Changes
Page 20
“You take someone who by age, kinship, social standing or wealth is in position to stand firm in all matters to do with the well-being of [the] marriage. Above all, he or she must be one who in a crisis must be respected and deferred to by all parties concerned. Your own employee? No-no.” (103)
Not to be outdone. All’s father explodes in anger at his son for failing to consult with him and other “real” family members before marrying a non-Muslim woman. The anger is short-lived, but it demonstrates tradition’s show of force in the face of encroaching change. Ali himself is an amalgam of the competing claims of Africa’s old and new realities. A French- and British-educated, well-traveled business executive, he remains firmly grounded in the patriarchal view of woman as “occupied territory” (91). His preference for sexually-ripened women does stand at one remove from his father’s forays into virginity, but his purchase in the economy of sexual pleasure is as large. All’s feminine looks—a “smooth... black” skin, “beautifully even and white” teeth, and “kohl”-darkened eyes (22)—combine with a new age charm to produce an irresistible and punishing lure. Negotiating polygamy turns out to be more arduous than he had imagined and his bouts of guilt over Fusena’s hurt feelings betray a modern sensibility. But for Ali, these are ultimately petty cares next to the thrill of victory over the female body. Esi’s is a new site of voyeuristic pleasure, an experience he complains of being hitherto deprived by “a great number of women” (75), including Fusena. Magnificently compensated by Esi’s unabashed sexuality, Ali uses the patriarchal privilege of polygamy to claim exclusive rights to yet another sexual terrain.
The novel’s innovative force, however, resides in how Esi mediates the contradictory impulses of tradition and modernity that influence the outcome of her “love story.” Some readers will likely rally around the opinion that Esi’s embrace of polygamy wrecks the liberated self she projects at the beginning of the novel. Her hasty re-entry into a sexual relationship after the rape, which was intended to control her, may cause additional wariness about her feminist capability. Such views, however, would fail to consider an important narrative detail: Esi’s consuming desire for a self-fulfilling career. The collision between female career goals and monogamy becomes all too apparent to Esi in her first marriage. Oko’s smothering need to be mothered undermines her effort to compete in a work environment where she is outnumbered and demeaned by men. In full retreat from monogamy’s compulsory domesticity, Esi takes a second husband whose primary care belongs to his first wife, leaving her with ample time to pursue what she euphemistically refers to as “my lifestyle” (48).
If Esi’s grasp on her freedom slackens under All’s gaze, the cause lies less with her will than with the nature of romance. The romantic peril is its penchant for controlling women and Esi, love-struck for the first time (she had felt only gratitude for Oko), is an ideal target. The novel offers a parable of the incompatibility of female autonomy and romance. As Esi gets entangled in love, her sturdy independence begins to turn flabby, leaving her enervated almost to the point of a nervous breakdown. Caught in a quandary of dual loyalty—to her career and to Ali—she gives an ironic nod to her previous marriage, in which the battle lines were more clearly drawn. The novel resolves the dialectic by deftly evoking the specter of erotic control to alert women to its danger. When Esi finally awakens from its hypnotic power, she performs two important acts of self-recovery. The first is her rereading of All’s lavish gifts not as tokens of affection but as bribes aimed at weakening her resistance. The second is her rejection of Kubi’s nearrape act at the end of the novel, a move that posits heterosexuality as a threat to female bonding. The novel’s culminating stance thus offers female friendship as a site of resistance against the erotics of control. Breaking the silence on erotica in the African novel, Aidoo at once locates it within patriarchal ideology and explodes it. Taking its place is a reservoir of good will between two women—Esi and Opokuya— that stretches through their multiple roles as wives, mothers, and career women. Theirs is the novel’s preferred model of love, a strong, nonoppressive current of feeling that flows between two women.9 Both All’s spasms of affection and Oko’s domineering passion fail the test.
Acts of self-authorization in the novel are not restricted to modern women. Nana, the embodiment of traditional womanhood, intervenes at a crucial point in the plot through a subversive rendition of the myth of male supremacy that opens the way for her grand-daughter’s emotional recovery. Esi’s consultation visit with her “mothers” to seek approval for her marriage to Ali presents the older woman with the opportunity to tell her version of the gender story. The result is a double-voiced narrative that both affirms and subverts the military metaphor of woman as “occupied territory.” On the surface, Nana’s account of male occupation of the female body seems approving. Conventional images of divinity invest the invasive act with the grandeur of griot-narrated legend. Close inspection of this female griot’s story, however, reveals a satirical edge undercutting the grandstand image of maleness. The following sentences illustrate her narrative method:
Who is a good man if not the one who ea ts his wife completely, and pushes her down with a good gulp of alcohol? (109)
Men were the first gods in the universe, and they were devouring gods. (110)
Under Nana’s skillful control of language, seduction and violence combine to imprint the male psyche. The same paradox characterizes romantic love, marking it as a strategy of male dominance. She drives home the point in a memorable pronouncement: “a man always gained in stature through any way he chose to associate with a woman” (109).10 This statement, the centerpiece of her cautionary tale, is both a warning and prophecy. Unheeded, it exacts from Esi a heavy emotional price. That it embeds in her mind, however, is evident in her decision to break with Ali and to reject Kubi.
It is to Nana, then, that we, like Esi, turn to unravel the novel’s intertwining chords of change and stasis. While she joins the chorus of women’s voices that laments male intransigence in a world of change, she also believes strongly in women’s self-emancipating ability. Her narrative articulates a sustainable strategy of resistance: the systematic dismantling of men’s allegorical claim to power. To unseat the idea that, in her words, “some humans [are] gods and others [are]sacrificial animals” (111) is her call to arms. And, by linking the economies of male and colonial domination (she refers to “equally implacable” and “bloody” European gods [110]), Nana reaches the critical threshold in Aidoo’s work where gender and nation meet. Not surprisingly, her prescription for progress—an interplay between “a lot of thinking and a great deal of doing” (111)—involves Aidoo’s twin strategies of female and cultural recovery.
In Changes, Nana’s countermyth of male supremacy and Esi’s difficult but successful negotiation of romance testify to the possibility inherent in female “thinking” and “doing.” The thought/action dyad is present throughout Aidoo’s writing. It explains the sense of female agency that gives her work its distinctive character within the tradition of women’s writing in Africa. Aidoo’s creative imagination has no room for the drama of victimization believed to preoccupy African women writers. Missing from her work is the painstaking delineation of women’s oppression by such writers as Buchi Emecheta and Flora Nwapa (modern Africa’s first published woman novelist). Female disadvantage in Emecheta’s fiction, for example, is ubiquitous and deterministic. The process of women’s subjugation is often overwhelming, and escape from the prison house of gender is virtually impossible. Nnu Ego, the most valiant of Emecheta’s heroine-victims, captures this pervasive sense of female frustration in an existential plea: “God, when will you create a woman who will be fulfilled in herself, a full human being, not anybody’s append age?” (The Joys of Motherhood 186)
One would be hard-pressed to locate the idea of a besieged femininity in Aidoo’s work. Even the somber mood of No Sweetness Here (1962) allows for female agency. Women in these stories are mothers, wives, sisters, aunts, gra
ndmothers, and subjects. The title story, which predates The Dilemma of a Ghost, depicts a woman, Maami Ama, in the throes of a divorce from her brutal husband. Shestands to lose her only child, a handsome ten-year-old boy, to her husband if he wins the case. The alternative, however, petrifies her spirit even more. Maami Ama’s self-affirming decision is captured in a question that sharply contrasts with Nnu Ego’s: “Why should I make myself unhappy about a man for whom I ceased to exist a long time ago?”(62) The happiness accompanying her freedom is shortened by the tragic death of her son, but there is every reason to believe that she will survive that too.
Indeed, as Changes vividly demonstrates, the cult of motherhood has no fanatical following among Aidoo’s female characters—another of the author’s distinctive characteristics. Far from lacking the maternal instinct, the women in the novel nonetheless show no signs of yielding to its culturally-enforced power. Esi, for example, is an absentee mother by dint of an active career and personal life. It is her husband, Oko, who, atypically, bears the emotional burden of looking after their daughter’s well-being. Opokuya is closer to the idea of hearth and home than Esi, but she too steers shy of maternal guilt. Of particular significance is the lax bond between Esi and her mother, a fact she correctly attributes to the changing face of the mother in contemporary Africa. That” [s]he could never be as close to her mother as her mother was to her grandmother” (114) is a truth confirmed by Esi’s own maternal impulse. In Aidoo’s short story “Nowhere Cool,” the protagonist, Sissie, is also aware of the conflict between the time-honored idea that “mother is gold and mother is silk” (63) and the exigencies of contemporary life. She has left her children at home in Ghana for a three-year study stint abroad and, airborne, she feels small pangs of anxiety. But this feeling is quickly replaced by the compelling fact that to “go she... knew she must, pushed by so many forces whose sources she could not fathom” (63).
The emblems of change, beatable throughout Aidoo’s work, come together in Changes to reveal the turbulent cross-currents of contemporary African life. Ironically, Aidoo confesses that she intended to write a “simple love story,” one she hoped would relax the neaderly tension of Our Sister Killjoy.11 Whether Changes, whose genesis is a radio play written in Zimbabwe in 1988, takes the sting out of Aidoo’s first novel will be a subject of heated debate. What is certain is that it is a sobering book. It charts a new mode of cultural consciousness and that is no small undertaking.
IV
They had always told me I wrote like a man.
“To Be a Woman”
Aidoo has said that she is “happiest of all with drama,” followed in descending order by poetry and fiction (In Their Own Voices 22). What she knows but is too modest to admit is the ease with which she moves between boundaries of genre. In the true spirit of both the oral tradition and modernism, Aidoo abhors the separation of genres and has elected instead to build bridges between literary forms. The resulting mixture of the pithy and the poetic, of fragmentation and coherence, of words that refuse to pacify, has provoked the criticism that she writes “like a man.” The rebuff is not new. Women writers in the West have been similarly stung, triggering efforts, as varied as Virginia Woolfs delineation of a woman’s sentence to French feminists’ celebration of Vecriture feminine, to fashion a female style. In Africa, where writing is still considered an exclusively male activity, it is not surprising that a stylistically innovative writer like Aidoo should be tagged a pretender.
There is no pretense, however, regarding Aidoo’s commitment to creating new modes of expression to capture the multifaceted character of African life, including its present state of dislocation. For this task she draws from the techniques of both African oral art and twentieth-century modernism. Typically, her narrative method consists of broken thought sequences, dizzying time shifts, elliptical syntax, spare prose, and interior monologues. Amply illustrated in her short fiction, this style explodes in Our Sister Killjoy, a fractured and sardonic portrait of modern life. The clash of genres, styles, tones, and rhythms in the work has rendered it unclassifiable. Characterized by critics as novel, prose poem, and novella, and as “fiction in four episodes” by Aidoo herself, the text is a testimonial to Aidoo’s unique creative grammar.
A love story. Changes is stylistically more relaxed, but Aidoo’s fondness for the generic hybrid is just as strong. Poetry, drama, the short story, and the novel form work together to produce linked meanings. Poetic and dramatic divagations, for example, are spaces filled with bits of satire and cultural history that illuminate and reinforce the plot. It is the method of the storyteller, an attempt to engage, entertain, and inform her audience. The following dramatic insert comes after the critical information about the death of Alt’s mother after childbirth:
“Was she not fifteen when Ali was born?”
“That was all she was.”
“Then how could she have lived?”
“She could not live. She did not live. I saw it all. She looked at the baby Ali very well. You could have thought she just wanted to be sure that everything was fine with him.”
“Then what happened?”
“Ah, my sister, may Allah preserve us. She sat quietly and bled to death.” (22-23)
This imagined dialogue between narrator and audience creates a heightened sense of tragedy and, consequently, helps to sharpen the criticism of Musa Musa’s exploitation of young women. The divagated dialogue between Esi’s mother and grandmother over their daughter’s ill-fated plan to marry Ali also carries narrative urgency, as these opening lines illustrate:
Ena: What shall we tell the child?
Nana: You have already made a mistake.
Ena: What mistake?
Nana: By calling her a child.
Ena: And isn’t she my daughter?
Nana: That she is.
Ena: So then, what crime do I commit if—?
Nana: Please, select your words very carefully. Your daughter—my grand-daughter—has thrown a problem at us. That is what we are talking about. Committing crimes should not even be mentioned here. (112)
Sometimes the divagation provides straightforward cultural commentary. The emotional logic of pre-marital consultations, for example, is reaffirmed in the following definition of parentage to underscore the gravity of All’s failure to consult with his extended family before marrying Esi. Parents “in the old days” were—and, by implication, still are—
“the father who helped your mother to conceive you, the mother who gave birth to you, and all those who claimed to be brothers and sisters to those two” (133, emphasis added).
Foremost among Aidoo’s stylistic techniques is the use of dialogue to develop character and plot. At the beginning of the novel’s denouement in Part III, for example, dialogue both telescopes time and events and sheds light on All’s postnuptial persona following his and Esi’s honeymoon visit with his Bamako kin. The passage records All’s telephone performance as he tries to justify his absence from his newly wedded and anxious wife:
“Okay, if you can wait for a couple of minutes I could drop you home.
“Hello, yes ... hello, yes, yes, yes, it’s Ali... Hi... yes. Oh, but I have missed you! Fine, fine. And how are you?
“Yes, oh yes. About four o’clock this afternoon.
“Yes, fine.
“Okay. But exhausting as usual...
“Yes, this time, properly worn out...
“Eh... eh... I... well... eh... actually I am going straight home to wash out all this travel dirt... and ... nothing at all. Just jump into bed to try and recover from my jet-lag ...
“Esi, please try to understand ...
“Darling, it’s not like you to be unreasonable ...
“Not today.
“Because it’s never possible for me to breeze through your place for five minutes ... please?
“Yes, tomorrow evening.
“Oh, definitely, I shall come straight from work. So how about cooking me one of your specialities?
“... Good ...
“... Lovely ...
“... See you then. Okay ... Bye!” (137)
Ali’s staccato voice contains tell-tale signs of waning interest, the prelude to what is to become the couple’s long distance marriage.
While the poetic and dramatic inserts are legitimate oral devices, the embedded short tale takes a greater resonance within the conventional topoi of African oral art. As digression, it accords both storyteller and audience a necessary break from the narrative, and particularly for the former, a place to rest and recharge. Moreover, when the embedded tale is a throwback to an earlier time, as in Changes, it feeds the audience’s appetite for the unfamiliar. Musa Musa’s crime and selfpunishment constitute the novel’s tale-within-a-tale. Depicted is a social order so stern that a shepherd boy is forced to flee his home for losing one goat from the herd in his care. Thus, along with its entertainment value, the episode compels comparison with the relatively laxer social context inscribed in the main narrative.
Similes, proverbs, and Africanisms are an integral part of the linguistic identity of Aidoo’s writing. They are effective rhetorical tools that capture the communicative rhythms of African (in particular, Ghanaian) life. Take, for example, the simile describing Opokuya’s surprise upon seeing Esi’s flashy new car:
In any case, why should her getting a new car from Ali have that effect on Opokuya, who now stood, a little pathetic, as she opened and shut her mouth like fish out of a drag-net, desperately hopping around for water on a hot beach? (153)
Opokuya’s visceral response is captured here by more than the conventional fish-out-of-water metaphor. Her shock is measured by an image familiar in West Africa’s fishing culture: the stunned reaction of freshly-caught fish emptied from the nets onto hot stretches of sand.