Changes (25 page)

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

       
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 Aidoo-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: