No Sweetness Here

The climactic divorce proceeding—with its all-consuming discord and fractiousness—occurs during Ahobaada, a day normally dedicated to joy, community, and reconciliation: “In the morning, old family quarrels were being patched up. In Maami Ama’s family all became peaceful” (64). That the day begins in such optimism, with the promise of feasts in the evening, communal togetherness, and the mending of fractured relationships, makes the rancorous atmosphere of the divorce proceeding all the more striking. Though Kodjo Fi, Maama Ami’s husband, is the one to ask for the divorce, all the blame falls on Maama Ami:

‘She is a bad woman and you are well rid of her,’ one aunt screamed.

‘I think she is a witch,’ the youngest sister said (67).

Even Maama Ami’s status as an only child is reckoned against her, as one of Kodjo Fi’s aunts says, “[O]nly witches have no brothers or sisters. They eat them in the womb long before they are born” (67). Within the patriarchal structure of this society, Maama Ami has no recourse. In leaving a bad marriage, she loses her only child, incurs a debt she will never be able to repay, and faces ostracization not only from her husband’s family but from her own as well.