Ama Ata Aidoo’s ‘Changes: A Love Story’, is a riveting, masterfully-woven novel that explores themes such as gender, tradition, friendship, the role of women in society, and the expectations placed upon them.
Through the lens of an omniscient narrator, Aidoo weaves a rich, deeply colourful portraiture of African womanhood around three female characters – Esi Sekyi, Opokuya Dakwa, and Fusena Kondey (nee Al-Hassan) – as wives, mothers, working women, daughters and friends.
Through the women’s individual journeys, this novel, set in post-colonial Ghana, delves into the complexities of relationships, marriage, and the common struggles faced by women in a patriarchal society.
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While Opokuya, Esi’s best and only real friend with whom she has maintained a friendship that is “so firm, so deeply rooted, it didn’t demand any forced or even conscious tending” (Pg. 40) is portrayed as a very feminine woman (she constantly worries over the well-being of her grown husband and their four children when she’s away on duty at the hospital), Esi, on the other hand, is portrayed as “unfeminine”, un-African even, because of her strong will, making the women in her husband Oko’s family, for instance, quite merciless with her because she chooses work and travel over her duties as a wife and mother.
Who is the African woman who seeks personal freedom or any form of self-expression through anything outside of a man and/or her family and be “so busily professional … and so booklong!” (Pg. 20)?
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Esi Sekyi.
Through her job as a “data analyst at the Department of Urban Statistics” (Pg. 9), Esi finds a sense of meaning to life from her career.
But there is a huge price to pay for this freedom.
Choosing career over family means Esi can give Oko only one child: a daughter – Ogyaanowa.
It means in the eyes of the women in Oko’s family, she is “a semi-barren witch” (Pg. 77).
It means they will not only “hate” her, but also wonder, “is Esi too an African woman?” (Pg. 16), because an African woman wouldn’t dare kick her husband out of her government staff bungalow, just because he wanted her all to himself.
If Esi was any African or at least feminine, she would have understood (African women understand!) that Oko raped her “That morning” (Pg. 76) because he loved her so much and couldn’t get enough of her. If she was any of these, Esi wouldn’t leave her husband because he loved her too much, because she found his wild love too stifling.
In a contrast, as a wise and wonderful woman Opokuya is, who exudes that elegant thoughtfulness in her dealings with others, one may have to encounter the silent strength of Ramatoulaye in Mariama Ba’s ‘So Long a Letter’, to fully appreciate her resilience.
Throughout the novel, Opokuya continues to remain strong and level-headed even in the face of her issues with Kubi. When she stands tall for her family, for instance, it is for the sake of her children because she wants the absolute best for them. So she stays in her marriage, even though she has always suspected Kubi and has often wondered “how it was that the Regional Survey Department had a budget meeting every morning of every week” (Pg. 27).
In her quest to take care of herself and end their morning dispute over “the car” which she seldom wins, Opokuya acquires Esi’s old car after Ali gifts her [Esi] the yellow car on New Year’s Day.
In a sharp contrast to the overly expressive Esi and the kind-but-firm Opokuya, Fusena expresses herself better in action.
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Fusena’s silence is an immersive language.
In fact, the sum of the woman’s verbal expressions is just eight brief statements. Any other knowledge the reader has of her is through her action.
In fact, her expressions are even louder in action when reality hits her that the highly educated entrepreneurial husband who had her truncate her dreams is the same husband chasing down an equally highly educated woman as a mistress and subsequently second wife.
She realises in that moment, that “life should offer more than marriage”. This is a bitter realisation, knowing that whether she stays in the marriage or not, the marriage she has built with her best friend Ali is never going to remain the same with the Master’s-degree-holding mistress-turned-second-wife in the picture.
Aidoo, in her brilliance, reinforces the message that irrespective of a woman’s social standing, in her dealings with the man, her fate is the same as all other women.
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The two highly educated women, Esi Sekyi and Opokuya Dakwa, who were making strides in their careers as data analyst and nurse respectively, had the same fate as Fusena Kondey who had to give up higher education and a career in teaching to support her husband and manage the home “because she was married to a man who cared about how his home ran.”
Funnily however, the experiences of these three women in their dealings with their men, are the same as those of Esi’s mother and Nana, her grandmother, both of whom never received any form of education or had any opportunity to pursue a career.
Aidoo’s masterful use of language, her immersive storytelling, and her humanly portrayal of characters altogether make ‘Changes’ a compelling and thought-provoking novel that offers a nuanced exploration of what society expects of women (mostly) in the African society.
Overall, the book was an excellent read and will be an important book for anyone interested in African literature with themes that explore African feminisms and gender.