Changes

A woman alone in a hotel lobby drinking alcohol? It would definitely be misunderstood. Then she told herself that she was tired of all the continual misunderstandings.

But marital rape? No. The society could not possible have an indigenous word or phrase for it. Sex is something a husband claims from his wife as his right. Any time. And at his convenience.

‘Yes, we told you, didn’t we? What is burying us now are all these imported feminists ideas
‘And, dear lady colleague, how would you describe “marital rape” in Akan?’
Igbo? … Yoruba?’
‘Wolof? ... or Temne?’
‘Kikuyu? ... or Ki-Swahili?’
‘Chi-Shona?’
‘Zulu? ... or Xhosa?’

Clean? It all came to her then. That what she had gone through with Oko had been marital rape.
‘Marital rape?!’ She began to laugh rather uncontrollably, and managed to stop herself only when it occurred to her that anyone coming upon her that minute would think she had lost her mind, which would not have been too far from the truth. In fact, her professional self was coldly telling her that she was hysterical. And isn’t hysteria a form of mental derangement? At that she got up and went to lock the door.

Esi definitely put her career well above any duties she owed as a wife. She was a great cook, who complained endlessly any time she had to enter the kitchen.

Esi had never stated it categorically that she didn’t want any more children. But she was on those dreadful birth control things: pills, loops or whatever. She had gone on them soon after the child was born, and no amount of reasoning and pleading had persuaded her to go off them. He wanted other children, at least one more ... a boy if possible. But even one more girl would have been welcome.

‘It’s not safe to show a woman you love her … not too much anyway,’ some male voice was telling him. But whose voice was that? His father’s? His Uncle Amoa’s? He wasn’t sure that the voice belonged to any of those two. Of course those men and their kind hid their hearts very well. They were brought up to know how.

‘Women die in too many ways anyway, my sister.
‘They say it was not always like this. I mean about women and men. They say that a long time back, it was different. But it has been as it is for far too long for it to matter how it was in that far away yesterday. Besides, no one remembers what it was like then. Certainly from as long as even our ancestors may have been able to remember, it seemed to have always been necessary for women to be swallowed up in this way. For some reason, that was the only way societies were built, societies survived and societies prospered.

Anyhow, a young woman on her wedding day was something like that. She was made much of, because that whole ceremony was a funeral of the self that could have been.

No, you can’t, Esi,’ Opokuya said, as if there had been no pause. ‘No matter what anybody says, we can’t have it all. Not if you are a woman. Not yet.’
Our society doesn’t allow it.’
‘Esi, no society on this earth allows that.’