John M. Chernoff

I expected this book to be full of comic, unabashedly sordid tales in some variety of the Western world’s unselfconsciously self-exploitative blog fiction. I even wanted it to be that and saved the book for a time when I would find the account of sexual escapades and predatory western ignorance particularly diverting. (I also figured that the academic whiff of the book—an introduction that runs to 117 pages, ample footnotes and a glossary—would elevate my low brow motivation for picking it up in the first place.) I began, dutifully, with the introduction, growing suspicious when Chernoff revealed that his graduate studies were conducted at a seminary and becoming impatient with the unnecessary showiness he seems vulnerable to: “The problem with that method is that minutely precise terms can become so vaporous that they have no earthly distillate: they cannot be subsequently condensed and used except in specially fabricated ivory towers.” I began to fear that it would turn into an epic translator’s introduction (shudder). Accordingly, I felt grateful to Chernoff when, on page eight, he offers, “those who are impatient to meet her (his protagonist) and those who think they know about modern Africa, may skip this introduction.” Before sprinting away with my hall pass, I glimpsed ahead, saw some sentences like “Africa: mother Africa, mother of depressing statistics and bad news” and “There is a territorial metaphysics of morals at work in the dichotomies of order and chaos” after which I felt totally excused from reading another word of it.

However, it is a testament (of some sort) to Chernoff’s book that I actually returned to the introduction after finishing Hawa’s stories and read a hell of a lot more of it. On that, more later. The other 350 pages of the book are a relatively unstructured transcription of reminiscences and self-justifications told to an ethnographer(ish), by an illiterate, Ghanaian woman who spent much of her life trading sex and companionship for comforts and security.

Stories from Hawa’s young childhood are scattered throughout the collection and offer a truly outstanding depiction of a relatively poor African girl’s childhood. For their lack of artifice and the defiant mirth in them, I enjoyed them more than any of the several dozen depictions of African childhood that I have read by the continent’s most talented novelists (with the sole exception of Ben Okri in the The Famished Road). The stories are simple, based around a single behavior or rebellion and are memorable for their succinct reality and the confiding way in which they are narrated.

The fourth “part” of the book (and I am wholly unconvinced by Chernoff’s structure—though, to be fair, this is the first of two volumes and their *may* be some huge sweeping arch in the works) delivers dozens of truly funny stories about witchcraft and African juju. If you are losing patience with Chernoff and Hawa, skip ahead and start reading from here. If you are not recaptured by the banana juju in the nightclub, put the book down and cultivate a sense of humor.

The other species of story—and the most prominent—involves Hawa’s adult involvement with men and the women who shared her lifestyle. These are shot through with digressions on life strategies and power dynamics: “if you haven’t got money, maybe the man who has the money to marry you, you won’t like him. And you shouldn’t be married because of money. No, I think you must marry somebody you like, or somebody you love. Then maybe you can stay with him and be correct;” “Then maybe, in that first year when we marry, we have nothing. We are suffering together. And then we are trying to get small money to save for our children after. Then he goes and takes another woman, too. That one too will bring babies out. And then: who is the property for?” While revealing, these moments recur a bit too often from a narrative point of view and might frustrate impatient readers. When she is not offering her general apologetics, she is recounting the glorious moments of her self-defense, the maintenance of her dignity, her self-assertion, her manipulation and moments of revenge. All of this challenges a reader in several ways, principally, drawing out the tendency to psychoanalyze and to judge (two exercises of minimal worth, against which this book makes it exhausting to struggle).

For what it is worth, on balance, Hawa’s stories offer enough humor and memorable characters to merit finishing. For a taste of the more rewarding, light-hearted moments: “Sometimes I could go alone to dance or I could go together with Nigel. Yeah. Nigel used to dance, too, with his conceive (fat belly)! Yeah. Hey! He liked Highlife. Eh? When he danced, he had a big ass—ha!—and when he danced, shaking his stomach in Highlife, people liked his dance. Hey! What are you talking?! Nigel?! Ha! He danced nicely;” “I used to sleep at the right side of my grandmother, and that boy used to sleep at the left side. So night time, when I was feeling like pissing, I woke up. But to call this old lady to take me outside to go and piss, I didn’t feel it. So I just got up and passed beside the feet, and then I passed behind and went to that small boy’s place and pissed, and then I came back to my right-hand side to sleep. Ha-ha!” Yes, the crudity, the vulgarity or whatever, is representative—as far as I am concerned, in the best and least shameful of possible ways.I’m not sure if I need to read the second volume.

But, the book distinguished itself so completely from everything else I have ever read that I soldiered back into the introduction to understand its creators more clearly. The brief description of Hawa on page 11 is totally worth reading and the narrator’s depiction of himself (that begins on page 45) is tremendously revealing. The fondness he has for the version of himself that was a young “believer” in the vibrant Ghana of the early 1970s completely changed my conception of him and made me more patient with his academic bombast. I also softened up considerably when I read my favorite sentence of the introduction, “Somehow or other, I picked up the nickname ‘psychedelic,’ and within a few weeks after my arrival, there was almost no place in central Accra where I could go and not hear a friendly voice calling me, ‘Hey! Johnny!’ or ‘Hey! Psychedelic!’” Right. Somehow or other. Finally, my objection to the introduction boils down to issues with Chernoff’s tone and personal writing style; but I must confess that his observations on Africa seemed, to me, basically valid and he seems, for the most part, to avoid excessive generalization, which means that if you really need the background, I don’t think he will mislead you. And that is a judgment I rarely make of people who write about West Africa.… (altro)