No Sweetness Here

The immediate impression left by “No Sweetness Here” is a somber one of unexpected grief. Throughout the story, Ama Ata Aidoo builds a tense atmosphere full of foreshadowing that creates suspense and fear that something will happen to Maami Ama, most likely through Kwesi and the divorce. When the elders demand that Maami surrender Kwesi, the expectation of upcoming grief is seemingly fulfilled. Instead, Kwesi’s sudden death arrives as a tragic twist, rendering the bitter fight over custody of the boy moot. In the end, no one wins.

Chicha feels the emptiness and senselessness of Kwesi’s death: “I did not feel like going to bed. I did not feel like doing anything at all” (72). She too has harbored dreams of becoming a mother to this beautiful child, giving him things that his own mother could not give him, and his sudden death has undone those dreams: “I saw the highest castles I had built for him come tumbling down, noiselessly and swiftly” (73). The overarching tone of these final paragraphs is one of futility. The various adults in Kwesi’s life have fought over him, a battle that symbolizes the zero-sum competition for status and power within the village, and now the prize has been snatched away from all of them. The soccer game, during which Chicha sees Kwesi block a goal, is a perfect motif for the story; Kodjo Fi’s family denies Maami Ama and her family the “goal” of keeping Kwesi, but they have not scored a point by doing so. This is the irony at the heart of the story: that the plot of the story is supposedly concerned with a divorce and a custody fight, and in the end, no one has custody of Kwesi.

This tragic ending, in which the grief—though felt most acutely by Maami Ata—is universal, underscores The Harm Patriarchal Power Structures Cause Societies. Kwesi’s death occurs immediately after the divorce proceeding—in fact, the timeline suggests that even as the various factions were bickering in the aftermath of the divorce, Kwesi was already dying. In moving directly from the scene of communal conflict to the plot of ground on which Kwesi lies, surrounded by a circle of children, the story implies that this tragedy is the price of all that strife. The patriarchal structure of this society has allowed Kodjo Fi to neglect his wife and child with impunity, and at the same time it has encouraged the women around him to fight over proximity to power rather than working together to improve conditions for all of them. Kwesi has become a symbol of everything else his elders fight over—the football in their game. His death is the final proof that this game has no winners.

By 1964, the year of the story’s initial publication, Ghana had been an independent country for less than 10 years. Its president, Kwame Nkruma, had led the movement against British colonial rule and was an inspiring figure to many Ghanaians, but he was also an authoritarian ruler who repressed dissent and manipulated election results. Just two years later, in 1966, he would be deposed in a military coup. The rural village of Bamso, where “No Sweetness Here” is set, stands in for every small and rural village in Ghana where the texture of daily life is changing in response to the country’s political transformations. In Bamso, the seemingly inflexible and unchanging social norms in fact represent generations of push and pull between Indigenous and colonial influences, and the conflict that occurs in the village extends far beyond its borders, engaging with questions of what it means to be Ghanaian in a new, postcolonial era.

Among the adults who fought over Kwesi, Maami Ama loses the most. Bamso’s patriarchal culture treats Motherhood as Synonymous with Womanhood, and Maami Ama’s role as a mother was her entire identity: It is she who loved Kwesi purely and was devoted to him, who raised him, made sacrifices for him, and structured her life around his happiness. The story signals her devotion to Kwesi—and the degree to which she depends on him emotionally—in the very first scene, as she is joking with Chicha. Chicha teases that she will take Kwesi away with her one day—a lighthearted joke that, by the end of the story, is revealed to be more serious than it sounds. Maami Ama responds with a plea:

‘Please Chicha, I know you are just making fun of me, but please, promise me you won’t take Kwesi away with you.’ Almost at once her tiny mouth would quiver and she would hide her eyes in her cloth as if ashamed of her great love and her fears (56).

This moment foreshadows the tragedy at the end of the story, when Maami Ama’s worst fear is realized. While Kwesi’s father, both families, Chicha, and the whole village mourn him, Maami Ama has suffered the worst loss of all. In losing her son, she has lost her reason for being, and she has no one now to turn to but Chicha, whose membership in the community is provisional and temporary.

Maami Ama’s abandonment in her grief drives home The Need for Solidarity Among Women. The patriarchal structure of this community means that Maami Ama is instantly blamed for her divorce, and no one takes her side. Kodjo Fi’s sisters and aunts accuse her of being a witch, while her own aunts lambaste her for her foolishness in allowing this man’s family to get the better of her. Since all power in this community resides with men, women are left to fight amongst themselves for proximity to male power. Maami Ama herself points out that it doesn’t have to be this way, telling Chicha, “If I had not been such an unlucky woman, his mother and sisters might have taken my side, but for me there was no one” (61). After Kwesi’s death, the village women lament as if in a chorus, “We do not understand! Life is not sweet!” (71). This exclamation, which echoes the story’s title, suggests that life will only become sweet when the women work together instead of against each other.

Aidoo’s goal in this story is to communicate the hollowness and grief that comes with patriarchal and hierarchical social structures, but it is unclear whether Chicha sees that hollowness, or whether she will act differently in the future. Chicha dreams of leading Kwesi into a successful, Westernized future and being his gateway to the wider world. She sees a role for herself that goes beyond that of a village wife and mother: “I will take him with me […] I will give him a grammar education […] he may win a scholarship to university […] he would visit Britain, America, and all those countries […] I saw the highest castles I had built for him come tumbling down” (72-73). She recognizes that something has gone terribly wrong to produce such an outcome. Yet Chicha fit in well in the village. She shares a number of the traditional beliefs in the village about the motherhood and about women. She never consciously notices, let alone criticizes, the patriarchal norms and power structures at work there. Chicha, the modern young career woman, represents the future of women in Ghana. The ambiguity of her mindset and beliefs by the end of the story indicates the dreams and fear of college-age Aidoo: As she writes this story in 1964, 28 years before the passage of a national constitution that would finally grant women full legal equality in Ghana, the future role of women in independent Ghana is unclear. It will depend on the young, educated women, observers who have seen the injustice and violence enacted on their female elders, to reach for their dreams before those dreams crumble as Chicha’s do.