Even as Aidoo’s ear recreates the voices of recited tales, she draws distinctively upon the oral tradition of the dilemma tale for her dramas and short stories as she probes problems facing society. According to Brown, the dilemma tale “usually poses difficult questions of moral or legal significance. These questions are usually debated both by the narrator and the audience—and on this basis the dilemma is a good example of the highly functional nature of oral art in traditional Africa” (85). William Bascom comments on his study of dilemma tales from the Akan region in Ghana: “They are prose narratives that leave the listeners with a choice among alternatives. . . . The choices are difficult ones and usually involve discrimination on ethical, moral, or legal grounds.” Bascom further notes that these tales additionally function to train the listeners “in the skills of argumentation and debate,” useful in settling disputes within the home or in courts of law (quoted in Brown 1981, 85). The dilemma tale often poses unanswerable questions or provokes debates that “really function,” notes Brown, “as a kind of intellectual exercise that develops and continually stimulates the audience’s ability to discuss such dilemmas in everyday existence” (85–86).

Dilemmas of Modernity: Through the Prisms of Colonialism, Independence, and Postcolonialism

The eleven stories of No Sweetness Here explore several dilemmas that resonate differently for women and men, for the very young, the elderly, and those in the middle of their lives—the latter perhaps caught most painfully in a society moving from traditional values to modern ways.