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.