West Africa Review (1999)

ISSN: 1525-4488

“Going home is another story”:
Constructions of Nation and Gender in Ama Ata Aidoo's Changes

Jane Bryce

And I wail to foreign far away winds:
Daughter of my Mother and my Father's Orphan,
what is to become of me?
And those like me?

Both the title and the epigraph quote from Aidoo's last collection of poems, an Angry Letter in January (1992), a volume in which the experience of exile, questions of place and belonging, of home and identity, reverberate like wailing off a wall. A committed political activist in the Ghanaian revolution of 1981, for several years subsequently, Aidoo lived elsewhere than Ghana (in Zimbabwe, to be precise). Though Aidoo merits a place in the company of her peers - those African writers like Achebe, Soyinka, Armah, Sembene, Farah, Ngugi et al, whose work has proceeded in step with the post-Independence histories of their countries - she has until recently been similarly displaced in terms of her literary reputation. A writer in many different modes - drama, poetry, short stories, the novel - hers is a voice not easily assimilated to conventional criteria of canonicity. Not only do her books - two plays, two poetry collections, two novels and a book of short stories - at first glance appear “slight” (nothing, for example, of the weightiness of Things Fall Apart or Petals of Blood); but they have also had a chequered publishing history, appearing here and there, in the UK, in Harare (The College Press), now with an African specialist publisher (Longman), now with a feminist (London: The Women's Press) or small “postcolonial” press (Coventry, UK: Dangaroo). Then there is the marked idiosyncracy of her style, its playfulness and fluidity, its disrespect for generic boundaries, its dramatic and oral quality, above all its elusive irony. All of this has made it difficult for a critical establishment largely based in the western academy, to come to a consensus about her work and stature. While for feminist readers this has never been in question, “feminist writer” is a definition which begs all sorts of questions - of national identity, of the relationship between Africa and its external predators, of history and its eruptions into the contemporary, of which ways of seeing and speaking are appropriate in the rendering of a subjectivity and perspective peculiar to Africa. Precisely the question, in fact, raised by her texts, in unsettling and not-so-comfortable ways.

Aidoo's earlier (1977) novel, Our Sister Killjoy, ends with Sissie literally suspended between Europe and Africa, looking out of a plane window at the country she had left, along with so many others, in quest of the blandishments of the west. Sissie, unlike many of her compatriots, returns, to her crazy old continent, which to her is home with its unavoidable warmth and even after these thousands of years, its uncertainties” (133). The way in which that “home” is characterised, as “a mixture of complete sweetness and smoky roughage”, alerts us to the fact that this is a homecoming fraught with contradictions. If “exile brings losses like/forgetting to remember/ ordinary things”, to quote again from one of Aidoo's poems, homecoming forces a confrontation with those “ordinary things” out of which what may emerge is far from predetermined. Aidoo's second novel Changes embodies this confrontation, at the same time as it forms part of a continuing discussion and exploration in all her previous writing around the issue of what constitutes a postcolonial African identity: “what is to become of me?/ And those like me?”

The “home” to which Sissie lays claim was renamed Ghana at Independence in 1957, after an ancient African empire. To the British, its former colonial power, it was the Gold Coast, both names redolent of the competing discourses towards which they point. Kwame Nkrumah, who led Ghana, the first African nation, to Independence, was an international statesman, a pan-Africanist prophet who dreamt of a United States of Africa. Ama Ata Aidoo, aged 17 at Independence, was one of those who benefitted from the educational programmes he initiated, herself becoming a university lecturer and briefly, in 1981, Minister for Education. The price paid for that education, and its implications in terms of the balance of power between the sexes, is one of the themes of both Our Sister Killjoy and Changes, as Aidoo signals in her ironic epigraph to the novel. In it, she proffers a “confession” and an “apology” for what she calls “an exercise in words-eating”. She once declared that she could “never write about lovers in Accra. Because surely there are more important things to write about?” and here she is, presenting us with “a slice from the life and loves of a somewhat privileged young woman ...in Accra”. Implicit in this characteristically tongue-in-cheek statement, in which the playful tone belies the sharpness of observation, is a contestation of the whole question of “privilege”, of class and of gender positioning.

To begin with, the novel defines itself as a “love story”, in a self- conscious reference to the conventions of romantic fiction, to heroines swept away by passion and the man of their dreams, and happy-ever-after endings. I have dealt elsewhere with the way Aidoo parodies and subverts these conventions, at the same time as laying claim to a despised “feminine” form and reshaping it in the interests of her own narrative. Of interest here is the way Aidoo uses orature intertextually with romance conventions, as a constant ironic counterpoint. Her narrative mode has been described in Ewe (a Ghanaian language), by Victor Odamtten, in the first full-length study devoted to this author, as a fefewo aloo nutinyawo kple eme nyakpakpawo: “a collection of prose-poetry narrative performances and a meditation for the reader's contemplation” (Odamtten, 160). This designation provides us with a way of naming Aidoo's style which properly contextualizes it within her (Akan) cultural background. We should not however overlook the devastating ironic effect of her juxtaposition of western romance elements - for example, a storm which breaks at the conclusion of Esi's frailty - and the parallel commentary Aidoo takes from the market or the streets of Accra. Feeling ill at ease in the silence in which “something quite new and interesting was trying to make itself felt...Esi spoke, to fill the air with words.” What follows is an aside, intended to separate it from the main text, and to indicate that here the narrator, whom Odamtten calls the Bird of the Wayside, has temporarily taken over:

They know that art well
who trade in food -
pad up
where resources are scarce, or
just for cool profit:
grains for sausages
some worms or burgers
More leaves for kenkey! (3)

The analogy of Esi with an unscrupulous street-hawker is both comically incongruous, and draws attention to the relative positions of Esi and Ali within the discourse of romance, and also within Ghanaian society. For though Esi is an educated, middle-class, successful professional woman, Ali's interest in her is unashamedly predatory (“a gift from Allah”), and moreover, he is richer (his plush office furniture, his expensive car) and he is a man. Lacking these advantages, Esi summons the skills of the market woman to outwit him, and leaves him wondering at “the sheer swiftness of her performance”(4).

The effect of Aidoo's technique, which she herself has likened to the use of “interspersed song” within an oral epic recitation, is to set up a second narrative level parallel to the first - “story” and “chorus” as it were. This may take the form of for example, unspoken thoughts within a dialogue, a remembered statement from someone who is absent, a commonly held cultural belief ora proverbial saying, or at times a passage of dramatic dialogue and functions overall to create an ironic interplay between surface and sub-stratum, analogous to the relation of conscious to unconscious. In effect, Aidoo gives us a “love story”, but never lets us forget the blind alleys of self-delusion into which we can be led y “love” in its romantic aspects. T the same time she dramatises for the reader the problematics of behaviour and identity in a context of social change where the old certainties are no longer reliable guides. This problematic is framed most explicitly in the section of the novel where Esi goes “home” to her mother's village to consult her grandmother. The view of femininity afforded by Nana is one Esi is unfitted for by virtue of her education: “But Esi tell me, doesn't a woman's time belong to a man? . . . Who is a good man if not the one who eats his wife completely, and pushes her down with a good gulp of alcohol?” (109). The grandmother's philosophy, that “a woman is always diminished in her association with a man”, and that her wedding constitutes “a funeral of the self that could have been”, is one Esi tries vainly to rewrite by entering into a polygamous marriage with Ali which she believes will bring her love without responsibility, but which she soon learns only brings her loneliness and disillusion. That is however not simply a personal dilemma for Esi, but a condition of contemporary life in a Ghana where traditional rules have been superseded, but not replaced, is demonstrated by a number of other narrative features. Among these are the other relationships to which we are given privileged access - between Esi's best friend Opokuya and her husband Kubi, and between Esi and her own former husband - and also the discussion we are permitted to overhear between Esi's mother and grandmother, and an interpolated dialogue between two emblematic figures, named as Ama and Aba. Aidoo thus counterpoises divergent points of view from within the society, representative of the different strategies in operation for dealing with the necessities of survival in a corrupt and ruthless world. Metaphors of consumption like Esi's adoption of the role of kenkey seller in an attempt not to be the kenkey, or husband who swallows his wife whole, are extended to the whole society and the materialism which drives it. The Aba. and Ama section takes the form of a parodic call and response, cataloguing “the number of reasons for which men leave their women for other women” in a near-delirium of name-calling: “Who the father was. And the mother too...people with power...kings and queens...chiefs and warlords...prime ministers, presidents, general secretaries of free republics, secretary generals . . . .” and so on (101).

Overhearing her grandmother and mother exchanging views couched in a proverbial language to which she has no access, Esi is driven to ask herself a series of questions:

Why had they sent her to school?
What had they hoped to gain from it?
What had they hoped she would gain from it?
Who had designed the educational system that had produced her sort?

and concludes that “all this was too high a price to pay to achieve the dangerous confusion she was now in and the country now was in” (114). These questions, as Esi fully recognises, are “serious personal, and not so personal questions...Hopefully a whole people would soon have answers for them” (115). The crisis she faces, which Aidoo has framed as a “love story”, is a crisis not only for her, or for women, but for Ghanaians, indeed for Africans. The crisis may have a different emphasis for different individuals, but it is a social crisis nonetheless. For Opokuya it is a matter of having to negotiate long hours at work, family responsibilities and a selfish husband. For Esi, it is a matter of a deep-felt need for self-realisation which she misrecognises as romantic love. For Fusena, Ali's first wife, it is a matter of suppressing her own abilities and ambitions to conform to the accepted notion of a “good” northern woman, despite her education. For Oko it is how to live with a desirable woman who withholds herself and disregards his wishes. For Kubi, it is how to maintain a sense of himself as being a man in control of his household, which he can only do by belittling his wife. But all of these individual dilemmas partake of the overdetermining character of a social problematic. Except, possibly, that of Ali.

Aidoo focuses in the person of Ali many of the questions of national identity which underlie the text. Ali is a northerner, but from which north? In a discussion of the story “For Whom Things Did Not Change”, Odamtten draws attention to the “intimate and complex historical relationship” between north and south in Ghana, in which “no single group of nationalities continues to be exploited as the Northern Ghanaian Nationalities” (Odamtten, 83). But this evidently does not apply to Ali, of whom the narrator asks: “Ali's country. Which one was that?” (22). Son of a trader with “a wife in each of his eight favourite stops on his trade routes”, Ali himself was brought up in Bamako, Mali:

Bamako was home. Then, having settled the question for the convenience of his heart, he had proceeded to claim the entire Guinea Coast, its hinterland and the Sub-Sahel for his own...he had assumed the nationalities of Ghana, Benin, Cote d'Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Niger, Mali, Nigeria and Togo. Naturally, he carried a passport to prove the genuineness of each. (24)

Not only does Ali collect countries as his father collects wives, but the business he runs--a travel agency--is only a modern version of his father's trade. Ali's inheritance is the freedom to choose, without the restriction of national boundaries, who he will be, where he will live, what women he will have. He thus constitutes a conundrum central to the text. Is Aidoo questioning the whole idea of nation, of ethnic affiliation, identity tied to place, home, country - the very things for which the exile longs? If this is a restatement of the old pan-African ideal, it disconcertingly lends itself to another discourse which has been questioned in the text - that of male power. Ali's freedom, attractive as it is, is contingent on his masculinity. It is not, for instance, available to Fusena, for whom conformity is apparently the only option. Perhaps it is enough to say that, through Ali, Aidoo dramatises another dimension of those “serious personal, and not so personal, questions” as to what constitutes identity, which the text invites us to examine.

REFERENCES

1. Writings by Ama Ata Aidoo

The Dilemma of a Ghost and Anowa . UK: Longman,1965.

Anowa. UK: Longman,1970.

No Sweetness Here. UK: Longman1970; New York: Doubleday, 1971.

Our Sister Killjoy: Or, Reflections from a Black-Eyed Squint. UK: Longman, 1977; New York: NOK, 1979.

Someone Talking to Sometime. Harare: College Press,1985.

Changes - A Love Story. London: Women's Press,1991. An

Angry Letter in January. Coventry, UK: Dangaroo Press, 1992.

The Girl Who Can and Other Stories. Ghana: Sub-Saharan Publishers, 1997.

2. References for further reading.

Aidoo, A.A. 1988. “To be an African woman writer”. In K.H. Peterson (ed.). Criticism and Ideology (155-172). Uppsala: Scandinavian Institute of African Studies.

Brye, J. and K. Dako. 1993. “Textual deviancy and cultural syncretism: romantic fiction as a subversive strain in black women's writing”. Wasafiri, Spring, No. 17, 10-14.

Elder, A. 1987. “Ama Ata Aidoo and the oral tradition: a paradox of form and substance.” In E.D. Jones, E. Palmer and M .Jones. Women in African Literature Today. UK: James Currey.

George, R. M. and H. Scott. 1993. “'A new tail to an old tale': an interview with Ama Ata Aidoo.” Novel, 26, 3, 297-308.

Innes ,C.L. (1995). “Conspicuous consumption: corruption and the body politic in the writing of Ayi Kwei Armah and Ama Ata idoo.” Gurnah, A. (Ed). Essays in African Writing. UK: Heinemann.

Nwankwo. C. 1986. “The feminist impulse and social realism in Ama Ata Aidoo's No Sweetness Here and Our Sister Killjoy.” In C. Boyce Davies and A. Adams Graves. Ngambika (151-159). New Jersey: Africa World Press.

Odamtten, V. 1994. The Art of Ama Ata Aidoo: Polylectics and Reading Against Neo- colonialism. Florida.

Owusu, K. 1990. “Canons under seige: blackness, femaleness and Ama Ata Aidoo's Our Sister Killjoy.” Callalloo, 13, 2, 339-362.

Rooney, C. 1990. ‘“Dangerous knowledge' and the poetics of survival: a reading of Our Sister Killjoy and A Question of Power.” In S. Nasta (ed). Motherlands (100-122). UK: The Women's Press.

Wilentz, G. 1991. “The politics of exile: Ama Ata Aidoo's Our Sister Killjoy.” STCL, 15, 1, 159-170.

Citation Format

Bryce, Jane. (1999). “Going home is another story”: Constructions of Nation and Gender in Ama Ata Aidoo's Changes. West Africa Review: 1, 1.[iuicode: http://www.icaap.org/iuicode?101.1.1.6]