No Sweetness Here

Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1969

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Summary

Background

Story Analysis

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Literary Devices

Foreshadowing

Foreshadowing consists of hints, clues, and other indicators of what may come to pass in the story’s plot. In this story, it is heavily foreshadowed that Kwesi has a dire fate. In the first paragraph, Chicha talks about taking him away. Maami Ama pleads with her not to make such jokes. She repeatedly asks rhetorical questions about the future: “[W]hat will I do, should something happen to my child?” (56). By the end of the story, it’s clear that Maami Ama will have to find the answer to this question. Chicha even tells Maami Ama, “Nothing will happen to him. He is a good boy,” a reassuring statement that sets up the coming revelation that being a “good boy” is not enough to protect anyone from fate (57). Other characters also raise rhetorical questions that imply dark futures for Kwesi. Maami Ama’s spiteful mother-in-law asks, “What did you want to do to him?” (69). It is an unfair question, but such questions intensify a sense of doom hovering over Kwesi’s fate. Meanwhile, Chicha’s clock is always in the background, ticking away seconds of Kwesi’s life.

Irony

The story consistently creates expectations that are upended by events. The plot of the story centers around the two families arguing over Kwesi at the divorce settlement. Everyone wants to keep Kwesi, especially Maami Ama, who worries constantly that someone will take Kwesi away from her or that something will happen to him. Kwesi is, in fact, taken away, but much further than Chicha could take him. Both families wanted to win him, and Kodjo Fi and his family are viciously triumphant when they do. But the work and energy that they put into winning Kwesi, and their cruelty toward Maami Ama in the process, was for nothing. They lost Kwesi anyway. Kodjo Fi was determined that his wife not have the prize, and now he does not either. It is an ironic ending; readers were expecting one or the other to win. By killing Kwesi instead, Ama Ata Aidoo subverts reader expectations and draws attention to her larger point: the fruitlessness of this struggle and the pain and damage everyone suffers under these cultural norms and practices.

Setting

A story’s setting is its place and time: when and where the action occurs. Bamso is a small rural village in Ghana, and in many ways it functions as a synecdoche for the country as a whole. In the mid-1960s, Ghana has recently gained independence from Britain, and now the country is facing profound questions about its identity and its future—about what it means to be Ghanaian, and to be African, in a post-colonial world. The injustice that plays out in Maami’s poor marriage and unfair divorce recurs across this region.