"About Lovers in Accra": Urban Intimacy in Ama Ata Aidoo's Changes: A Love Story

"What does a woman want?" If Sigmund Freud did not have an answer to that question, that is not the case with the mothers in Ama Ata Aidoo's novel Changes: A Love Story. The fact that their daughter is an educated woman in a lucrative job with great prospects for her future has a profound influence on how these rural women see her "real" needs and desires. But their advice and admonitions are based on the reality of women's lives in a male dominated world. According to the mothers, an educated woman expects "something better," she deserves "something better," but even in a society where women's financial independence is both expected and highly valued, the necessity for a woman to have a husband is never questioned. What she deserves is a "better" husband, certainly a husband of her own—in any case she deserves to be the first wife. According to the mothers, what a woman wants is to be desired by her husband and defined exclusively in relation to that desire.

Aidoo's novel is both a continuation of and a challenge to the well-known theme in African women's writing of women's suffering and confusion due to changing ideas of marriage and motherhood. These texts are written in different contexts, but they deal with a postcolonial reality where both customary and common law rules of marriage apply. In these texts one can discern a polarization of female characters into either the trope of the "suffering good wife" and that of the "cynical modern woman." Although Changes also employs what Florence Stratton terms "the convention of the paired women" (97), it introduces a new element into the discussion of different varieties of socially sanctioned or enforced intimate relations, that of their function in creating and perpetuating social and political structures. ¹ The issue of marriage is thus taken beyond a concern with individual choice or morality to the question of how subjects are shaped and changed in changing societies.

The love story as myth and narration is crucially linked to the process of subject constitution and needs to be studied as one of the most central forms through which the individual comes into existence. The definition of self through frustrated desire is thus expressed in the form of a story that creates an identity and a life. This story of love, frustration, bewilderment, and betrayal is in itself part of changing power structures.

One of the most urgent issues in the world today—the spread of HIV—has now given a new dimension to this question of what it is a woman really wants. When the fastest growing group of AIDS victims are married women with no other sexual parners than their husband, the issue of women's sexual self-determination gains a new urgency. That a dependent wife is at high risk regardless of the social status of her husband is due to the fact that her sexuality is seen as a commodity that is controlled by her husband. As Brooke Grundfest Schoepf argues:

Those who have reduced their risk most are women with negotiating strengths based on their capacity to support themselves and their dependents without resort to sex within or outside of marriage. Although the poor are at highest risk, the experience of married women dependent on wealthy husbands shows how ephemeral and transitory women's class position can be. (153)

In Ama Ata Aidoo's novel, the protagonist Esi Sekyi is raped by her husband. She makes a conscious decision to actually define the incident as "marital rape," knowing well that her act of naming totally redefines the idea of marriage to which most people around her adhere. In this common sense view, sex is one of the services that a husband demands from a wife. Esi Sekyi's process of redefinition is further...