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And because the look had softened Baaba’s face somehow, and because Effia also knew desperation, that fruit of longing, she did as she was told.

In this quotation from Effia’s chapter, we see how Effia’s desire for Baaba’s love and approval leads to her participation in her own exile. Here, Effia agrees to keep her first menstrual cycle a secret, not realizing Baaba intends to use this information to keep Effia from marrying Abeeku. This moment demonstrates how Baaba’s abuse has made Effia passive and silent. Because Baaba is the only mother she knows, Effia is desperate for any approval from her, even at her own expense.

Her whole life Baaba had beat her and made her feel small, and she had fought back with her beauty, a silent weapon, but a powerful one, which had led her to the feet of a chief. But ultimately, her mother had won, cast her out, not only of the house but of the village entirely…

In this quotation from Effia’s chapter, she evaluates Baaba’s success in casting her out from the village. Because of the strict gender roles and Baaba’s constant antagonism, Effia’s one weapon has been her beauty, something that makes people love her, but which comes with the price of her silence. Her beauty causes Abeeku to fall for her, but it is no match for the power of Baaba’s words in the form of rumors and slander. Effia’s beauty rescues her by attracting James, but she can only keep him with silent complicity with the slave trade, symbolically alienating her from those of her own people who are sold.

“You are nothing from nowhere. No mother and now no father.” She looked at Effia’s stomach and smiled. “What can grow from nothing?”

Baaba says these cruel words to Effia when Effia returns to her village to visit Cobbe on his deathbed. Effia is the first of many characters in the novel on both sides of the family who is told by someone in a position of power that they will amount to nothing because of the circumstances of their birth. As such, Effia establishes a pattern of defying these cruel expectations by not only surviving but creating a lineage that reaches to the present day. Effia not only becomes a loving mother to Quey, but later a wise grandmother who encourages James’s bravery.

But if we do not like the person we have learned to be, should we just sit in front of our fufu, doing nothing? I think, James, that maybe it is possible to make a new way.

In this quotation from James’s chapter, Effia, now a grandmother, reveals the inner strength and wisdom she has cultivated with age. Effia can relate to James’s discomfort because she, too, was forced to follow a life path she didn’t choose. She also recognizes that her learned silence never helped her, and Quey’s following of the accepted path never made him happy. She therefore encourages James to forge his own path and break the patterns that held her and his father back.

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