Societies have always expended a great deal of effort on regulating sexual passion – an all-consuming and often chaotic drive that seems to need some kind or regulation to curb the violence that it engenders. Sexual passion and romantic love are notoriously changeable. In modern times, as women have taken to the work force, balancing the demands of husband, children, and career has proven to be difficult. Women have children and become mothers, turning their attention away from their husbands. Or they may turn wholly to their careers. Feeling neglected or simply longing for change, men look for new love interests.  Either or both members of a couple may find their passion waning and begin, even unconsciously, to look elsewhere.

The characters in Ama Ata Aidoo's Changes: A Love Story are caught by two additional currents.  One is their traditional past with its extended families and tribal groupings, and the heritage of European colonization. Educated Ghanians like Esi and Ali know that their own cultures have been partially suppressed, and also that to some extent all of them have internalized European values. Add to this the influences of two imported and sometimes opposing religions, Christianity and Islam.  

We might find polygamy abhorrent. But is it really that different from the extramarital affairs that are rampant in the West? Or the divorces which leave both parties free to marry again, though the presence of children binds the divorced parents together forever?

The difference of course is that the privilege of the second or third or fourth consort extends in Ghana only to the male.  

An additional problem for Fusena, a successful businesswoman in her own right, is that even polygamy is changing. In the old days, she would have met and approved or disapproved of Esi. (We remember Lily choosing her husband’s concubines.) In the modern world, this does not take place – the old ways have fragmented, and the result is that Fusena is hurt much more than she would have been in the old system. Ali feels more guilty as well than he would have a hundred years previously when he would have considered a second wife his absolute right. But European ideas have influenced him too.

ESI
In a discussion post when I first taught the novel last year, a student described the novel as a comedy of manners, and I think she was right.  We see the brief possibility of a descent into tragedy when Esi starts taking tranquilizers and drinking to combat her loneliness, but the final outcome is hopeful, though not simplistic in its diagnosis of the problems between men and women. 

The novel seems to me to be an adroit and often ironic dissection of the power struggle that goes on between any people in a sexual or romantic relationship, the shifts in power that occur as passion and need wax and wane. The person who loves less has the most power. As Esi had with Oko in the book’s beginning. But many women are socialized not to have power and to link their sexuality itself to feeling powerless. Esi’s strong attraction to Ali makes her feel “like a real woman” at last, and she has her sexual awakening, an adventure not to be missed. But she's met her match. He’s got the upper hand: no matter how passionate he is about her at the beginning of the relationship, he is the one who is able to stay away, then stray, and send her into a spiral of loneliness.

ALI
Ali is not a villain like the Marquis or Lloyd or even Juan. He is charming and likable. (And marked! You noticed the Kohl eye shadow or was it eye liner?) He knows he’s attractive. But he’s still a man for whom women are commodities to be acquired, or as he says territory to be possessed. Though he thinks of himself as “not one of the selfish ones” he causes a lot of pain to his silenced wife and later to Esi by his inability to restrain his desires. (a contrast to Esi with Kubi later in the book). Will Ali come to a bad end like the Marquis? Probably not.

 
Aidoo is, I think, fair to both male and

Ali is fortunate emotionally that he can and will move on. His womanizing proclivities protect him from rejection, but it is worth noting that at the end of the novel Ali also has to learn “not to question [Esi]” when he comes to see her and she is not at home. This may have been a little difficult for him. We are told that he loved her, and that Esi knew he loved her, “in his own fashion.” As he also loves the long-suffering Fusena and possibly a number of other women as well.

FRIENDSHIP
So everyone is happy and unhappy, as human beings always are. Even Opu and her (now we know) probably wayward husband Kubi reached a silent don’t ask/don’t tell compromise long ago, and though Opu suspected the attraction between Kubi and Esi, she told herself, “What would happen to her if she started suspecting her husband and her best and only real friend” (55). She doesn't find out, thankfully, and Esi though attracted to Kubi is ultimately loyal to her friend. And now Opu even has, thanks to that same loyal best friend, her own car!

More Reading

--Tuzyline Jita Allan’s "Afterward" at the back of the book,  178-186. 

--Jane Bryce, "Going home is another story": Constuctions of Nation and Gender in Ama Ata Aidoo's Changes.