Changes

by Ama Ata Aidoo

  So who could it be? There was of course Ali... but it couldn’t be him. It could be Opokuya who might have been coming back for any one of a number of things to do with the car... The visitor was already knocking on the door as she switched on the light in the sitting room. Perhaps she should switch on the light on the veranda for whoever it was; but she felt that she may just as well open the door and let the person come in anyway. As the visitor stepped into the room, she shut the door and stepped back.

  Neither of them could collect himself or herself together quickly enough even to say hello. They just stared. Kubi was overcome by the sight of an Esi he had not seen before; eyes of crimson and face stained with tears. And Esi was feeling extremely vulnerable since she suspected that that was how her face looked.

  ‘I thought Opokuya was here,’ he said rather uncertainly.

  ‘Yes, she was here but she’s gone now.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘In my car,’ she said, and tears welled up in her eyes.

  ‘What is it?’ Kubi sounded alarmed. Esi lifted her face to say something to him ... No words came. Kubi took hold of her hand, maybe to lead her into the room and get her to sit down. He found himself holding her close. Then, as though he had taken a quick decision just in that minute, he turned to face her and hold her closer and hard. She did not feel like offering any resistance. He began to kiss her face, her neck and all over. Then they were moving towards the couch and Esi could feel Kubi’s manhood rising.

  Esi’s mind snapped open. There must be a cure for most pains including a feeling of desolation, she was thinking. Why not? she added, all in her head. Then it occurred to her that maybe this was what had always been between her and Kubi. Which neither of them had wanted to face but which had inspired his treatment of her to swing between that of a kindly understanding uncle and an irritable, disapproving older brother? It also occurred to her that maybe this might be an answer to the great question of how to get one’s physical needs met, and still manage to avoid all attachment and pain.

  So then, why was she remembering that business about drowning people experiencing a replay of their entire life in a flash of a second? So here was her life. Either it is not true that only the drowning go through that experience, or we can drown quite a few times in this life in different ways... And water is not the only force to fear …

  Thoughts chased one another so quickly in her mind, it was like a fast-moving film … She remembered that there is something called friendship. And hadn’t her friendship with Opokuya been, so far, the most constant thing in her life? And that whereas mothers, fathers, grandmothers and other relations are like extra limbs we grow, a friend symbolises a choice? And to maintain a friendship is a choice? Therefore not to maintain a friendship — indeed, to kill a friend — is a choice? Opokuya’s ample face came into view, beaming... humorous, but with Nana’s voice, ‘My lady Silk, remember that a man always gains in stature any way he chooses to associate with a woman — including adultery... But, in her association with a man, a woman is always in danger of being diminished …’In any case, wasn’t the need to maintain that friendship greater on her part? Maybe Opokuya could shed her. She, Esi, could not afford to shed Opokuya.

  When she finally realised that Kubi was unzipping his trousers, Esi broke free from the embrace. And at that sign of unwillingness on her part, Kubi too paused. He might have offered an explanation, but there really was no need for words. He reorganised himself and made sure he had got his keys. At the door Kubi turned to face Esi. It was as if he was going to say something. Again there was no need. Esi easily guessed what he had been about to say. She was never going to breathe a word of what had nearly happened — to Opokuya or any living soul. There are things you don’t do to a friend. Opokuya was not just a friend. She was a sister, almost her other self. And definitely there are some tales you don’t tell even to yourself.

  Esi never went back to Oko. As far as she was concerned, that was never even an option. She never had a baby with Ali either. That relationship stopped being a marriage. They became just good friends who found it convenient once in a while to fall into bed and make love.

  She never bothered to look for an annulment of the marriage. That would have meant going back home to her people with her version of what had happened. They would have called Ali. Ali would have shown due respect and gone to meet them at the village. They would have put before him the matter as they would have received it, and expected Ali to comment. She knew that Ali would have told her people that as far as he was concerned he loved her and that they were still man and wife... Her people would not have accepted any explanation from her as to why she would want to ‘destroy’ that marriage too.

  ‘What? Throw away a man who gave you things any other woman would have given part of her life for? Including a brand new beautiful car? And isn’t it being rumoured that in fact, he has almost finished paying for an estate house for you?’

  ‘And he is fine!’

  ‘Ah, for a scholar, so respectful... an unusual human being …’

  It would probably have ended in her grandmother asking her to go back to the village for a longer stay. So that they could take her to the priestess and ask her to have Esi’s soul called up for an interview. For instance, about what it was that she really desired from this life. Since as far as they were concerned she always seemed to get and throw away what other souls desired. Besides, her behaviour was becoming too unnatural altogether.

  No, she could not go through all that. Not really.

  So the marriage stayed, but radically changed. All questions and their answers disappeared. If Ali went to Esi’s and she was not in, he tried not to question her about it when they next met. For Esi though, things hadn’t worked out so simply. She had had to teach herself not to expect him at all. She had had to teach herself not to wonder where he was when he was not with her. And that had been the hardest of the lessons to learn. For, Accra being that kind of place, she couldn’t help hearing about his womanising activities. Given the nature of her job, it was only natural that out of those close to Esi, it should have been Opokuya who heard more of the gossip about Ali. Yet it was she who told Esi least. Esi believed Ali when he insisted that he loved her very much. She knew it was true: that he loved her in his own fashion. What she became certain of was that his fashion of loving had proved quite inadequate for her.

  So what fashion of loving was she ever going to consider adequate? She comforted herself that maybe her bone-blood-flesh self, not her unseen soul, would get answers to some of the big questions she was asking of life. Yes, maybe, ‘one day, one day’ as the Highlife singer had sung on an unusually warm and not-so-dark night …

  Glossary

  zongo

  West African term for a ghetto of northern peoples in southern cities. Most people who live in zongos are presumed to be Islamic.

  tuo

  A Hausa staple adopted by almost the entire Sub-Sahel. It is made from rice, millet, corn or sorghum.

  kola

  In current West African pidgin, this means a bribe.

  ninos

  A Ghanaian expression for a new recruit, interchangeable with ‘greenhorn’.

  harmattan

  The cold, dry wind that effectively constitutes the West African winter.

  armstrong

  Tightfisted. West African pidgin pun on the Scottish name.

  The Castle

  Christiansburg Castle by the sea at Osu, Accra. Built by the Danes, it was subsequently captured by the English who used it as the seat of colonial government. Except by President Kwame Nkrumah, who ignored it for symbolic reasons, it has been preferred as the residence and offices of all governments.

  kenkey

  A coastal Ghanaian staple of cooked corn meal and one of the solid foundations of a vast national food industry.

  nim

  A tree common in coastal Ghana. It produces sweet, edible berries.

  dokon-na-kyenam

  doko
n: real name for kenkey, see above kyenam: fried fish.

  Always put together as a standard fast meal, eaten cold.

  wahala

  Pidgin, meaning troubles or disagreements.

  abe nkwan

  Soup prepared from the fruits of the palm nut tree.

  kolof rice

  Classical West African meal of rice with stewed meat and vegetables.

  Makola

  The centre of Accra where there used to be a huge two-part market.

  Kokompe engineers

  Dealers who sell used-car parts and have their market in Kokompe, which is a large area north-west of Accra.

  pesewa

  Smallest unit of Ghanaian currency.

  adires

  Traditional Yoruba batik.

  Afterword

  by Tuzyline Jita Allan

  I

  Once in a while 1 catch myself wondering whether 1 would have found the courage to write if I had not started to write when I was too young to know what was good for me.

  Ama Ata Aidoo, “To Be a Woman”

  Before reading from her new novel. Changes, at the Festival of African Writing sponsored by Brown University in November 1991, Ama Ata Aidoo recalled the early stages of her career. Her subject matter, she jokingly reminisced, had provoked a peculiar style of greeting from an influential African male literary critic. “How is my little girl with Africa and women on her shoulders?” he would inquire in half-jest.1 The remark drew muted laughter from her rapt Ivy League audience on whom both its paternalistic tone and allusive intent were clearly not lost.

  The greeting’s combined sense of levity and seriousness captures the gap between African women’s literary enterprise and the critical establishment’s response to it. Aidoo and other African women artists bear the prodigious responsibility of holding in check the structures of gender and cultural domination. Yet this feat remains curiously unacknowledged by an African critical paternity that has managed to propel the African imagination onto the world stage and many male writers along with it.2

  In “To Be a Woman,” an essay that qualifies easily as a manifesto of African feminism, Aidoo links female subordination with the marginalization of the woman writer in Africa. Women’s victimization, she points out, begins with the distinction made at birth between “a girl [and] a human being,” the latter category designating the male child (263). She believes that this demarcation underlies the masculinization of the public sphere and the attendant exclusion of women from it. She recounts her own experience as a writer and an academic with male colleagues who resented her independent spirit and tried to portray her successful first novel. Our Sister Killjoy Or Reflections From a Black-Eyed Squint (1977) as un African. Aidoo is both saddened and offended by this act, calling it a “violence” intended to insure the death of the female author (262).

  Of course, critical immolation of the woman writer is not unique to Africa. The long list of casualties compiled in the West by feminist critics during the past two decades attests ruefully to the universality of the epistemic violence inflicted on the female artist. For African women, however, this fact is compounded by the presence of a literary nationalism bent on purging the creative (female) mind of such corrupting Western influences as feminism. At a recent African writers’ conference, the Ugandan writer Taban lo Liyong presented the definitive nationalist argument against feminism:

  I suspect that feminism may destroy that which up to now has enabled Africa to withstand all the buffeting from other cultures... I think I should appeal to keep the African household intact at the end of the day, otherwise we may have our younger sisters going off and joining in dances in Lapland which concern the people of Lapland only. (Criticism and Ideology 183)

  Responding, Aidoo correctly identified this nationalistic plea for cultural purity as a ploy to silence women:

  To try to remind ourselves and our brothers and lovers and husbands and colleagues that we also exist should not be taken as something foreign, as something bad. African women struggling both on behalf of themselves and on behalf of the wider community is very much a part of our heritage. It is not new and I really refuse to be told I am learning feminism from abroad (Criticism and Ideology 183)

  Aidoo’s retort foregrounds the unexamined assumptions that African femininity is inherently nonfeminist and that the (borrowed) elements of Western feminism exhibited in African women’s writing are inimical to African nationalism. Both assumptions have no basis in fact, but together they have proved effective as a strategy of alienation. Internationally, images of African women’s passivity and easy accommodation to society, rooted in colonial discourse, underlie mainstream Anglo-American feminism’s indifference to the African female subject. And while some women critics in England and America have begun to focus attention on African women’s writing, the Western opinion that feminism is alien to African women seems unshakable.3

  This act of dismissal abroad stands in ironic contrast to the fears expressed at home about African feminist practice. The nationalist grounds on which these fears rest diminish, however, once one understands African women’s literary purpose. Women writers in Africa feel as deeply as their male counterparts the need to repair Africa’s fractured image following colonialism. But they also intend to interrogate cultural prerogatives that circumscribe women’s lives. In short, they interpose gender in the pivotal project of African cultural recovery. Theirs is a bold and decisive gesture of synthesis aimed at dissolving the false dichotomy, implicit in nationalist discourse, between female and national liberation. Adeola James, in a recent interview with the Kenyan female writer and educator Micere Githae Mugo, put the matter this way: “Will it damage the ultimate struggle for a complete social, economic and political liberation of Africa if we focus on singing the song about the oppression of women?” (98)

  Aidoo’s own artistic response to this question represents a forceful argument against the view that divides woman and nation. “One must resist,” she writes, “any attempts at being persuaded to think that the woman question has to be superseded by the struggle against any local exploitative system, the nationalist struggle or the struggle against imperialism and global monopoly capital” (“To Be a Woman” 264). As the bit of ironic confessional release in the epigraph to this essay indicates, the author’s courage of conviction on this matter has proved costly, especially in African literary criticism where attitudes toward her work run the gamut from neglect to outright hostility.4 Yet her belief in the necessary, albeit uneasy, connection between woman and nation remains unshaken. If her work focuses on the points of rupture between these two entities, it is to underscore the need for their reconciliation. Put simply, Aidoo believes that post-independence Africa cannot afford to ignore women if it wants to succeed in nation rebuilding. She sums up both her artistic vision and her aesthetics in a recent article in Dissent:

  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. (323, emphasis added)

  II

  I feel the revolutionalizing of our continent hinges on the woman question.

  Ama Ata Aidoo, in Adeola James, In Their Own Voices

  The publication of The Dilemma of a Ghost (1965) warned us to expect painful truths from Aidoo even as it opened her formidable career. The play is a remarkable harbinger of her favorite themes: the fractured modern African psyche, the chasm between Africa’s past and present and the difficult but necessary search for links, the torment visited on Africans by European colonization, and the indomitable African female spirit. Another major imprint left by the play is the Aido
o-esque tone. It is at once doubting and hopeful, scathingly ironic and deeply longing, a paradoxical combination of resistance and identification that makes Aidoo one of the most ardent voices in a troubled postcolonial age. This dialectic, however, embodies more than the spirit of anxiety that rules the modern African soul. It is a call for action, for an effort of will to resolve the painful dilemma of African life in a world of change.

  The Dilemma of a Ghost prefigures the important role women play in this effort. The play’s crisis centers around the cross-cultural marriage of two young college graduates: Ato Yawson, a Ghanaian studying in the United States, and Eulalie Rush, a young African American woman. Ato’s confident return home with his wife provokes a classic confrontation between past and present, between tradition and modernity. His marriage puts him on a collision course with his family on several fronts: his wife is a cultural outsider (a “black-white woman”), a descendant of slaves, and the holder of strange views about motherhood. Caught between the competing demands of his wife and his family—and, by implication, the West and Africa—Ato feels as torn and devitalized as the folkloric ghost immortalized in the children’s song appropriately titled “The Ghost.” Like that “wretched” figure of childhood imagining (28), his response to crisis is not action but paralysis.

  Ato’s dilemma is an epistemological one. He must reconcile two opposing systems of knowledge in order to maintain a coherent sense of self. His failure, in Aidoo’s mind, bespeaks more than personal ineptitude. It exemplifies the disorientation and sense of irrelevance that afflict his class, namely, Africa’s intellectual bourgeoisie, described in Our Sister Killjoy as “comatose intellectuals” (121). Esi Kom’s intervention is important because it is she who recognizes the epistemological nature of her son’s problem and its attendant irony: