woken up Fuseni. Sit down and feed him and listen to me . . .
Listen to me and I will tell you of another man who left his newborn child and went away.
Did he come back? No, he did not come back. But do not ask me any more questions for I will tell you all’ (52).
M’ma’s story is meant to infuse new strength into Hawa so that she can care for her child and not grieve about losing her husband. Like mother, like daughter, their difficult destiny repeats itself, and the women manage to live with dignity, to overcome loneliness, and to rear strong children.
Aidoo ends her collection in the United States, where Kofi in “Other Versions,” far away from home, gains an understanding of his mother’s generosity. After a dinner party during which he feels that he is the main meal being consumed, he meets an African-American woman, Mrs. Hye, the hired kitchen help. Something triggers empathetic feelings in Kofi that he cannot articulate or verbalize until a few days later, in a subway, when he sees another “old or middle-aged” black woman (133). Kofi’s heart goes out to her, as, initially, without words, some connection to a common ancestry leaps out at him. And for Kofi, more personally, these black women connect him with his Ghanaian mother: “I don’t know what made me. But I drew out my wallet. I had received money from my scholarship. So I took some dollar bills, crumpled them in my hand and jumped like one goaded with a firebrand.” He tells her, “‘I come from Africa and you remind me of my mother. Please would you take this from me?’” (134)
When Kofi tells her that he is a student, she remarks, “‘Son, keep them dollars. I sure know you need them more than I do.’” Kofi thinks, “Of course, she was Mother,” a caring, nurturing spirit that had guided Kofi throughout his life (134).
The key in dilemma tales is discussion, almost a democratic process of listening to different points of view on a single subject, turning it around as as if viewing the shifting colored pieces of glass in a revolving kaleidoscope. Characteristically, the endings are often open-ended, as in “Everything Counts.” The point of open-ended resolutions is that Aidoo makes the reader-listener an active participant in resolving the dilemma presented by that tale. Her technique is reminiscent of the Brechtian impulse to make the audience think as well as be entertained.
Other endings come to rest in death, as Kwesi’s by snakebite, and despite the mother’s heartbreaking sorrow at this irredeemable loss, the ending indicates that she will find the strength to go on. Mami Fanti endures three infant deaths and then savors the miraculous survival of her son Nyamekye in “A Gift from Somewhere.” A different kind of death is depicted in that of Auntie Araba, a respected elder whose funeral is attended by the community and whose legacy of baking is carried on somewhat differently by her daughter-in-law, Mansa, who can now “bake hundreds of loaves of bread an hour with machines” (125).
Birth and death, youth and old age, wives, mothers, husbands, black masters and black servants, the exploitive new class of government ministers, the arrogant educated class versus wise elders who cannot read or write, storytellers and community listeners and participants—all find a place in Aidoo�
�s universe, and all are portrayed with a loving though searing honesty. Aidoo represents her people with grave sympathy. They are not victims; they resist oppression where they can, and they discuss their deeply personal dilemmas, which have national import. Even as her vision encompasses political scenarios of corruption and “big men” exploiting unnamed mistresses, she never loses sight of the individuals inhabiting her narrative world. The relentless contempt and disgust that Ayi Kwei Armah portrays in his novel about contemporary Ghana, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, do not figure into Aidoo’s world. She can be as tough a critic of corruption as Armah, but she cares for her community and does not view its problems as beyond redemption. There is hope and struggle even when the sweetness vanishes.
The (In)Visibility of African Women Writers
Ever since I discovered Aidoo’s stories in 1982 when I was preparing a lecture called “African Women Writers and Their Invisibility” for a women’s studies brown-bag lunch at Yale University, I have loved these tales that resonate deeply with my own years of growing up in postcolonial India in the 1950s. For over ten years now, I have included Aidoo’s stories in my undergraduate and graduate courses in African literature, postcolonial women writers, and contemporary fiction; they are as fresh now as when I first read them. And my students’ readings are filled with discovery. Often, an Aidoo story with its depth, complexity, yet remarkably unponderous qualities has served to set up the ground for discussions of colonial history and gender roles amid changing neocolonial realities. Often, I have taught “Everything Counts” and “For Whom Things Did Not Change” along with sections of Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth.
Within the African literary tradition, male writers like Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka in Nigeria came to prominence first in the 1960s, even though women writers like Flora Nwapa in Nigeria and Aidoo in Ghana, whose careers span over three decades, were also writing at the time. One key manifestation of rendering women writers insignificant is to render them out of print, as in Aidoo’s case. All of her work of the 1970s has been unavailable in the United States until the recent reissuing of her two dramas by Longman, the 1993 publication of Changes by The Feminist Press, and this very welcome republication of her short stories. Since No Sweetness Here has not been in print in the United States since the Anchor Doubleday edition of 1972,5 it was not possible to teach the text in its entirety (as I often do with Bessie Head’s rich volume of stories, The Collector of Treasures) as it well deserves to be taught, in order to demonstrate the range of Aidoo’s themes and narrative techniques, and the structure and arrangement of the tales. Now, these stories can be included for serious study in school and college curricula. Readers can enjoy Aidoo’s artistry, her subtle ironies, her evocations of Akan storytelling forms, her complex vision, and her refusal to provide simple answers to complex problems facing Ghanaian postcolonial society.
Another way to neglect women writers is to give them no serious critical attention. As Lloyd Brown remarks, “Western male Africanists have contributed heavily to an old boy network of African studies in which the African woman simply does not exist as a serious or significant writer” (5). Aidoo’s literary productions since 1964 had not been studied in book form until Vincent O. Odamtten’s recent, very worthwhile critical study entitled The Art of Ama Ata Aidoo: Polylectics and Reading Against Neocolonialism. In Ngambika: Studies of Women in African Literature, Carole Boyce Davies asserts the need for serious reevaluations of women writers who have often been dismissed casually by a male literary establishment. Constructive criticism is crucial in the development of any literary tradition. In a 1986 interview with Adeola James, Aidoo comments on the African woman writer’s neglect and why there are no “female Achebes”:
The question of the woman writer’s voice being muted has to do with the position of women in society generally. Women writers are just receiving the writer’s version of the general neglect and disregard that woman in the larger society receives. I want to make that very clear. It is not unique. Now, as to the issue of where the female Achebes and so on are, you know that the assessment of a writer’s work is in the hands of critics and it is the critics who put people on pedestals or sweep them under the carpet, or put them in a cupboard, lock the door and throw the key away. I feel that, wittingly or unwittingly, people may be doing this to African women writers; literally locking us out, because either they don’t care or they actively hate us. Bessie Head died of neglect. So how is she going to be an Achebe? When nobody gives recognition to her as Bessie Head, as a woman in her own right trying to write—heh! writing—something relevant and meaningful?
(Original emphasis, James 1990, 11–12)
In her autobiographical piece, “To Be a Woman,” described by Allan as “a manifesto of African feminism” (171), Aidoo comments on the pain she felt when Our Sister Killjoy was ignored by Ghanaian critics:
If Killjoy has received recognition elsewhere, it is gratifying. . . . But that is no salve for the hurt received because my own house has put a freeze on it. For surely my brothers know that the only important question is the critical recognition of a book’s existence—not necessarily approbation. Writers, artists, and all who create, thrive on controversy. When a critic refuses to talk about your work, that is violence; he is willing you to die as a creative person” (“To Be a Woman,” 262).
Killjoy was not appreciated locally, since in it Aidoo exposes several discomforting truths about contemporary African society. She boldly satirizes the “black skin, white mask” bourgeois class of African leaders:
Excellent idea . . .
How can a
Nigger rule well
Unless his
Balls and purse are
Clutched in
Expert White Hands? . . .
Champagne sipping
Ministers and commissioners
Sign away
Mineral and timber
Concessions, in exchange for
Yellow wheat which
The people can’t eat . . .
While on the market place,
The good yams rot for
Lack of transportation . . .
Our representatives and interpreters . . .
maintain themselves on our backs (Killjoy, 56–58).
Aidoo’s creative work and her statements in essays and interviews contribute significantly to the parameters of African feminism. Aidoo remarks that
When people ask me rather bluntly every now and then whether I am a feminist, I not only answer yes, but I go on to insist that every woman and every man should be a feminist—especially if they believe that Africans should take charge of our land, its wealth, our lives, and the burden of our own development. Because it is not possible to advocate independence for our continent without also believing that African women must have the best that the environment can offer. For some of us, this is the crucial element of our feminism (“The African Woman Today,” 323).
Aidoo is an astute critic of the many cultural and economic issues facing her society. Moreover, her historical vision enables her to situate such creative representations within Africa’s long, often bitter encounter with European colonizers and with continuing imperialist controls. Even as she honestly faces the many sociocultural situations where “sweetness” has vanished, Aidoo finds a way to retain a sympathetic and loving concern for the people who inhabit her world. The image of “sweetness” rolls on one’s tongue as, along with Sissie on her returning flight to Africa, we also land on African soil guided so ably, even wittily, by Aidoo. Sissie’s words towards the end of Killjoy embody a warmth and realism towards home: “She was back in Africa. And that felt like fresh honey on the tongue: a mixture of complete sweetness and smoky roughage. Below was home with its unavoidable warmth and even after these thousands of years, its uncertainties. ‘Oh, Africa. Crazy old continent. . . .’ Sissie wondered whether she had spoken aloud to herself” (133). When Aidoo speaks to us, her readers and listeners, her insights bring new illum
inations and discoveries about the people who inhabit her stories and about their struggles and triumphs.
NOTES
1. For more detailed discussion of the economic and political impacts of colonization on African societies, see Basil Davidson, Which Way Africa? The Search for a New Society (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1973); Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Washington D.C.: Howard University Press, 1974, reprint 1982).
More specifically, for the impacts of colonization on African women, see Maria Cutrufelli, Women of Africa: Roots of Oppression (London: Zed Press, 1983), especially chapter 1, “Colonization and Social Change”; Edna Bay and Nancy Hafkin, eds., Women in Africa: Studies in Social and Economic Change (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976); Christine Obbo, African Women: Their Struggle for Economic Independence (London: Zed Press, 1980); Ifi Amadiume, Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society (London: Zed Press, 1987); Claire Robertson and Iris Berger, eds., Women and Class in Africa (New York and London: Africana Publishing Company, 1986).
2. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963; reprint 1991). See especially chapter 1, “Concerning Violence.”
3. This is also reminiscent of the problematic word “postcolonial,” which carries the baggage of colonialism. As Nayantara Sahgal, a writer from India, asked at a recent Commonwealth Literature Conference, “When will we be post-postcolonial?”
4. Aidoo records with biting humor how her expertise at using the English language was described by a student as “absolutely masculine.” In a “Dialogue, May 1980,” Aidoo reflects on this sexist remark which also evokes the colonial past and the neocolonial present: “I fold back into myself. I who am yet to find me on the graph of ‘speakers of English as a second language,’ or where I stand as a ‘nonnative’ user of the English language. At least once in the lifetime of a [post]colonial, there is a confrontation with the remark: ‘But you speak English . . . like an Englishman’ . . . One’s feelings at such times are ambivalent enough. Now I speak English like a man?” (“To Be A Woman,” 261).
No Sweetness Here and Other Stories Page 15