I’m working with four of your books now, Changes, Anowa, No Sweetness Here and The Dilemma of a Ghost, and I have one question about each one. For Changes, I was interested to know why you included four generations in Esi’s family, and whether that was intentional. Did each generation represent something different as an ideology, or do they each have something else to offer?
That’s how the novel worked out. I’m sorry. Do you see anything symbolic or representative in the generations? It’s interesting for me also, as the author, when I’m confronted with interesting questions about my work . . . because I want to interview you and find out where this idea came from. How did you come to even frame the question, because it’s an interesting question. The only thing is, I don’t have an interesting answer for you.
For me, it had more to do with how I saw Esi than what I thought each generation should mean. First of all, let’s face the fact that her daughter is not an active agent herself. She’s only ancillary to the life of Esi. And whatever happens in Changes about Ogyaanowa really says more about Esi than the little kid, right? So, to some extent your question underscores a different question: What does Ogyaanowa mean in terms of Esi’s life? Now you are asking me to analyze the work as though I was a critic.
None of these ideas occurred to me in the process of writing. I had not sat down and said, “Yes, I’m going to make Esi be a mother so that we can see what kind of a mother she can be,” or “let’s see how Esi can relate to her own mother and to her grandmother.” No. I suspect, at least, that the growth of a novel is slightly more organic than that. With me, things don’t occur in terms of how they represent anything, except how they come into the story in an organic kind of way. Now that I’ve written the novel and sometimes teach it, I can answer your question as a critic. But what good is that? You may as well read other critics who are looking at the four generations in Changes.
The main reason I ask is because what I’m writing about is how three different African Diaspora female writers [Aidoo, Maryse Condé and Edwidge Danticat] conceive of motherhood.
I actually write about the Diaspora more in Anowa than in Changes. In Changes, Esi is clueless when it comes to the relationship between Africans and the African Diaspora. She doesn’t deal with it. Anowa is partly about that the Diaspora, and so is The Dilemma of a Ghost. In Sister Killjoy, she deals with everything, including that.
But I want to ask you: How did you come to frame me or negotiate me within the broad concept of diasporic writing? Because the Diaspora is a bi-growth of Africa. So, how does an African writer who has not really lived outside of Africa long enough for her to be considered an émigré become part of diasporic writing?
Well not you, as a writer.
My work?
Right. I think there are some things that can be said, especially in The Dilemma of a Ghost, about what it means to be in Africa and be of African descent and not from Africa.
And to a certain extent even Anowa, because of the whole slave narrative . . . What I mean is, if you’re talking about the Diaspora, how did it come about, right?
But I’m just worried about Esi in Changes. She’s a strange fish.
My next question is about Anowa and the significance of her barrenness. She asks these slaves to call her mother. What is that role for her—needing to be a mother to these slaves?
Well, it’s quite clear that she wanted to be a mother. You know she had raised the question with her husband, no? Throughout, she kept wondering why she couldn’t have any children. So, for her it was a yearning for motherhood.
In her environment, given the time and the place, it was difficult for any woman, even an Anowa, to see her life in any other terms, to negotiate her sense of fulfillment in any other way, apart from being a mother. She could be anything—but it was like without being a mother, she just couldn’t see that her life was worth much. And for her it was that clear.
And her slaves fill a void?
Yes. Given the time and the place, the wife of the big man was inevitably regarded as the mother of the slaves. You know, in that kind of slavery, they often tried to make the slaves be part of the family. And in fact, later on, there were decrees promulgated, especially by the Ashanti Empire, against asking for someone’s origins as part of any kind of relationship or communication. It was against the law to do this because people were not supposed to make others feel like slaves were of slave origin. Humans being what they are . . . one way to prevent one section of society making the other section feel like slaves is to pretend that nobody knows.
My next question pertains to No Sweetness Here and The Dilemma of a Ghost. How do mother/daughter relationships differ from mother/son relationships? Does the mother have to take on a different role with respect to her son than with respect to her daughter?
Well, now that you ask me this question, I must confess that I hardly deal with mother/son relationships, at least to the extent that the mother/daughter thing is all over the place. Basically, that’s because I am a girl. Even though my books and plays are not about me, they are definitely about issues that I care about. And I believe that, subconsciously at any rate, I was trying to explore mother/daughter relationships in as many forms as possible, maybe in an effort to understand my own relationship with my mother. Except in The Dilemma of a Ghost, mother/son relationships are missing. We catch a fleeting glimpse in one of the stories in No Sweetness Here, but clearly, mothers and sons are not as close as mothers and daughters. With mothers and daughters there is a bond—not just a bond, but quite often a closeness, a companionship. The mother/daughter relationship is not something that can be taken for granted, obviously. People are busy affirming that relationship or repudiating it, as Anowa definitely does at the beginning of Anowa. And then it is so complicated in Changes.
Clearly, Esi and her mother are not close, but her mother and grandmother are fairly close. Again, maybe it has to be framed in terms of the time and especially the place. Esi could move away—intellectually, socially, she had been moved away from early in her life. And the gap only widened as she got older. From the moment they took her from her mother and grandmother to dump her in a boarding school, she never could, as she herself said, get as close to her mother as her mother had been to her grandmother. It’s a matter that clearly was a source of, if not bewilderment, then some sadness, because Esi lamented this fact. For her, it was a lament when she told her grandmother, or when she talked on her own about these things.
The suffering, or rather, the sense of deprivation, welled up. It came to haunt her. And now, looking back—and now I’m wearing my critic’s hat—it seems to me such incredible irony that Esi, who hadn’t really known much about how it feels to be close to one’s mother, is also so incapable of offering that closeness to her own daughter. And it underscores the popular belief in psychology that says that abused children end up being abusive themselves. You know, it’s almost as if what we did not receive from our parents we can not give to our children. Obviously, its one of the arenas of human tragedy. And it’s something that, if it is true, can explain quite a bit in terms of people’s behavior. But, mind you, I had not sat down and thought about all these things before or during the writing of Changes.
