Content area
Full Text
Ama Ata Aidoo's most recent novel, Changes, A Love Story, arouses interest starting from its title. If one came to this novel with the titles of Aidoo's previous works in mind, one might remark the relatively prosaic character of this latest title. Aidoo had published plays, fiction, and poetry with such figurative titles as The Dilemma of a Ghost (1965), Anowa (1969), Our Sister Killjoy, or Reflections from a Black-Eyed Squint (1977) and Someone Talking to Sometime (1985). If one suspected the deliberate use of such a prosaic title for Aidoo's recent novel, one would be partially right.
Changes does tell a love story, but does more than that in examining what love might mean in particular situations. The mediators are powerful traditions, religion, education, career and personal volition--all possible factors in the processes of transformation and stasis in contemporary Ghana. Like the theme of love, the theme of changes, or mutability, is well-worn in literature. However, Aidoo interweaves these two themes with those of gender, sexuality, patriarchy, polygyny and sisterhood--themes that are trenchant in contemporary cultural, especially women's studies, discourses. It is perhaps not a coincidence that Esi, Aidoo's central character in Changes, is a social scientist and statistician who fleetingly catches herself responding in the mode of her professional training to her grandmother's nuanced question on the implications of her decision to become second wife to a man whose circumstances she has not fully taken account of (p. 112). In the background of the personal drama of the characters looms the country's postcolonial legacies of bureaucratic and hierarchical structures that impinge upon the people's lives, and the precolonial kinship structures which make it possible for one individual to have several fathers or mothers, or for one individual to validly claim the identities of the equivalents of eight or more modern nations. The point of Aidoo's explicit title would seem to be an attempt to reclaim the often rarefied themes of love and changes to reclaim the often rarefied themes of love and changes to a worldly, social and historical realm. But that reclamation is not prosaic; it is very thoughtful. Changes, A Love Story is both realistic and ironic.
The story is straightforward: Esi Sekyi, who works as data analyst with the Department...