Summary
Sissie is writing a letter to her now ex-boyfriend (this part is in the first-person, addressed to the man). She begins by saying she knows he told her to be positive and she tried, but she could not help being negative because she had to use the language that enslaved her and the “messengers of my mind always come shackled” (112). She writes of conversations they had, remembering his responses to her; one time he said radicals like her made him sick because they were so tragic and oversensitive. She should be ashamed, but knows she was, and is, right. Yet when he’d run out of the room in anger, she would want to call him back; after all, she still loved him.
It was tough for them, she concedes, because they could never discuss matters relating to group survival. They did not share a private world. Unlike his assertion of the common humanity of all people, she believes people aren’t just people; some have wished others ill, and enslaved them for their own gain. She believes Africans are not responsible for anyone but themselves, that they did not create other races and should not allow them to harm others. Africans did not invent those from the “icy caves of the north” (115) and it is incomprehensible why they must be made to suffer for whites’ inadequacies.
She is unhappy that the two of them cannot talk or write or cable each other without everyone else listening in. He would argue that the fact that they can come together at all and talk is an advantage. She knows that he is right, but there is bitterness in the sweetness. She believes they must have a secret language, that they must create a language. After all, others are always boring eyes into the back of Africans’ necks, trying to find out how they dance, make love, and reason, so there must be a new way to communicate. And yes, she writes, we are different, but we aren’t better.
When she began the letter she thought she would just be writing about how much she missed her lover, even though he probably would not believe it. She writes of how much she loved him, how she should have been more careful with her heart. She knows most women would have thrown away their opinions and loud voice to stay with him, but instead she criticized him and his friends for wanting to stay in this alien place. She wonders if she regrets not being able to shut up and be meeker, but no one ever taught her that. Her people weren’t westernized or urbanized; no one made her into a meek woman. Sure, in Africa the position of women was like the position of women worldwide, but women in Africa were “a little more complicated than…the dolls the colonisers brought along with them, who fainted at the sight of their own bleeding fingers and carried smelling salts around, all the time, to meet just such emergencies as bleeding fingers” (117).
Sissie knows she is digressing and apologizes, but then says it is a problem that she is always blaming herself. There is something wrong. There is an enemy and a boulder in their path. They are lost.
Of course he’ll say that she is just going on and on again, and that she needs to understand these are old problems and cannot be corrected in a day. She knows.
She cannot believe he left and actually did not come back. When it finally hit her he was really gone, she did not know what to do with herself. She tells him she sat in her room and suffered, making loneliness her new roommate. She did not go mad, but she was bereft. She hated the cold, the food, and was filled with fear and missed her home.
It should not come as a surprise to him, she writes, that she has spent so many sleepless nights trying to understand why their brothers and sisters stay and stay, when it was supposed to be that they come to this alien place to study and then return. But it really seems like they just come and learn how to die, and it is so strange to her.
She asks him if he remembers when they first met, which was at the students’ union meeting. There she said she told everyone they needed to stop arguing and hurry back home, but all that resulted in were versions of people explaining why they couldn’t. One person said, for example, that he made good money here in these parts and it would be hard to take less because his own country cannot afford his services. Most people said something about their mother—that they wanted to work and send her money.
Sissie knows the African mother has suffered, suffered through slavery and imperialism and colonial wars and the now scrimping and saving money to send her kids to school or abroad. She wonders, “So all of us who have been overseas build houses for our mothers. Then what next?” (123).
All that night the students talked. Her lover didn’t say anything, but merely stood handsomely, watching her with an amused look on his face. Nothing was relaxed that evening and for much of it she was concerned that maybe she should not have said anything.
There was one man who had a face that made him look older than the others and it was he who shamed her the most. He explained vociferously how he bought a bunch of houses and rented them out to people from his own country when they came over. Other people took up the man’s defense, saying he threw them parties on holidays and was chairman of the benevolent society and helped people get affordable burials and so on and so on. Someone else said he had worked hard and did not even have a scholarship so why should he go home? Sissie asked about all the other ones besides that man.
Another angry voice spoke up and said they came here on government scholarships and he had paid his debts through the honors he’d earned. Sissie looked at that man. Later she would have conversations with her lover, and she would learn that he and the man were in the same profession of medicine. She should have known that her critiques of the man would feel like critiques of her lover. This man was not the real problem but was a symbol of “everything I thought was distasteful about all the folks who have decided to stay overseas permanently. No, none of you admit it as openly as he does: but then, he has the confidence of the long distance runner” (126). And all this time, she knew her lover identified with him. She could never pretend to like the man; he always behaved like she’d challenged him to an achievement duel “all in order to explain why he wants to live in Europe and America” (127).
She remembered him saying that all the preaching to go home was absurd, for what was there except “stupid and corrupt civilian regimes, coups, and even more stupid and corrupt military regimes” (127). He did not know how he could go back there, he averred; after all, he was now doing research and was getting famous and there was no facility at home to support him. Sissie had nothing to say. He added that he would go home someday. For now, he was supporting his family back home and certainly he went home for visits every winter.
Sissie sighed and changed the conversation to the white people here, whom the man said were finally being educated as to Africans’ worth. Sissie replied that they always knew their worth. Why now “burn out our brawn and brains trying to prove what you describe as ‘our worth’” when we wouldn’t “get a flicker of recognition from those cold blue eyes” (130).
Sissie did notice that the man was holding the hand of a white woman and wondered who she was.
Her soon-to-be lover had come up to her and taken her hands, and she had been so grateful. He said he knew everyone called her “Sissie” but wanted to know what her actual name was.
The narrator takes over, explaining that Sissie is sitting on the plane. She hates flying and normally reads to take her mind off of it. Right now she is writing, which she has been doing the whole time. She looks over what she wrote, amazed that it is so long. She realizes that postmortem correspondence like this never does any good, and decides there is no point in sending it. She feels better now, and will just let things be.
Besides, she is back in Africa now, flying over the “crazy old continent” (134). She doesn’t know if she said that out loud, but then decides she does not care.
Analysis
In the final section of the novel, Sissie writes a letter to an ex-boyfriend she had in England; Kofu Owusu says that in this fourth section, there is a “structural and stylistic affirmation of the female coming into her own.” She is on a plane heading back to Africa, determined not to be one of those who never return. In the letter she grapples with her feelings towards the man, whom she clearly loved, but who became annoyed with her “killjoy” attitude in pointing out the hypocrisies in the “been-to” population. By the end of the letter she decides she does not actually need to send it, as its mere writing has been enough of a catharsis that she can let him go and turn herself fully to the task at hand.
Aidoo makes several significant points in this section. The first is, as articulated by Sissie, that language is insufficient to give voice to her soul. She writes that so far she has “only been able to use a language that enslaved me, and therefore, the messengers of my mind always come shackled” (112). She wishes that she and her love could “share our hopes, our fears and our fantasies, without feeling inhibited because we suspect that someone is listening” (115). They should have a secret language; they must create this language. Her lover does not agree, and mocks her as too sensitive.
Another of Sissie’s points is that, unlike what other Africans say in the student union, humans aren’t all just humans. She’s unwilling to accept that in the sense that some people—some races—have long made others suffer, so why put up with it?
And yet another is that it is absurd that Africans who come to Europe having promised to learn and then return just stay there in order to, as she sees it, die. They provide a multitude of reasons as to why they stay, and Sissie, attending the students’ union meeting, is unconvinced. She sees these versions each “more pathetic and less convincing than the one before” (121). Someone says they don’t want to take a cut in salary, another says they never heard back from a company in their home, others claim they need to send money back home. Sissie understands that there are mothers back home: “Of course she has suffered, the African mother. Allah, how she has suffered” (123) but does not think it’s necessarily a good thing that such mothers scrimp and save to send their children abroad to never return.
No one wants to listen to Sissie’s critiques. One man tells her “Listen, Sister. You cannot make these blanket statements. We came here on government scholarships. So what? Whose scholarships were we to come on? Besides, look at someone like me. Haven’t I paid my debt through the distinctions I’ve been winning?” (126). Though this man was not the only offender, for Sissie he “became the symbol of everything that I thought was distasteful about all the folks who have decided to stay overseas permanently” (126). He tried to convince her that there was no real reason to return home, for after all, “What is there? Apart from stupid and corrupt civilian regimes, coups, and even more stupid and corrupt military regimes?” (127). Sissie knows what the man says is true, and cannot say anything in response. She knows she will not be able to craft an argument that these people will appreciate, and gives up for the moment.
Like the character here, real critics have looked at Aidoo’s nationalism as articulated by Sissie and found some contradictions. Megan Behrent notes some of these issues, explaining that Aidoo has “certainly sided with those who see the process of 'brain drain' as an obstacle to national development and has critiqued the hypocrisy of those Ghanaian intellectuals who have emigrated and justified their decision in nationalist terms, insisting that it is based on a desire to contribute more effectively to the development and prestige of their native countries. At the same time, however, she recognizes that the material, economic and political conditions of post-colonial Ghana drive many of those for whom the option is available to leave in search of greater political freedom and economic opportunity. Indeed, since independence, political instability and repression and economic hardship has led to increased emigration from Ghana, particularly by the educated elite classes. Ironically, at the same time as numerous political leaders and activists from other African countries sought refuge in Nkrumah's Ghana, the latter's repressive regime led many disillusioned intellectuals to abandon their country and emigrate elsewhere.”
Ultimately, Sissie understands that she is letting her nationalist, pan-Africanist, and feminist views take precedence over a relationship with someone she really loves. She knows that “any female in my position would have thrown away everything to be with [him], and remain with [him]” (117). But Sissie isn’t just any woman. She explains how she grew up in a society that did not turn out docile, weak women. She can’t stop taking on the weight of the world because what she sees is so bad.
Aidoo has offered some insights into the final section, explaining in an interview that Sissie uses her ex-boyfriend “as the conduit through which she is speaking with a communal voice, a kind of collective voice and her address really was to everybody because in the long run what hurt her most was not what happened between her boyfriend and herself—’I’ and ‘I’—but between them’ and ‘them,’ between ‘We,’ between ‘us’ as an African people. It's a love letter to everybody and also to herself. I didn't say ‘let her write a letter to herself,’ but in effect that is what it is, a letter to herself in an effort to clarify her own views, to state her case, and examine it to see if she agrees with the conceptions of her own mind, her thoughts. So I think that is why she tears the letter up after writing it. It becomes irrelevant once she has clarified herself to herself and realized ‘We'll be ok.’ So it's larger than herself. It is a message to her, to him, to both of them, to the whole of the African world.”
