Summary
Marija is a young mother pushing a baby in a pram when Sissie meets her. She tells Sissie that the youth hostel the young foreigners are staying at was once a castle, once the largest in all of Germany.
Marija asks Sissie if she is Indian, and talks about two Indians she knows and likes at the supermarket. Sissie thinks of stories of Indians who moved to the U.K. and America and had terrible experiences.
Marija’s husband is named Adolf, and her young son is named the same. She tells Sissie to call her Mary. She asks about Sissie’s country, Ghana, and if it is where President Nkrumah is the leader.
When Sissie tells her that she also used to be called Mary when in school, Marija is surprised and asks why. Sissie suspects it is because it is a Christian name, she was baptized, and it is good for school, work, and being a lady.
Sissie thinks of how the name Mary is anybody’s name, a name given to natives by Christians so they could “grow up / To be a / Heaven-worthy individual” (25). Her people used to love long names, names with ten or more parts, but now they are all seen as “Pagan / Heathen / Abominable idolatry to the / Hearing of / God” (27). No one should ever expect “Angels who take roll-calls in / Latin — most likely — / To twist rather delicate tongues / Around names like / — Gyaemehara” (27).
Marija asks if she can be Sissie’s friend and Sissie says yes. She is curious about the name “Sissie,” and Sissie replies that it is a version of “Sister,” a term for someone you like very much, especially if there are not many girl babies in a family. Sissie, though, is called that because the boys at school treated her like their sister.
When Marija mentions the Indians again, Sissie ruminates on their shared heritage of being plundered of their gold, their tongues, their lives. In the future she will meet an Indian who stayed in Germany for a long time, and when she asks him why he did not go home, he will scoff at her and ask why she did not go back to Ghana. He will tell her there are more Ghanaian doctors here than Indian doctors, and she will know that to be true. Her Indian, as she will call him, is of a social order that “Froze a thousand years ago” (31) and would never make money opening a private practice back home, but will stay in Germany to provide help to rich men. He will not want to talk to her about “brain drain,” as the only ones who want to stay in their home countries are the ones who fear they cannot survive abroad.
The women agree that tomorrow Marija will pick Sissie up after work and take her to her own home. Five o’clock is when the “campers,” as they are called, return from the pine nursery where they are working. The women enjoy the heavy portions of food after their volunteering; they were “required to be there, eating, laughing, singing, sleeping and eating. Above all eating” (35).
Some Bavarian peasant women also worked in the garden, confusing the campers, but they soon learned that they were employed by the same public authority. The campers had wanted to be “international volunteers in the hope of getting to the poverty-stricken multitudes of the earth” but now they are here in Germany, “nursing prospective Christmas trees!” (36). The peasant women chat with the campers; they are mostly widows in black, the blood of their sons used to “mix the concrete for / Building the walls of / The Third Reich” (36).
Marija takes Sissie to her house at the other end of the village. There Sissie admires the lush fruits hanging from branches and vines. Marija says Adolf will be home later so she will not be cooking a big dinner and she would thus like Sissie to stay. Sissie cannot, but Marija loads her up with bags of apples, pears, tomatoes, and plums, the last fruit being one she’d never seen in their real, living forms. Over the next few weeks she will see many fruits, but decides pears and plums are her favorites. She is not aware at the time, the narrator says, that the fruit also possess qualities she possesses, which makes them taste delicious: “Youthfulness / Peace of mind / Feeling free: / Knowing you are a rare article, / Being / Loved” (40).
Marija and Sissie spend time together every day after work. Marija asks about Sissie’s “mad country / and her / Madder continent” (40). Their eyes meet and they smile. Marija gives Sissie plums and other fruits, which the campers are excited for every time Sissie returns.
As some of the campers are young men and it is a romantic environment, there are a lot of relationships that unfold. Sissie does not get involved with any of them, but loves the atmosphere of the castle and the woods. She is friends with the other young women (none of whom are African), such as Marilyn, who goes to a teacher training college and, when she takes Sissie with her one day, points out the only other Black girl there. As for the villagers, they find Sissie’s costume charming and her facial features of interest, and, wholly intrigued by her, become jealous of Marija for spending so much time with her. After all, Marija is just a “little housewife married to a factory hand” (43).
These villagers hated the “thinned-out end of the old aristocracy and those traditional lickers of aristocratic arse, the pastor, the burgomaster, and the schoolteacher… Joined by the newly arrived” (44). Those newly arrived came when the Leader built a massive chemical plant that served the Empire, a plant that was then, after the war, turned into another chemical plant to make painkillers. More and more people came into the village, and the villagers hated those bosses and social services.
Those important people and their wives begin to wonder why they are not the ones escorting the “African Miss” around rather than Marija Sommer, and rage at the woman. They wonder what Marija and Sissie talk about, and say it is perverse and someone should tell her husband. The women probe Marija for gossip to the point that Marija and Sissie decide to move their meetings a couple hours later.
Marija has a certain strangeness in her eyes when she first comes to fetch Sissie in the evening. Sissie would be concerned if there was not a smile there as well, but she does note that Marija is flushed and warm. The camp leader and receptionist do not want Sissie going out so late but finally the camp leader gives in to Marija’s pleading.
The two step into the cool night and Marija says she baked Sissie a cake. Sissie is privately uncomfortable because she has already gained ten pounds since coming to this country; she thinks of how men say they like fat women but only marry the thin ones. She is delighted to hear, however, that it is a plum cake.
As they walk they are feeling happy to be alive, but soon they come across an old couple. The old man and woman are incredulous at the Black woman, pointing and feverishly talking in German. Marija responds to them and blushes but will not tell Sissie what they asked.
Marija is, the narrator explains, a “daughter of mankind’s / Self-appointed most royal line, / the House of Aryan” (48) while Sissie is just a “Little / Black / Woman” (48) and it is wild that she is even walking the Fuhrer’s land.
When Sissie asks where little Adolf is, Marija says he is sleeping and admits that she just wanted to be alone with Sissie. She knows it sounds odd but sometimes she just has to be away from the child she loves so much. Even though Sissie does not have a child, Marija looks at her as if expecting reassurance that she is not uttering something heretical.
The house is quiet and Marija brings Sissie black currant juice. She asks if Sissie wants to see Little Adolf upstairs and Sissie says yes. She takes Sissie upstairs to see the rest of the house because thus far they have only been downstairs. Sissie compliments Adolf’s cuteness and Marija explains that she had complications with his birth so he will be her only child and she is happy he is a boy. Sissie thinks of how women everywhere would say the same, for why desire to curse a child by wishing her female? The “ranks of the wretched are / Full, / Are full” (51).
Analysis
In the second part of the novel, “Plums,” Sissie settles into her scholarship program abroad, living in a former castle now turned hostel, planting trees and indulging in heavy foods, visiting cultural sites in the area, and, most importantly, befriending a lonely German housewife.
Unsurprisingly, Sissie is somewhat of a spectacle in Bavaria, drawing curious eyes and hushed whispers wherever she goes. The German women do not seem to want to be friends with her - not because of anything inherent to her personality, but rather because she is an exotic, something as rare as the plums feel to Sissie herself. They call her the “African Miss” (43), and marvel over her “costume” (43) and her nose and lips and how the “mere fact of the presence of the African girl was phenomenal” (43). One of Sissie’s peers who is attending a teacher training college cannot help but point out to Sissie the only other Black girl on campus, and Marija, who actually does seem to care for Sissie in a real way, still conflates different non-white ethnicities together, assuming Sissie is Indian.
So, who is Marija Sommer? She is a young mother who spends most of her days pushing her baby, Little Adolf, around while her husband works long hours. She seems quite lonely, asking Sissie “wistfully” (28) if she might be her friend. Being a mother seems to make her happy, but she craves some time for herself apart from the child. As she and Sissie become closer, she is clearly grateful for Sissie’s presence, inviting her over frequently and foisting bags of food on her to take back to the hostel. The other village women are jealous of her for monopolizing Sissie’s time, but Marija does not seem to notice or care. She focuses only on Sissie, and that focus seems to shift the first time they come together in the evening. Aidoo lays the groundwork for Marija’s eventual attempt to seduce Sissie by saying that first night there was a “certain strangeness about Marija” (45) and she was constantly smiling, flushed, and hot. When she pronounces Sissie’s name in her singular way, it sounds like she is “consciously making an effort to get the music in it not to die too soon but rather carry on into far distances” (46). And she seems to have prepared in advance a great deal for Sissie’s evening visit, setting the chairs just so, making a cake for her, and deliberately asking her to go upstairs and see the rest of the house. Marija’s loneliness permeates everything she says and does, and it is no surprise that she will try to connect with Sissie on a physical level (which will be discussed in a subsequent analysis).
Sissie and Marija’s friendship is complex, and not just due to the undercurrent of lesbianism. Kevin Everod Quashie states that Marija’s “friendship with Sissie is an attempt to circumvent her own marginal status in her community” but that Sissie “is spared no objectification in this community to which Marija belongs.” He thinks her “friendship with Sissie appears to be merely a convenience of their mutual status as outsiders in a patriarchal white German culture” because Marija is ultimately “unaware of the colonial trajectories that populate her desire.” Gay Wilentz explains that, at least from Sissie’s perspective and probably from Aidoo’s herself, we see Marija’s sexual advances as “arising from the despair of a western-style, isolated, loveless family life. However, it is also clear that Marija is seen as a fellow sufferer, and her home situation is one that many women deal with in some way or another throughout the world. For Sissie sees Marija’s weeping not only as personal loneliness but also as part of a larger political discourse–the ‘collective loss’ that women within the context of an aggressive patriarchy must endure. Moreover, as she watches older ‘Bavarian ladies’ in black dresses walking through town, she envisions them as war widows, ‘The blood of their young men was / Needed to mix the concrete for / Building the walls of / The Third Reich.’”
Sissie might be on European soil now, but Aidoo points out how even when she was back in Africa, she was heavily affected by the legacies of imperialism and colonialism. Yes, imperialism was for all intents and purposes over, but its legacies endured long past Ghana’s achievement of independence in 1957. For example, Sissie explains to Marija that people used to call her Mary back home because she came from a Christian family and it was the name given to her when she was baptized. The narrator ruminates on how “For a child to grow up / To be a / Heaven-worthy individual, / He had / To have / Above all, a / Christian name” (25). Furthermore—and this is something Sissie will deepen her consciousness about throughout the rest of the novel—she is aware that the lure of Europe for most Africans has its concomitant of never wanting to return home. She deplores the “brain drain” and is increasingly skeptical of Africans who try and explain the reasons why they stay.
Touria Khannous writes of Sissie’s observations, feelings, and analyses of Germany and England: “Sissie has a unique vantage point as a commentator on both European and African politics. Through her experience, she quickly develops insights into the contradictions between so-called European democracies and the poverty of the African masses. She is shocked by the European lifestyle and its emphasis on consumerism, instant gratification, and even hedonism, which she feels are symptoms of late industrial era capitalism. In line with this lifestyle is the black Mercedes-Benz in which her hosts pick her up and which is emblematic of transnational capitalism. The abundance of food consumed by members of the Involou group conjures up in her mind images of starving people in Africa who have to ‘pick tiny bits of undigested food from the offal of the industrial world’... When she meets the lonely German housewife Marija, she is all the more disillusioned by ‘the West’s societal degeneration,’ the ‘breakdown of the family,’ and the oppression of women by a universal patriarchy.”
Aidoo’s feminist ideology is thus conspicuous in this section. When Marija says she can only have one child and is thus glad it is a boy, Aidoo’s narrator says any good woman would say the same, for “why wish a curse on your child / Desiring her to be female / ? / Beside, my sister, / The ranks of the wretched are / Full, / Are full” (51). Female babies are considered undesirable because women are undesirable; they cannot bring pride to a household, cannot bring money or reputation, cannot be anything other than a burden. Similarly, Marija also shocks herself when she admits that sometimes she wishes for just an hour of time alone or with another adult, and seems to want “confirmation. A reassurance. That she was not speaking blasphemy” (49). Motherhood is supposed to be the highest aspiration for women as well as deeply fulfilling; anyone who wants a life of their own is anathema to society.
