Summary
Marija and Sissie often talk about Africa. Sissie says Nigeria is like all the other countries but bigger and bolder, and Ghana is a tiny but beautiful piece of territory that was once great but now is not.
The narrator tells a story of the French tarring two narrow strips of Earth in the Upper Volta to make a road. Those strips were each wide enough for one tire, so two vehicles had to negotiate with each other. The roads were in miserable condition. Three friends were traveling on it when they punctured a tire. A Frenchman came by as they waited for help, and they asked him why the French had let an international road decay like that. The Frenchman shrugged and said the president drove on it every day. He left.
The narrator says that they’ve heard of countries in Africa where the wives are Europeans, and they bring their brothers to rule the economy. In the cities, ex-convicts from Europe drive buses and Black construction workers sweat under the sun making nice things for beautiful people. It’s just like the good old days before independence, the narrator says sardonically, except the present is so much better. After all, the rich run things and the poor suffer; our “representatives and interpreters, / The low-achieving academics / In low profile politics / Have the time of their lives / Grinning at cocktail parties and around / Conference tables” (57). They return home and tell of how their tooler water is better than the water the villagers drink, and no one says anything because there is “ecstasy / In dying from the hands of a / Brother / Who / Made / It” (59).
Marija asks Sissie who pays for all her travel, and she replies that it was once fashionable to be African, and if a young student had wanderlust they could get into the world. A little rueful, Marija says she wishes she was better educated so she could travel, but she is at least happy Little Adolf will be able to.
Sissie is looking down and when she looks up she sees Marija watching her. Marija blushes deeply and Sissie also feels embarrassed for some reason. She had thought before that if she were a man they might have a delicious love affair. It was a game she liked playing in her head and with which she became very absorbed.
Sissie needs to return home but Marija insists she sees the upstairs of the house. Sissie agrees and because it is so late at night, as they head upstairs into the dark it is like she is moving “down into some primeval cave” (62). The master bedroom is minimalist and starkly modern, and it seems odd to Sissie that Marija is associated with such austerity. Her beauty shelf is filled with colorful and decorative bottles and skin foods though.
Suddenly Sissie feels Marija’s hands on her breast and then her warm tears on her neck and her lips on her own. Sissie impulsively breaks free and accidentally hits Marija. The two stare at each other, mouths open in disbelief. The situation is peculiar to Sissie; she never could have imagined she would be here like this with this woman.
Marija is crying and Sissie also wants to cry but stops herself; so much trouble in the world has come from the unhappiness and loneliness of people like this. Sissie again wishes she were a boy or a man. She asks why Marija is crying, and Marija says it is nothing.
They go downstairs and have food. Sissie marvels at how in this cold place people want to eat cold food. As they eat and drink coffee, Marija asks about Sissie’s family. Sissie tell her about the seven children of her mother and the sixteen of her father, and they laugh about the polygamy. The tension being broken, Sissie wonders if their maker gave them the ability to laugh so they would not be broken by sorrow.
Sissie remembers that she will be leaving in a week but knows she cannot yet tell Marija. It is not the time to “give undue intimations of the passage of time, or of our mortality” (69).
In the next couple days the campers are not working but instead are visiting festivals and dances across the Bavarian countryside. Officials fete them and talk about international aid and peace.
On Sissie’s last evening she meets Marija and Little Adolf; they had been waiting for her at reception. They agree to go on a short walk around the castle to the river. Marija invites her to come over to her house tomorrow and says she will cook. When Sissie replies that she cannot, Marija becomes confused and agitated. Sissie finally says she is going north to Frankfurt, Hanover, and Gottingen to another camp on the eastern border, and will then go back to her country. Marija is deeply sad and keeps asking Sissie questions as they walk.
As Marija expresses what seems to be jealousy when Sissie tells her she might see a boyfriend in London, Sissie feels a “pleasurable heat” (85) fill her. She realizes she is enjoying Marija’s pain, and wonders at this very masculine exhilaration. At one point she cruelly asks Marija why she made all her plans before even seeing if Sissie was available, and watches Marija’s face turn different colors in vulnerability and embarrassment. Marija ventures that she will come say goodbye to Sissie, and Sissie shrugs and says there is no point. And as for the rabbit, the special meal she was going to make, it should be for Marija’s husband; it is not right to make special meals for women, as women should find enjoyment in watching men eat such meals.
The two women separate, and Sissie returns home. At dawn the next morning she boards the train. Before it can leave, she sees Marija running toward her with a bag of food, and they clumsily say goodbye. Marija begs her to go see Munich if she can, as she was going to take Sissie there one day. Sissie promises she will see it, but privately knows she will not miss a train to see that city. After all, no city is sacred or holy; it is just a place to “meet a / Brother and compare notes” (80).
The town disappears behind the train, and Sissie looks in the bag to see sausages, pastries, cheese, and some plums.
Analysis
Before going upstairs to see the rest of the house, Sissie and Marija briefly talk about Ghana (and Nigeria), and Sissie-as-narrator ruminates on Africa in this new neocolonial landscape. Neocolonialism is, as C. Nichole, the founder of the Pan African Think Tank, “the deliberate and continued survival of the colonial system in independent African states by turning these states into victims of political, mental, economic, social, military, and technical forms of domination carried out through indirect and subtle means that did not include direct violence…In the short definition, neo-colonialism is the use of economic, political, cultural, or other pressures to control or influence other countries, especially former colonies.”
In one of the most powerful, incisive verse sections of the text, the narrator sneers of the current state of affairs in Africa: “And the Presidents and their / First Ladies / Govern from the North / Provence, Geneva, Milan… / Coming south to Africa / Once a year / For holidays. // Meanwhile, / Look! // In the capitals, / Ex-convicts from European / Prisons drive the city buses, and / Black construction workers / Sweat under the tropical sun, making / Ice-skating rinks for / The Beautiful People… / While other N**gers sit / With vacant stares / Or / Busy, spitting their lungs out” (56). Aidoo knows Africa isn’t in a good place after independence, but she doesn’t blame ordinary Africans—she blames Europeans and complicit African leaders.
When they do go upstairs, Marija makes a sexual advance on Sissie that the latter clearly rebuffs. She admits to herself that she’d often fantasized about being a man in relationship with Marija, and later feels a perverse sense of satisfaction when Marija exhibits confusion and sadness at what she sees as Sissie’s abrupt departure. She sees Marija’s tears and almost cries herself, but then tells herself, “Why weep for them [white Europeans]? In fact, stronger was the desire to asl somebody why the entire world has had to pay so much and is still paying so much for some folks’ unhappiness” (66). Later, when Sissie tells Marija that she is leaving the very next day and cannot come to her house for a meal Marija cooked, she feels a “pleasurable heat” (75) and realizes she was “enjoying herself to feel that woman hurt” and that it was “an exclusive masculine delight that is exhilarating beyond measure” (75). She throws the invitation back in Marija’s face and proclaims “Special meals are for men” (77) and it is “not sound for a woman to enjoy cooking for another woman” (77).
What does this failed encounter mean? Critics have much to say about the women’s relationship and this scene in Marija’s bedroom. Gay Wilentz suggests that the moment is problematic for feminist scholars because Aidoo, while sympathetic, “sees this attempt at a lesbian relationship as a perversion of womanlove and part of the degeneration of European family life.” Wilentz supports this by saying that Sissie immediately thinks of her home and childhood and how absurd it is that a young Aryan housewife has just kissed her. Kofi Owusu agrees, and writes that “Lesbianism may be a possibility in the future, but for now Sissie is wholly unprepared for it. She bears a hasty retreat emotionally, quite content, it seems, to eat ‘literal’ plums and leave the symbolism and lesbianism to her ‘sisters’ overseas.” Also in a similar vein, Jarrod Hayes weaves in the influence of missionaries on Sissie and other Africans, writing that “Although the novel’s protagonist rejects homosexuality as un-African, the novel historicizes this rejection and suggests that Sissie, rather than defending a precolonial African purity, may actually only be repeating a discourse that she learned from European missionaries.”
Overall, Sissie’s time in Germany is one of growing nationalism, pan-Africanism, and feminism. She is beginning to see that the Africans who go to Europe to study are not inclined to return home, which makes it even more difficult (in light of the neocolonial issues mentioned above) to achieve any real change. When asked in an interview about the “professional migration” out of Africa, Aidoo answered with an acknowledgment of the difficulties of the situation: “It often begins with education and training. I am critical of this whole business of we foreigners coming to 'the West' to study and work. It is really about lending ourselves, it is like an incipient kind of brain drain. Every country needs all the minds of all of its people, all they can get. But realistically our institutions are not good enough, often the money isn't there in poorer countries for a good general education system or quality higher education. So we end up with some of our best minds and talents coming here or to Europe to study, and half of the time these people don't return. Then there is the gap between ordinary Africans who are not able to leave anywhere, and these lucky few who are mobile and talented and are picked off. In Our Sister Killjoy is saying that having our top students study and then live abroad is not only draining off our most valuable resources, but it exposes our peoples' minds to be picked.”
