AFRICAN PROSE ASARE KONADU: A Woman In Her Prime Narrate Pokuwaa's experience with her first two husbands.

Answer Details

In Asare Konadu's A Woman in Her Prime, Pokuwaa's failure to bear a child is the wound that drives the whole story, and her two earlier marriages, before her union with Kwadwo, form the background of that anxiety. Both marriages ended in divorce, and in each case her childlessness was made the cause of the breakdown.

The first husband. Pokuwaa's first marriage collapsed because no child came. In the traditional Akan world of Brenhoma village, a wife's worth is measured largely by her fertility, and the pressure of family expectation fell heavily on her. When months and years passed without pregnancy, the marriage lost its purpose in the eyes of the community, and the union was dissolved. The barrenness was assumed to be her fault, and she carried the blame and the shame.

The second husband. Her second marriage followed the same painful pattern. Again she remained childless, and again the relationship broke down under the weight of that failure. The repetition deepens her reputation as a woman who cannot conceive and hardens the villagers' and her own mother's conviction that some spiritual obstacle stands in her way.

The effect on Pokuwaa. These two failed marriages leave Pokuwaa scarred but resilient. They drive her, and especially her mother, into a long round of sacrifices, consultations with fetish priests and ritual observances aimed at removing the supposed curse of barrenness. They also explain her guarded, patient attitude in her third marriage to Kwadwo, and her quiet determination to keep her dignity and her hard-won independence as a farmer.

Thematic significance. Pokuwaa's experience with her first two husbands dramatises the novel's central concern: the cruelty of a society that reduces a woman to her womb. The marriages fail not because of any lack of love or industry on her part, but because tradition allows a childless wife no security. Her endurance through these losses prepares the reader for her eventual, hard-earned motherhood and for the novel's gentle questioning of blind custom.