Changes

by Ama Ata Aidoo

  Esi was trying to pretend she had not heard the declaration.

  ‘Aren’t you saying anything?’ Oko’s voice was full of pleading.

  ‘What would you like me to say?’ she spoke at last, trying very hard to keep the irritation out of her voice.

  ‘You don’t care what my friends think of me?’ he pressed.

  When she spoke again, the irritation was out, strong and breathing. ‘Oko, you know that we have been over this so many times. We all make friends. They either respect us for what we are, or they don’t. And whether we keep them or not depends on each one of us. I cannot take care of what your friends say to you, think of you or do to you.’

  ‘I need my friends,’ he said.

  ‘I also need mine,’ she said.

  ‘Opokuya is a good woman,’ he said.

  Esi yawned, groped for her wrist-watch from the table, and looked at it. Oko snatched the watch from her, and threw it on the bedside table on his side of the bed.

  ‘What did you do that for?’ Esi demanded.

  For an answer, Oko flung the bedcloth away from him, sat up, pulled her down, and moved on her. Esi started to protest. But he went on doing what he had determined to do all morning. He squeezed her breast repeatedly, thrust his tongue into her mouth, forced her unwilling legs apart, entered her, plunging in and out of her, thrashing to the left, to the right, pounding and just pounding away. Then it was all over. Breathing like a marathon runner at the end of a particularly gruelling race, he got off her, and fell heavily back on his side of the bed. He tried to draw the bedcloth to cover both of them again.

  For some time, neither of them spoke. There was nothing else he wanted to say, and there was nothing she could say, at least, not for a while.

  What does one do with this much rage? This much frustration? This much deliberate provocation so early in the morning, and early in the week?

  She could go back to the bathroom and clean herself with a wet towel, just standing by the handbasin. She could go and run a full bath again and briefly soak her whole self up. Either way, she could be out of the house in another half-an-hour, drop Ogyaanowa at her school and be only a little late for work. Or she could forget about going to work altogether, wait until Oko had got himself up and taken the child to school, and then have a good cry. She preferred the latter option, but dared not take it. Not show up at work at all the whole day? And a Monday too? Impossible. It was bad enough that she was going to be late. A woman in her kind of job must be careful…

  In the meantime, Oko was collecting his thoughts together. He was already feeling like telling Esi that he was sorry. But he was also convinced he mustn’t. He got out of bed, taking the entire sleeping cloth with him. Esi’s anger rose to an exploding pitch. Not just because Oko taking the cloth left her completely naked, or because she was feeling uncomfortably wet between her thighs. What really finished her was her eyes catching sight of the cloth trailing behind Oko who looked like some arrogant king, as he opened the door to get to the bathroom before her. She sucked her teeth, or made the noise which is normally described, inadequately, in English as a sucking of the teeth. It was thin, but loud, and very long. In a contest with any of the fishwives about ten kilometres down the road from the Hotel Twentieth Century, she would have won.

  One full hour later, she was easing her car into the parking lot of the Department of Urban Statistics. The car came to a standstill. She turned off the engine, removed the keys from the ignition, dumped them irritably into her handbag, got out of the vehicle with an unconscious and characteristic haste, and literally ran to her office on the third floor of the building. This morning, she did not even bother to find out whether the lift was working. Since if it was, it would have been maybe only the sixth or seventh time the whole year, and most probably the last time before the end of the century.

  Once in her office, she sat down, first to get her breath back. Then she just sat, uncharacteristically doing nothing at all. She became aware that she was in no hurry to do any work inside her office, or go out and meet anybody. In fact, she was rather surprised at the degree of lethargy she was feeling. She could not remember when last had she felt so clearly unwilling to face the world... and then with a kind of shock, she realised that in spite of the second bath she had had before leaving home, she was still not feeling fresh or clean.

  Clean? It all came to her then. That what she had gone through with Oko had been marital rape.

  ‘Marital rape?!’ She began to laugh rather uncontrollably, and managed to stop herself only when it occurred to her that anyone coming upon her that minute would think she had lost her mind, which would not have been too far from the truth. In fact, her professional self was coldly telling her that she was hysterical. And isn’t hysteria a form of mental derangement? At that she got up and went to lock the door.

  She could hardly remember what commitments were on her schedule for the day. Yes, there was some data analysing she and her colleague had to do for the Minister. But that, mercifully, was for three o’clock that afternoon.

  Marital rape. She sat down again, this time almost making herself comfortable. As if the state paid her to come and sit in her office to try and sort out her personal life! One part of her was full of disapproval, while the other — a kind of brand new self — could not have cared less.

  Marital rape. Suddenly, she could see herself or some other woman sociologist presenting a paper on:

  ‘The Prevalence of Marital Rape in the Urban African Environment’

  to a packed audience of academics. Overwhelmingly male, of course. A few women. As the presentation progresses, there are boos from the men, and uncomfortable titters from the women. At the end of it, there is predictable hostile outrage.

  ‘Yes, we told you, didn’t we? What is burying us now are all these imported feminists ideas

  ‘And, dear lady colleague, how would you describe “marital rape” in Akan?’

  Igbo? … Yoruba?’

  ‘Wolof? ... or Temne?’

  ‘Kikuyu? ... or Ki-Swahili?’

  ‘Chi-Shona?’

  ‘Zulu? ... or Xhosa?’

  Or …

  She was caught in her own trap. Hadn’t she some long time ago said in an argument that

  ‘you cannot go around claiming that an idea or an item was imported into a given society unless you could also conclude that to the best of your knowledge, there is not, and never was any word or phrase in that society’s indigenous language which describes that idea or item’?

  By which and other proof, the claims that ‘plantain’, ‘cassava’ and other African staples came from Asia or the Americas could only be sustained by racist historians and lazy African academics? And both suffering from the same disease: allergy to serious and honest research. … African staples coming from the Americas? Ha, ha, ha! … And incidentally, what did the slaves take there with them by way of something to grow and eat? … What a magnificent way to turn history on its head! … She told herself that when it came to poor history getting turned on its head, there was too much of that sort of thing going on around Africa and Africans anyway …

  But marital rape? No. The society could not possible have an indigenous word or phrase for it. Sex is something a husband claims from his wife as his right. Any time. And at his convenience. Besides, any ‘sane’ person, especially sane women, would consider any other woman lucky or talented or both, who can make her husband lose his head like that.

  What does she use? Some well-known stuff?

  It must be a new product from Europe or America …

  You know how often she travels.

  ‘Ei, Esi Sekyi … and she always looks so busily professional … and so booklong!’

  And here she was, not feeling academic or intellectual at all, but angry, and sore … And even after a good bath before and after, still dirty … Dirty! … Ah-h-h-h, the word was out.

  She put her head on her desk. She must have dozed off for a minute or two. She woke up wit
h a start, and somewhat disorientated. When her mind cleared, she realised that she had made a decision.

  3

  Compared to Esi, Opokuya was definitely fat. Not that she cared. She moved like lightning, and laughed through the days of the year. Any time the question of her obesity cropped up, she made it quite clear that the fact that she was fat had nothing to do with not knowing what to do about it. She had been a state registered nurse and a qualified midwife for nearly fifteen years. In those years, she had concluded that those who are interested in women, especially African women, losing so much weight must be the same ones who are interested in women, especially African women, cutting down their birth rate.

  ‘You Opokuya. As for you Opokuya,’ her listeners would protest.

  ‘I could be wrong,’ she would make an attempt to concede, and then move straight on, ‘otherwise how is it that no matter how remote and hidden a rural clinic is, two items you are bound to find in great amounts are pamphlets and samples for losing weight and contraception? Eh?’ she would ask her bemused listeners, her hands akimbo. ‘... And as for hospitals like this one, you know we would never run out of the routine drugs if they were also contraceptive and we gave them to all patients, including men and children, and asked them to take them three times a day before meals.’ She would glare around, her eyes blazing in a most unnatural way. When she got into such deep areas, people normally kept quiet and listened to her.

  ‘Meanwhile, our governments are behaving like all professional beggars. They have learned the rules of effective begging, one of them being that you never object to anything the giver likes. And they know the givers like one thing very much now: that there should not be too many of us. Under such circumstances, how does the beggar tell the giver to go and stuff his dangerous and experimental contraceptive pills, capsules and injections? Yes, injections. And they call their murderous programmes such beautiful names: “family planning” and “mother health”... all to cover up …’

  Her listeners were nearly always hospital personnel. Some thought they recognised the truth of what she was saying. Others simply felt embarrassed, wondering what a decently married woman was doing with such mad ideas in her head. Some of them would turn away when she was carrying on. Some would keep quiet. But there were always others who stayed and continued to argue with her in an effort to get her to see modern and civilised reason.

  Opokuya had thought quite hard about the politics of population and fat. She had concluded that the way population, especially, was being handled in relation to Africans left her frightened. It seemed to her that any time someone else showed such a keen interest in your not making children, then for sure, he is not just interested in your good health, your prosperity, and the good health and prosperity of your children. For herself, Opokuya had decided she wanted four children. She had had them, and then brought the matter out in the open to discuss with her husband, Kubi. After they had agreed that, indeed, four were enough, she had gone to one of the gynaecologists she respected, sorted things out with him, booked herself on to his surgery schedule, and for a bed in the gynae ward. She had then gone in to have the ends of her fallopian tubes tied or singed, whatever. Finish!

  Opokuya had not so far been able to sort out the weight issue that neatly, even in relation to herself. She would admit once in a while that she was a little bothered about the possibility of a heart complication. She routinely took her blood pressure, which remained remarkably normal. Besides, since she didn’t know the extent to which her body was capable of expanding, she had a long time ago taught herself to do without the more obvious criminal items like sugar and fatty foods. So it was that knowledge and this discipline which gave her the confidence to argue so hotly. Sometimes she truly felt like a fraud.

  No two humans could have been as different, physically and temperamentally, as Opokuya and Esi. But they also got on very very well. In fact, they had been friends for so long, and they had become so close, their mothers related to one another like friends and sisters too, in spite of the fact that they lived in different parts of the country.

  Opokuya and Kubi had met when she was a student nurse, and they had got married the year she had graduated from nursing school. Her midwifery qualification was to come later.

  Their oldest child, a girl, was just a little younger than her mother’s first professional certificate. She and the next child after her, a boy, were in secondary boarding schools. The two youngest, also boys, were still in primary school, and lived with their parents.

  Opokuya and Kubi lived on Sweet Breezes Hill. It had been the most prestigious of the colonial residential areas. They occupied the same old colonial surveyor’s bungalow built in the 1930s, and Opokuya was always quite aware of the different spirits who also inhabited the house. There was that of the first surveyor who had probably selected the hill as the site most suitable for occupation by them, the English civil servants who were sent to these deadly mosquito-infested regions to administer the territories on behalf of their royal majesties, and generally civilise the natives. These natives, both the groups on this part of the Guinea coast, and in the interior of the country, were reputed to be some of the rudest and most untameable throughout the whole of the British Empire. Why this was so, no one knew, but it was definitely so. In time, quite a sizeable group of Englishmen had come bringing their women with them. They had lived close to one another so that they would be well-placed to fight those natives with guns, the mosquitoes with alcohol, and general boredom with women. Of course, they always could and they often did import both alcohol and women from ‘home’. But then, there had also been more than adequate local supplies of both. So in the end they banned the local liquor to force the natives to buy expensive English gin and Scottish whisky, and then proceeded to take over the local women.

  Other spirits inhabited the Dakwa’s house which were perhaps more kindred. Though sometimes she wondered whether they could be said to be more benevolent just because they were African.

  ‘It’s up to them,’ she murmured to herself.

  ‘You aren’t talking to yourself, are you?’ said Kubi, as he returned to their bedroom from eating his breakfast.

  Oh, you frightened me so,’ Opokuya protested. ‘But I probably was talking to myself,’ she confessed.

  ‘And what is the problem now?’ Kubi was quite sensitive to Opokuya’s moods.

  ‘I’m not sure myself. In any case, I think the conversations I hold with myself which occasionally appear on my lips don’t really have anything to do with what you call “my problems”.’

  ‘But what is it this morning?’ Kubi pursued.

  ‘Probably same as yesterday’s.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘How to co-ordinate the car’s movements.’

  The problem was out. Knowing it was one of the few areas of friction in their otherwise good marriage, Opokuya hated bringing it up. But she had to: every morning. Yet both of them saw the issue of the car’s movements as being ‘very simple’. Kubi felt that like his colleagues in the office and the civil service generally, he should be able to drive his car to his place of work. Especially since the government paid for its fuel consumption and general maintenance, and anyway, in most regional offices there was always a place in the car-park, marked out for the surveyor’s car. He was convinced that the car should be parked there all day. He would move it at half past twelve to go home for lunch. Then he would drive it back at a quarter to two, park it, let it stand for the rest of the afternoon, until he was ready to drive home at the end of a working day. Whenever there was a day’s field trip, he insisted that the car should stand on its spot the whole day, until he returned from the bush or wherever and drove it home in the evening. Opokuya should go to work and return home with the hospital vans.

  Opokuya thought this was absolutely ridiculous and even mad. A car is to be used. How was she to work full-time, and medical work at that, and look after a family as big as theirs without transportation of her own? Was he aw
are of the amount of running around one had to do to feed and clothe four growing children? ‘It’s a question of ethics!’

  ‘W-h-a-a-a-t?’

  ‘Yes, it’s a question of ethics.’

  ‘What ethics? It’s common sense.’

  ‘What do you mean common sense? Are you abusing me? I collect my full car maintenance allowance. Do you want me to let you drive it every day to the market?’

  ‘But -’

  ‘Does the fact that everybody else does it mean that we should do it too?’

  ‘Please, Kubi, listen. First of all, I am not abusing you. And you know I’m not trying to say that you should let me drive the car all over the place with government maintenance -’

  ‘Then what are you saying?’

  ‘If you would let me finish. Please, just take your car off maintenance -’

  ‘What? What an idea! I’m a senior civil servant. Car maintenance is an approved fringe benefit.’

  ‘What I’m trying to say is that since I also need the car in order to look after the family properly, please take the car off maintenance. With your salary and mine, we should be able to take care of the car ourselves. That way, there would be no reason for any of us to feel guilty when I drive it.’

  ‘You always carry on as if you are the only salary-earner around.’

  Oh,’ she would say with all the affection she felt for her husband packed into her voice, ‘now you are being unfair. You know I am not talking about the money. I’m just talking about the up-and-down I have to do each day to keep us going.’

  Whenever Opokuya complained about her husband’s ‘unreasonable attitude’ about the car to any of her female colleagues, they would nod sympathetically in front of her, and laugh at her behind her back. As far as they were concerned, it was Opokuya who was unreasonable or mad. Clearly, she didn’t know anything. She should listen to the stories of women who paid for cars which their husbands then took over completely. In some cases, whisking their girlfriends around town in them.

  For the whole world to see.