Changes (27 page)

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 culture. She appears silent because she is “not being heard.”
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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:

               
“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.
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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).
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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, grandmothers, 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).