But do you never know anything? I thought those who go to school know everything... so your wife says we have no understanding and we are uncivilised ... We thank her, we thank you too... But it would have been well if you knew why she said this. (50, emphasis added)
Esi Kom’s reprimand is directed mainly at her son’s failure of imagination in the face of conflicting systems of thought. The pull from both sides has left him powerless and, not coincidentally, speechless, a fact that his face-saving retreat into rigid masculinity (he slaps Eulalie) cannot conceal. His mother’s scolding, therefore, also carries with it the implicit message of the need to create alternative thought systems that operate outside the crippling economy of power. This valuable epistemological insight is summed up in Trinh Minh-ha’s pronouncement: “Between knowledge and power, there is room for knowledge-without-power” (40). Esi Kom’s resolution of her son’s crisis through acceptance of his “black-white” wife clears the ground for the construction of such a power-free knowledge system.
The picture Aidoo draws in her first published work of the oppressive and unimaginative nature of existing structures of knowledge is developed in her second play, Anowa (1970). The setting here is nineteenth-century colonial Ghana, to which the writer turns in part to challenge long-standing myths about African womanhood. The most stubborn of these myths—that African femininity is congenitally passive—is debunked by the heroine’s spontaneous and ample spirit of rebellion. Anowa does not embody the feminine ideal of the “good woman [who] does not have a brain or mouth” (93). On the contrary, she is equipped both verbally and intellectually to do battle with her parents, husband, and community over the legitimacy of her own ideas.
For Aidoo, the marriage plot, with its penchant for constraint and conformity, seems an appropriate site to test the strength of her heroine’s ideas. Anowa violates several marriage conventions: she refuses to marry early, rejects socially approved suitors, and chooses her own mate. The marriage plot is further radicalized by the feminization of Anowa’s husband-to-be. The most watery “of all watery males” (75), Kofi Ato is a diluted male, a female-man, the incarnation of a masculine culture’s nightmare.
This subversive beginning, however, gives way to an aggressive reassertion of the marriage plot with Kofi Ato’s self-transformation into a greedy, power-hungry egomaniac intent on fulfilling his capitalist dream on the backs of slaves. Anowa feels betrayed but neither her outrage nor her refusal to accede to her husband’s lust for power can avert the outcome of the marriage plot: the heroine’s death as punishment for her rebellion. Anowa’s suicide measures her entrapment within patriarchal law. Her search for freedom thwarted, she chooses death as the means of escape for her dissident spirit.
While Aidoo chooses to work with the the marriage plot in Anowa, she leaves behind sufficient reason to hope that if and when it resurfaces in her later work it will undergo a careful reappraisal. If, as the play’s legendary origins stipulate, Anowa’s tragedy is a cautionary tale for would-be violators of marriage’s patriarchal law, it also serves to put Aidoo on notice about the need to rechart its course to allow women, in Margaret Atwood’s words, “to go somewhere else” other than the grave.5 The choral voice of wisdom that ends the play makes it clear that change is both desirable and inevitable: “Who knows if Anowa would have been a better woman, a better person if we had not been what we are?” (124) In Changes Aidoo explores this question to determine the extent to which African women and their nation have come of age, but it is first given apocalyptic urgency in the multi-genre arena of Our Sister Killjoy.
The simmering problem of intellectual dislocation dramatized in The Dilemma of a Ghost comes to a boil in Our Sister Killjoy with the brazen acts of accommodation by “academic pseudo-intellectual [s]” (6), educated Africans seduced and beguiled by Western cultural hegemony. Sissie, the protagonist, is a new invention: the African woman as artist-heroine, measuring in a punishingly ironic tone vast levels of social and moral decay in” twentieth-century modernia” (22). The despoilers of this landscape come from the frontlines of the political and intellectual arenas of Europe and Africa. The novel’s emotional logic, however, is guided by the desire to dislodge the bourgeois mentality that feeds a host of social problems in contemporary Africa—from obsequious politicians who feel a kinship more with De Gaulle and Edward Heath than with their constituents, to intellectual aspirants, like Sammy, for whom “going to Europe was altogether more like a dress rehearsal for a journey to paradise” (9). For Sissie, the bourgeois mind is pseudo-intellectual, a veritable symptom of a failed imagination. It engenders, for example, such obdurate naivete as revealed in Kunle’s reading of a biracial heart transplant in South Africa as marking the end of racialism.
Equally disturbing is pseudo-intellectual indifference to the woman question. In the “love letter” that ends the novel Sissie links Western cultural and African male hegemonies in an effort to compel a rethinking of African “group survival” (114) that includes women. She contests her double silencing—as an African, forced to “use a language that enslaved me” (112) and as a woman, socially conditioned to “shut up and meekly look up to [the male]” (117). She calls for a new idea of nationhood, one that reconceives women as subjects, pseudo-intellectual thinking as a threat to national well-being, and Africa’s common folk—the formally uneducated mothers and fathers of formally educated Africans—as part of those “intangible realities” that make for “life being relevantly lived” (129).
Sissie’s epistolary conflation of the personal and the political provides an insight into Aidoo’s own textual practice. Writing against the common understanding that proscribes women’s experience as tangential to national life, she has gone as far as renegotiating the relationship in revolutionary terms. A mother’s timely intervention in her son’s politically-charged crisis (The Dilemma of a Ghost), Anowa’s holy rage against patriarchal inexorability, Sissie’s politicization of a personal adventure—these narrative acts of resistance are all framed by the desire to break down the border separating women and the state. Aidoo’s interest in the dissolution of boundaries derives from a unique understanding of the changing African environment. Like many African writers weaned on Things Fall Αρart, she realizes that change is the inevitable outcome of the colonial experience. Also, like some, she is ambivalent about change, recognizing its potential for both good and harm. What Aidoo brings to the subject, however, apart from a keen geopolitical sensibility, is a heightened awareness of the complex nature of change. Necessary, slow, insidious, liberating— these are but a few descriptions of the faces of change in her work.
Aidoo’s commitment to female autonomy, her belief in a salvational force preserved in pockets of traditional African life, and her knowledge of the destructive nature of oppression combine to create a fervent and conflicted voice for change that speaks with compelling authority in Changes.
III
I cannot see myself as a writer, writing about lovers in Accra because you see, there are so many other problems.
Ama Ata Aidoo, African Writers Talking
Readers familiar with Aidoo’s oeuvre will agree that Changes, winner of the 1992 Commonwealth Prize for Literature in Africa, is a novel she was bound to write, in spite of doubts she expressed twenty-five years earlier about her capacity to write a love story amid the turbulent climate of post-independence Africa. Such readers may at first be amused by the prefatory “apology” and “confession,” which refer to the writing of the novel as “an exercise in words-eating,” but, on second thought, will fit these tropes into the ironic mode so typical of the author’s expressive manner. For the fact is that the love plot is a common feature in Aidoo’s work, although it is embedded so seamlessly into weightier concerns that it often escapes the attention of critics who pan solely for political gold. For example, the relationships between Eulalie and A to, Anowa and Kofi, and Sissie and her unnamed lover in Our Sister Killjoy are generally subordinated to the “loftier” issues o
f cultural conflict, communal authority, and cultural disintegration, respectively. Such a critical practice unfortunately ignores Aidoo’s habit of coupling the personal and political.
Put in proper perspective, Aidoo’s statement, used here as an epigraph, reflects artistic intent or practice less than the political and gender realities of the time. In 1967, in the midst of a nationalistically- charged political climate filled with post-colonial possibility, Aidoo— one of only a handful of women writing in Africa6—could not afford to convey the impression of neglecting the big “problems” of the day to frolic in the private chambers of love. Admitting a proclivity to the personal (read: women’s experience) was a risk the woman writer knew well enough not to take. Hence, although Aidoo at the time of the interview had written two plays and a few short stories in which private and public domains are fused, it seemed more prudent to accentuate the latter in an interview.
Placing Changes in the thematic continuum outlined above is not to deny or underplay its innovative character. The novel pulses with an irrepressible pioneering spirit, clearing the ground for a new tradition of women’s writing in Africa. It is a record of the changing circumstances of women’s lives in contemporary Africa, but more importantly it transcends realistic significance and constructs a psychological blueprint for female portraiture. Based on the novel’s cumulative impact, African women’s diminishment in literature may well be a thing of the past. The three main female characters together provide a composite portrait of an emerging African femininity from which many future experiments will be drawn. Educated, career-oriented, financially independent, and strong-willed, Esi Sekyi, Opokuya Dakwa, and Fusena Kondey are also wives, mothers, and daughters, a combination that replaces the ideal of domesticity that has long governed the imaging of women in African literature. It is not a utopian vision, however. Obstacles to the full humanity of women threaten even the most promise-filled female act. In other words, Changes is as much about stasis as it is about change. Yet the novel enlarges women in ways hitherto unimagined by the producers of African literary culture.
Aidoo returns to the institution of marriage, the seat of patriarchal power, for signs of the changing relations between women and men, and the results are mixed. On the one hand, a bad marriage is no longer inherently tragic for women. The loud communal tones of censure that drove Anowa to her death have died down to a family whisper of disapproval with Esi’s termination of her marriage to Oko. Esi’s financial independence is not an unrelated factor. Her path-breaking career—she is a statistician with a master’s degree—earns her more money than her teaching husband and, following their separation, an African literary record is made: the husband must vacate the family home because it belongs to his wife. One need only recall Anowa’s dispossession and placelessness to fully appreciate Esi’s achievement. For Opokuya and Fusena, too, financial stability proves a protective advantage, although the latter’s circumstances, the most comfortable of the three, are enhanced not by the career she had planned to have but rather by a compensatory gift from her entrepreneurial husband who scuttled that career.
Women and money not only make for imaginative capital, as Virginia Woolf accurately noted,7 but also for a transformative psychological economy of marriage. In Changes the major women characters resist victimization mainly because theirs is a habit of mind unaccustomed to the consolidation of power in male hands. Esi, for example, rejects Oko’s plea for sympathy for the daily bruising to which he claims his ego is subjected because of his wife’s atypical femininity. In retaliation, and to assure himself that in spite of her culturally aberrant behavior, “Esi too [is] an African woman” (8), Oko rapes her. Esi’s response to her violation occurs in three quick stages. First, she names the act: it is “marital rape” (11), although there is no “indigenous word or phrase for it” (12) in her linguistic universe. Naming the rape act enables Esi to read it not as an oxymoron, as masculine logic would have her believe, but rather as a patriarchal tool designed to enforce female subjugation. This reading is reinforced by the post-rape narrative moment that shows Oko walking away from Esi’s naked body, dragging the “sleeping cloth” behind him, “looking] like some arrogant king” (10). The scene evokes antithetical images of subject and object, exaltation and humility, power and powerlessness, and Esi knows on which side of the gender divide she falls. But she also knows that the divide is a social construction designed to limit, even deny, her humanity. From this knowledge springs action, a forceful reassertion of the self, that culminates in her separation and divorce from Oko. Esi’s refusal to participate in the post-rape ritual of victimization is an integral part of the novel’s effort to reconstitute female identity.
Acts of self-legitimization by Opokuya and Fusena also require significant expenditure of emotional capital, and they too have the backing of stable incomes. Opokuya’s comes from a fifteen-year career as a registered nurse and midwife, and Fusena’s business is rumored to have “made more money... than the largest supermarket in town” (67). Oko’s representation of Opokuya as “a good woman” typifies male misreading of female signature. His search for a “proper” model of femaleness to negotiate Esi’s self-desocialization inhibits his understanding of Opokuya’s complex personality. This complexity is masked, for instance, by her obsessive concern for Kubi’s physical well-being. The self-serving motives underlying Opokuya’s maternal attitudes should not be overlooked. One is simply a matter of survival. With four children and a family not within close proximity, her self-interest seems to overlap significantly with genuine concern.
The maternal mask also allows Opokuya to deflect deep anxieties about her husband’s (in)fidelity. An extension of her nursing instinct, Opokuya’s “worry” about her husband’s safety enables her to continue to “work” at home and thereby remove herself emotionally from her husband who, as the final scene shows, is actually as untrustworthy as she suspects. Work proves to be more than an emotional palliative for Opokuya. It is also a conduit for financial independence, a fact she asserts forcefully with her purchase of Hsi’s car to ease the strain of daily rounds between work and home. Old and well-worn, the car clearly does not measure up to required transportation standards (Ali describes it in the opening scene as dangerously “frail” [4]), but it serves as a fitting symbol of the old and oft-forgotten fact of African women’s industry and financial autonomy Unlike Opokuya and Esi (before the latter marries Ali), Fusena has no car worries. Her “two-door vehicle” may look inconsequential beside her husband’s “elegant and capacious chariot” (99), but it makes for easy travel between her “kiosk” and home. Her problems begin when her worst fears come true. Earlier on, Fusena had abandoned her plans for an advanced degree and a teaching career, married her college friend, Ali Kondey, and settled into a wifely and childbearing routine that took her to England and back home to Ghana. As she watched Ali fulfill his dreams through several degrees, she began to fear that the educational gap opening up between them would eventually engulf her. The incarnation of this self-fulfilling prophecy is Esi, the elegant, well-educated divorcee Ali chooses to be his second wife. Fusena’s response to her husband’s remarriage plans seems to complicate the novel’s paradigm of a changing (African) female personality within the marriage plot. Lacking voice, she is unable to articulate even her anger. In fact, Fusena’s entire range of self-expression is comprised of eight brief statements, four of which are one-to-five-word in terrogatives. But judging from her reaction—the dangerously reckless manner in which she drives out of the house to go to work on the day she gets the news—her rage is tremendous. It definitely belies the image of the woman whose first and last words in the novel represent nodding approval of patriarchal authority—”yes” to All’s marriage proposal and a triple “yes” to the women summoned by “the patriarchs of Nima” (105) to console her. Fusena’s silence, therefore, bespeaks not the absence of an inner life but rather her double isolation within the dominant society and, in particular, her own restrictive Muslim cultu
re. She appears silent because she is “not being heard.”8
The tensions embodied in the portrayal of Fusena and Opokuya—not to mention Esi in her role as All’s second wife—reflect the novel’s dual themes of social stasis and change. Echoes of the former reverberate throughout the novel and frequently appear in ironic juxtaposition with the latter. The opening chapter’s conflicting images of womanhood set this pattern in motion. We see, on the one hand, a highly educated female employee of the Ghanaian government making travel plans to attend an international conference with her male colleagues and we observe, on the other, the gendered dynamics of a social environment that threaten to weaken her leverage. This conjunction of female capability and vulnerability, captured at the end of the chapter by All’s categorization of Esi as both “fascinating” and “frail” (4), is dramatized in the rest of the novel through the separate and interlocking lives of the three women characters.
New attitudes about marriage also appear against an immovable background of cultural beliefs and practices. Esi’s sense of independence, for example, stands in opposition to the view of woman as object of exchange embodied in the “breathing parcel” (71) Oko receives from his mother as replacement for the ungovernable Esi. A man of fiercely traditional instincts, Oko sees his career-driven wife as part of a disturbing modern trend, but even he is shocked to learn that “it was still possible in this day and age to get a young woman... who would agree to be carried off as a wife to a man she had never met” (71). Ali, too, is rudely awakened to the facts of custom when he shows up before Esi’s “fathers” with one of his employees to ask for their daughter’s hand in marriage:
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