No Sweetness Here

"He was beautiful, but that was not important.”"

"Please, Chicha, I always know you are just making fun of me, but please, promise me won’t take Kwesi away with you.”"

"One’s yams reflect the sum total of one’s life. And mine look wretched enough.”"

"Kodjo Fi was a selfish and bullying man, whom no decent woman ought to have married. He got on marvellously with his two other wives but they were three of a feather"

"Now all I must do is to try and prepare myself for another pregnancy, for it seems this is the reason why I was created . . . to be pregnant for nine of the twelve months of every year. . . . Or is there a way out of it at all? And where does this road lie?"

"She hurried home and into the bathroom where she vomited – and cried and cried and vomited for what seemed to her to be days."

"A Master’s here. A Doctorate there. . . . That was the other thing about the revolution."

"What was more, if they really wanted to see a revolution, why didn’t they work constructively in other ways for it?"

"They used to tell her that they found the thought of returning home frightening. They would be frustrated."

"Even that was not the whole story. Suddenly, it seemed as if all the girls and women she knew and remembered as having smooth black skins had turned light-skinned."

"She had always known that in her society men and women had had more important things to do than fight each other in the mind."

"[I]t was six o’clock…this time, I did not run”"