Hustling Is Not Stealing
Stories of an African Bar Girl
-
- $49.99
-
- $49.99
Publisher Description
While living in West Africa in the 1970s, John Chernoff recorded the stories of “Hawa,” a spirited and brilliant but uneducated woman whose insistence on being respected and treated fairly propelled her, ironically, into a life of marginality and luck as an “ashawo,” or bar girl. Rejecting traditional marriage options and cut off from family support, she is like many women in Africa who come to depend on the help they receive from one another, from boyfriends, and from the men they meet in bars and nightclubs. Refusing to see herself as a victim, Hawa embraces the freedom her lifestyle permits and seeks the broadest experience available to her.
In Hustling Is Not Stealing and its follow-up, Exchange Is Not Robbery, a chronicle of exploitation is transformed by verbal art into an ebullient comedy. In Hustling Is Not Stealing, Hawa is a playful warrior struggling against circumstances in Ghana and Togo. In Exchange Is Not Robbery, Hawa returns to her native Burkina Faso, where she achieves greater control over her life but faces new difficulties. As a woman making sacrifices to live independently, Hawa sees her own situation become more complex as she confronts an atmosphere in Burkina Faso that is in some ways more challenging than the one she left behind, and the moral ambiguities of her life begin to intensify.
Combining elements of folklore and memoir, Hawa’s stories portray the diverse social landscape of West Africa. Individually the anecdotes can be funny, shocking, or poignant; assembled together they offer a sweeping critical and satirical vision.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Chernoff, a longtime student of Ghanaian drumming and author of African Rhythm and African Sensibility, met the pseudonymous Hawa in Ghana in 1971 and started taping her stories in 1977. Born in Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso) in the 1960s, three-year-old Hawa lived with various relatives after her mother died, eventually joining her father's family in Kumasi, capital of the Ashanti region of Ghana. At 16, she refused an arranged Muslim marriage and started making her own life. Moving to Accra, she became an "ashawo" woman variously described as a hustler, bar girl or "pay-as-you-go" wife. When economic conditions deteriorated in Ghana in the early 1970s, Hawa migrated first to neighboring Togo, and then to Upper Volta, when anti-Ghanaian sentiment mounted in Togo. While emigration was a survival tactic, Hawa also viewed it as an opportunity to see how other people lived and hear their tales. Indeed, there's a restlessness that pervades Hawa's stories, whether she's describing her girlhood, her girlfriends, the men she's lived with or people who've tried to get the better of her. In Chernoff's admiring eyes, Hawa is a classic trickster, cleverly resourceful at manipulating bad situations for her own ends. Her story is a "giddy celebration of her will to dignity." Hawa and her ashawo friends are poor, but they're "not about to let their poverty spoil their life completely." Chernoff follows his lengthy and insightful introduction with hundreds of pages of transcriptions of Hawa's somewhat repetitive anecdotes as well as a glossary. A second volume, Exchange Is Not Robbery, will chronicle Hawa's travels after Togo.
