Changes (28 page)

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?

“Ya ... Ya ... Ya ... Ya ...

“... 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.

In the following epic simile, the spirit world, a common feature of the African imagination, is evoked to paint a haunting picture of Esi's lovelorn state:

               
The ancients claim that they know something about the freshly dead. That especially those who perish violently are often compelled by certain forces to visit familiar people and places. When they do, they observe what goes on, but without interest. They cannot be moved because all emotions have to do with living tissue: sensitive skin, muscle and bones; rushing blood and beating hearts. And since spirits are humans who have been mercifully spared such baggage, they cannot rejoice, they cannot hurt... (149-150)

Aidoo's use of proverbs is instinctive and innovative. Proverbs are not ordinarily associated with an urban setting, nor with women, but the few, well-placed ones Aidoo chooses for this story capture the bite and flavor of one of the distinct elements of African literary expression. For Aidoo the African proverb, apart from its verbal dexterity, is a form of social psychology shaped, by persons she endearingly refers to as “ancients,” to enhance the collective wisdom. One of Esi's bouts with loneliness, for example, is registered through a cautionary proverb: “having to love a burdensome child because one day you will miss her” (79).

Africanisms, new words coined from the alchemic blending of English and the African cultural scene, enrich Aidoo's linguistic repertoire. Such terms as “flabberwhelmed,” “negatively eventful” and “away matches” violate standard English in order to express a socio-linguistic identity that is uniquely African.

Changes'
redeployment of stylistic traits common in Aidoo's writing does not lessen its inaugural significance. The novel will both haunt and guide subsequent thinking about women in Africa.

       
V

It was from my father I first heard the rather famous quotation from Dr. Kwegyir Aggrey: “If you educate a man, you educate an individual. If you educate a woman, you educate a nation.”

“To Be a Woman”

Of the elements that have shaped Aidoo's creative mind, her family is perhaps the most important. Hers is a lineage of political and pro-woman activism that spans a century. Her paternal grandfather was “tortured to death in a colonial prison for being ‘an insolent African'”; and her father “supported Kwame Nkrumah … and believed that above all, a nation should educate its women.”
¹²
Described as “in her way … politicized,” Aidoo's mother, Abasemah (alias Elizabeth Bosu), has been a source of nurturing political energy, star ting with her “talking” stories that continue to inspire her daughter's art and including her keen sense of national and global
politics.
¹³
But perhaps the best indication of the family's heterodoxy is to be found in a bit of advice the young Aidoo received from an aunt, who, she
says,
was unschooled in English: “My child, get as far as you can into this education. Go until you yourself know you are tired. As for marriage, it is something a woman picks up along the way” (“To Be a Woman” 259).

Into this family, distinguished by its ability, in Aidoo's words, “to see alternative lives for children other than the one adults were living” (“To Be a Woman” 259), Ama Ata Aidoo (christened Christina) was born on March 23,1940. Her twin brother was stillborn, one of five of her mother's children who did not survive. A “mercurial, electric, and fearless character,” her father. Yaw Fama (alias Manu IV), was
ohene
¹⁴
of the village, a kingmaker of Abeadzi state, which meant that he had a political voice in who became
omanhene
¹⁵
of the region.”
¹⁶
His, also, was the most persistent voice in ensuring that young Aidoo receive a formal education, in spite of the prevailing bias against schooling for girls.

She attended the Wesley Girls' High School at Cape Coast, the oldest and one of the most prestigious secondary schools in Ghana. It is here that her artistic interest and talent began to develop. Her teacher, Barbara Bowman, now living in retirement in Yorkshire, England, “was instrumental with respect to [her] early awareness of [herself] as a writer.”
¹⁷
In response to Bowman's question about her students' future goals, Aidoo expressed a desire to become a poet. “Oh but Christina,” Bowman replied, “that's good, but you must remember that poetry doesn't feed anybody.”
¹⁸
A couple of years later, however, Aidoo received a gift of great significance from Bowman: an heirloom Olivetti typewriter. Aidoo's dream would soon be realized, first in fiction, followed by drama and poetry. Her first published work, a short story titled “To Us a Child Is Born,” won a Christmas story competition organized by
The Daily Graphic
in 1958. On the strength of her second short story, “No Sweetness Here,” Aidoo was invited to the historic African Writers' Workshop held at the University of Ibadan in 1962. It was her first year in college and meeting and making common cause with such literary luminaries as Langston Hughes, Chinua Achebe, Ezekiel Mphahlele, Wole Soyinka, and Christopher Okigbo left an indelible mark on her budding creative mind. That same year she wrote the first draft of
The Dilemma of a Ghost,
whose production in 1964 at the University of Ghana, Legon, and subsequent publication in 1965 secured her place on Africa's
emergent, male-dominated literary scene.