"...that is why we do the serious business of living with our heads, and never our hearts"

Ama Ata Aidoo's second novel is the story of a woman discovering herself - trying unsuccessfully to balance her need for independence with her need for attention and love within the 'constraints' of Ghanaian culture.

What she finds is that Ghanaian culture is wise; "Esi, why do you think they took so much trouble with a girl on her wedding day?... She was made much of, because the whole ceremony was a funeral of the self that could have been."

Changes - the love story Ama Ata Aidoo professed she would never write - conveys the clutter of the zongo, the frustrations of working life in Accra, and the disillusionment of love. Peppered with the uncanny wisecracks of African culture: on love; "when we have to count pennies for food for our stomachs... love is nothing", on hypocrisy; "How can anyone go about, eating the heads of cows, and still maintain that he is afraid of eyes?"; Changes is a delightful trance. One of those pleasures that is indefinable but defining.

It is written without fuss in the language that Ghanaians call English - adapted to suit the whims and imaginings of the local mind. Ama Ata Aidoo flows with ease, occasionally returning (for effect) to the drama format with which she is unquestionably comfortable.

Read this or weep!

Modern Ghanaian women suffer daily sacrifices, lifelong barriers to their advancement, and an emerging modernity which has multiplied their duties but not simplified their lives. Changes focuses on a three year period in the lives of Esi Sekyi, Opokuya Dakwa, and Fusena Kondey, three women approaching their mid thirties in Accra, Ghana.
In Changes we can see the evidence of a complex struggle in the name of modernity between African women and society, families, traditions, and their own desires. From the perspectives of Esi, Opokuya, and Fusena, Aidoo shows us how such modern African women view their lives, and with what methods they are willing to fight to improve their lives.
Esi, Opokuya, and to a lesser degree the much-suppressed Fusena, fight against more than just an accumulation of oppressive tradition that favors men. They struggle for appreciation of their talents and for an equal part in guiding their marriages. Esi and Opokuya struggle to build marriages and relationships that allow them to reap their benefits of their individuality and their educations, and exercise their own free wills, without making them overworked, or being labeled mad women and witches. The reaction of their families, husbands and communities to these women reveal modern dilemmas for educated African women.

Aidoo's love story traces Esi's distinctly rebellious and independent path to love and marriage, as contrasted to the more traditional married lives of Opokuya and Fusena.; in doing so, the novel illustrates women challenging a postcolonial African society on all fronts. This front is as diverse as the workplace, in hotel bars, in the kitchen, on the road driving alone in their new cars, in the rural traditional village, and in the bedroom. Despite often finding that lonely independence is untenable, Esi and Opokuya achieve moderate success in their fight. Their resiliency indicates shifting gender roles in Africa, and some compatibility between tradition and these new roles.

I give this book 5 stars because ot is an extremely rich story told frankly and believably. The material even seems politically important (perhaps all novels should try to be so?) in that it addresses real problems facing Africa and does not always provide answers, although it certainly proveds a rich cast of characters attempting to do so.

I read this book in two days! This was a love story but much more. It was a well-written, fascinating book with an ending that I could'nt have predicted. I read somewhere that Ata Ama Aidoo was hesitant to write a love story, well I'm glad she did. I've recommended it to all of my friends!

A young man leaves his village in rural Ghana to look for hissister, Mansa,in the capital. The last time the family saw her wastwelve years ago when she was only ten. Arriving in Accra, the brother looks up Duayaw, a fellow villager, who was his sister's classmate in grade school. Duayaw thinks he's on a crazy mission. Where are they going to find her? Now at the age of twenty-two, she could even be married. The city-wise Duayaw actually suspects worse but being the polite host, he complies. "In the Cutting of a Drink" is one of eleven short stories in No Sweetness Here and Other Stories by Ama Ata Aidoo, a Ghanaian writer.

Aidoo's novel, Changes, won the 1993 Commonwealth Writers Prize for the Africa region. No Sweetness Here was originally published in the United States by Doubleday in 1971. But it first appeared the previous year through Longman of Britain. The last Doubleday printing was in 1972. It was re-issued by the Feminist Press, the world's oldest continuing feminist publisher, which is primarily concerned with restoring important out-of-print historical and literary works by women.

On the surface, "In the Cutting of a Drink" is a simple story. But a lot takes place. It demonstrates well the talent possessed by Aidoo who has also written poems and plays and served as Ghana's minister of education from 1982 to 1983. The story is narrated by Mansa's brother to his immediate family, other relatives, and some villagers. Aidoo cherishes the African oral tradition and in the tale the burden rests entirely with her narrating character. He must sustain his audience's attention and he succeeds. The result of his search is withheld till the end.

His amazement of the city sounds exaggerated by today's standards but one has to keep in mind that Aidoo wrote the stories during the decade after Ghana's independence from Britain in 1957. To rural folk, Accra held novelty. "Each time I tried to raise my eyes, I was dizzy from the number of cars which were passing," the narrator explains. At another point he describes his experience while walking along the streets at night with Duayaw: "The whole place was as clear as the sky. Some of these lights are very beautiful indeed." Such descriptions, while captivating to the villagers, are nevertheless delivered in a tone that depicts the city as a crazy place.

When No Sweetness Here was first published, there were already troubling political developments in Ghana. The country, which holds a unique place in the sub-Saharan region for being the first to gain independence, had a military coup in 1966. Its first civilian president, Kwame Nkrumah, the pan-Africanist and pioneering statesman, was toppled. Taken as a whole,these short stories therefore grapple with the social challenges of the first years of independent rule in the country.

Ghanaians, like most Africans, were in between the end of colonial rule and a new nation in the making. Villagers arrived in the city in search of new opportunities. Young Africans--a small elite--returned from western universities and moved into the offices and residences vacated by the British. And corruption by the new public officials began to get noticed. In tackling these issues, Aidoo is a refreshing alternative in the African literary field which is dominated by men. One gets intriguing glimpses of Ghanaian women encountering everyday joys and tragedies.

The short stories in the book are really a listening experience. One is either listening to a monologue or conversation depending on the number of narrators. The strength in Aidoo's emphasis on the oral skills of her characters is that they have a lot of room to be themselves. They pronounce words as some people actually do in Ghana. They say "Klase Tri" for "Class Three," "Chicha" for "Teacher," "Kudiimin-o" for "Good evening" and so on. For the unfamiliar reader, the stories can pose a challenge for one must scramble to learn and visualize the Ghanaian setting. The narrators often don't provide any background--they just start unfolding their tales.

The book's afterword, written by Ketu H. Katrak, a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, is useful for it provides some context. Today, words and phrases like "highlife," "nation-building," and "white man's land," which are used by Aidoo, sound slightly archaic though they were in vogue during the heady days of independence. Reading No Sweetness Here is to journey back to a period when Africa was supposed to make a fresh start, a period that now feels far away.

Much like Arundhati Roy (in "God of Small Things") and Sandra Cisneros (in "House on Mango Street"), Ama Ata Aidoo often uses the experiences, expectations, and disappointments of children to paint the portrait of a culture and a community. It's not a novel literary device, but in the hands of the right craftswoman, one that can be used to great affect and Aidoo doesn't disappoint. The book includes eleven short stories and a fine, if superfluous, afterword by Ketu Katrak.