Buchi Emecheta:-
Buchi Emecheta OBE was a Nigerian novelist who has published over 20 books, including Second-Class Citizen (1974), The Bride Price (1976), The Slave Girl (1977), and The Joys of Motherhood (1979). Her themes of child slavery, motherhood, female independence, and freedom through education have won her considerable critical acclaim and honors, including an Order of the British Empire in 2005. Emecheta once described her stories as "stories of the world.... women face the universal problems of poverty and oppression, and the longer they stay, no matter where they have come from originally, the more the problems become identical."
From 1965 to 1969, Emecheta worked as a library officer for the British Museum in London. From 1969 to 1976 she was a youth worker and sociologist for the Inner London Education Authority, and from 1976 to 1978 she was a community worker.
Following her success as an author, Emecheta traveled widely as a visiting professor and lecturer. From 1972 to 1979 she visited several American universities, including Pennsylvania State University, Rutgers University, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
From 1980 to 1981, she was a senior resident fellow and visiting professor of English, University of Calabar, Nigeria. In 1982 she lectured at Yale University, and the University of London, as well as holding a fellowship at the University of London in 1986. From 1982 to 1983 Buchi Emecheta, together with her journalist son Sylvester, ran the Ogwugwu Afor Publishing Company.
Double colonization of women:-
The Joys of Motherhood is a novel that gives the impression that it might well appeal to western feminists. With motherhood as its theme, and the irony of its title, it appears to be part of the significant body of feminist literature concerned with women's experience of motherhood in patriarchal cultures. John Updike, in his review for The New Yorker, calls it "a graceful, touching, ironically titled tale that bears a plain feminist message". However, the messages contained in Buchi Emecheta's tale are neither plain nor traditionally feminist.
In fact, the morals of Nnu Ego's story are disclosed in a literary style that is only fleetingly satisfactory, or even familiar, to the western feminist reader. Despite its subject matter, the novel rejects the feminist codes normally associated with motherhood. Instead of utilizing the celebratory or critical gestures towards motherhood that we normally associate with feminist discourse, The Joys of Motherhood draws us into unfamiliar territory where the relationship of motherhood to female subjectivity becomes everything or nothing.
To begin, I would like to summarise what we might mean by western feminist interpretations of the woman-authored African text. Female-authored Third World literature became popular with feminist publishers and readers in the First World for a number of reasons. As a postcolonial and literary rendering of English, it represented at once an engagement with, and alienation from, a language that Euro-American feminists have identified as oppressive and man-made, responding, therefore with frustration about the restrictions placed upon women writers historically, especially in Europe. Secondly, it rejected or disrupted male European forms of writing previously assumed to be normative.
Conventional feminist responses to The Joys of Motherhood are unsettled by an unfixed, third-person narrative that maps the life of one woman, and the cultural and self-constructed expectations of motherhood to which she is subjected. The maternal body itself directs the narrative, which is structured around the ability of its central character, Nnu Ego, to bear children. While the novel contains a series of epiphanies as Nnu Ego confronts personal and social crises, it is not a quest novel in the European sense of the tradition. Her purpose is not to achieve liberation or even self-knowledge, but to bring into the world many healthy sons who will care for her in old age. Her dependence upon her maternal body to provide her with identity, status and, finally, personal welfare, defies the conventions of the Euro-American feminist quest in which women's pre-ordained roles as wives and mothers are consciously over-turned. Instead, Nnu Ego represents women who, from birth, are assigned as chattels. Their true value becomes known once they are old enough to marry and conceive children, in particular sons. So, while women are extremely important in one way, their status is completely lost, or is never gained, if this maternal expectation remains unfulfilled. While relating the crisis of motherhood that disrupts and then destroys the life of Nnu Ego, the unstable narrative itself exposes the difficulties of defining female subjectivity beyond the constraints of fertility and motherhood. Consequently, the troubles that Nnu Ego encounters in her life are mirrored in the text, which seems either unable or unwilling to fix female identity beyond the condition of motherhood.
The narrative hints that the elusive "real woman" might lie in the powerful image of Nnu Ego's own mother, Ona. On her deathbed she urges her lover, Agdabi, to allow their daughter to have a life of her own. Through this scene, Ona asserts that a real woman is someone whose feelings of worth do not depend on fulfilling the expectations of a father and husband; in other words, a woman who does not define herself as a chattel, but as an independent individual. Ona's refusal to marry is ostensibly to please her father, but we learn that the real reason is to allow her to maintain her sexual and economic independence. Agdabi's interpretation of Ona's dying wish is, however, quite different from what one may assume given Ona's ideas concerning women's independence. He believes that for his daughter to achieve womanhood, she must be married and become a mother of sons and, to do this successfully, she must accept the authority of her father and husband. The conflict between dominant cultural constructions of womanhood—to which Nnu Ego is compelled to adhere—and an untrammelled female subjectivity symbolised by her mother Ona is established early in the text. This dichotomy concerning female identity underlies the novel's ambiguities, and causes the series of events that lead to Nnu Ego's decline. It is her untimely death that permits narrative closure and emphasises both the danger and the hopelessness of her quest.
The novel opens in Lagos in 1934 with the cinematic image of Nnu Ego running wildly through the streets after discovering the body of her dead baby. She is sightless, wordless, and formless. With no identity outside the designation of mother, she feels she is incapable of existing. A fellow Igbo who encounters the despairing woman prevents her suicide and, from this point, Nnu Ego's journey through life unfolds before her like the life of a person who is about to drown. The narrator's reference to drowning warns the reader that the story we are about to experience is the story of a person who will not survive. Nnu Ego's failure to conceive in the first months of marriage seriously affects the rest of her life. She becomes emotionally unstable and is beaten and finally rejected by her husband. She is returned to her father, who by custom is obliged to find her another husband. She is required to travel to Lagos, far from her tribal connections, to live with her new husband Nnaife, a man whom she finds repellent.
Nnu Ego's reaction to Nnaife (translated from Igbo means "Little Father", another of the novel's many paradoxes) indicates her own ideas about what constitutes masculinity. She says that "with a belly like a pregnant cow", and his hair worn in the long style of a mourning widow, Nnaife has the appearance and demeanour of a middle-aged woman. To Nnu Ego and the society in which she lives, a middle-aged widow has, of course, no value. She is husband-less and past her childbearing years. Through Nnu Ego's harsh appraisal, the reader learns that the colonisation by, and servitude to, the British has not just emasculated Igbo men like Nnaife, but also made them worthless. In a society in which domestic servitude is equated with femininity, their loss of power is confirmed by their feminine appearance. Nnu Ego also notes with some irony that the economic exploitation of men like Nnaife is tantamount to slavery, which colonial rule has nevertheless deemed immoral and has made illegal for indigenous Nigerians to practice.
Throughout the text, as in Emecheta's other work, marriage and motherhood are constructed as modern allegories for slavery. In The Joys of Motherhood, Nnu Ego works extremely hard for very little money to feed and educate her children. In addition, the unexpected and enduring love she has for her children becomes itself a form of emotional bondage from which escape is impossible. The narrative makes a series of connections between marriage, motherhood, slavery, and colonisation: all form a unique literary discourse that has the potential to be shared by other women writers of the Black Diaspora. A literature that acknowledges a common history of slavery and colonisation, overlaid with contemporary representations of marriage and motherhood, is capable of uniting the political concerns of Black women in different parts of the world, and also of stressing the importance of the individual in the face of change.
Throughout the text, we are frequently reminded of Nnu Ego's chi, a spirit who accompanies her throughout her life and who is responsible for both her good and bad fortune. Nnu Ego's chi is the spirit of a slave woman who was buried alive with her dead mistress, the senior wife of Nnu Ego's father. With the difficult circumstances that befall Nnu Ego in adulthood—infertility, poverty, hunger, and exploitation—the chi appears to impose upon the living woman her own lowly rank, and what Nnu Ego perceives as the slave's revenge provides her with an explanation for her misfortune.
Nnu Ego is overjoyed when she discovers she is capable of conceiving after all and she is able to enjoy, for a brief period pregnancy and motherhood unimpeded by tradition in which motherhood is constructed as a duty to the father and husband. Her new-found ability to bear children does not only satisfy her maternal longings and fulfil social expectations, it provides her with the only form of feminine identity she is permitted, or can contemplate: motherhood. After her son's birth, she feels like a "real woman" and is gratified that there will be somebody left behind to refer to her as "mother". Thus Nnu Ego's overriding desire to be a mother is important for her in death as well as in life. Immediately after her first child dies in infancy, Nnu Ego publicly attempts suicide by trying to fall from a busy bridge. A bystander comments that she is not mad but that, "she has only just lost the baby that told the world that she was not barren". Later in the novel, in a contest between mother and father for control over the oldest son, Nnaife's younger wife tells Nnu Ego that, "In Ibuza sons help their father more than they ever help their mother. A mother's joy is only in the name". Here, Adaku reminds Nnu Ego that the joy of motherhood is only ever an illusion; that mothers cannot expect to gain happiness from the children themselves, only a kind of happiness gained from the knowledge of the status that motherhood brings. Adaku here expresses the wisdom that continues to elude Nnu Ego and, for a period in the narrative, she represents the voice of modern Black feminism.
The image of Africa as female recurs in anti-colonial, as well as colonial discourses. In an appropriation of the Mother Africa trope by anti-colonial male writers, Africa is frequently represented as the figure of a woman, who is on the one hand, young, beautiful, and fertile, and on the other, "raped", degraded, and impoverished. Stratton argues that these contradictory images do not reflect genuine concerns for the economic and political position of African women, but instead represent a projection of the degradation that men feel as a result of colonisation. Despite this, mothers and motherhood remain a powerful symbolic force in both male- and female-authored Black literature. In a parallel reading of the Joys of Motherhood with Alice Walker's Meridian, Barbara Christian asserts that matrilineal connection is an important theme for women writers of the Black Diaspora because it counters the damage to the family caused by slavery and European colonisation. To Christian, textual representations of the joys and sorrows of motherhood are capable of emphasising the historical and cultural connections between Black women worldwide. But, possibly because of the apparent permanence of motherhood in the face of unrelenting political and social change, African male writers have represented women as politically static and ahistorical.
The Joys of Motherhood and Meridian vigorously re-write this assumption, revealing women as both victims and agents of change. For the female African writer, the mother figure is also capable of bridging the gap between the oral storyteller and the creator of the written word, thus strengthening the connection between women's traditional role and that of the published author in English. Most importantly, however, the image of the mother is capable of re-assigning the figure of women in African literary discourse. According to Stratton, whether a woman is "canonised as mother or stigmatised as prostitute, the designation is degrading, for he [the male writer/narrator] does the naming and her experience as a woman is trivialised and distorted" (52). Stratton proposes that pregnancy and childbirth in male-authored African literature have come to signify the writer/narrator's own interpretation of his nation's history, in particular, how each pregnancy might indicate the potential for a new beginning for the nation as well as his own renewed potency. Female-authored representations of women and motherhood are capable of re-writing these metaphors. The Joys of Motherhood addresses the false consciousness of the Mother Africa trope through the life story of Nnu Ego. By relocating motherhood from metaphor to social realism, Emecheta critiques the ways in which the myths of motherhood are imposed on Nigerian women and also re-writes the Mother Africa trope of anti-colonial discourse. As Stratton notes, The Joys of Motherhood succeeds in exposing the unreliable male-authored narratives of African nationalism, narratives in which lofty ideas of nationhood are masculine in nature, while social and political difficulties that beset the newly independent nation are presented as feminine.
Despite Emecheta's refusal to subscribe to literary nationalism practised by her male counterparts, an important comparison between Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart and The Joys of Motherhood can be made. Emecheta and Achebe are both Igbo writers for whom the novel in English is a means to inscribe and assert the African subject in literary discourse, and whose writing is overlaid with concern about the survival and well-being of the Igbo people. If we look at the texts as parables about individuals, subjected to overwhelming change, who in failing to adapt to these changes do not survive, then there are a number of meaningful similarities. Okonkwo and Nnu Ego symbolise both the positive and negative aspects of their tribal culture. The conflict that they encounter throughout their adult lives echoes their nation's tension between tradition and modernity and, through their own struggle to survive, they anticipate Nigeria's struggle for political independence. The novels are set in different times in Nigeria's history: Things Fall Apart takes place in the 1890s, and The Joys of Motherhood during the middle of the twentieth century. In Achebe's novel, Okonkwo is paralysed by the changes he is forced to consider as colonisation and Christianity threaten his traditional beliefs. As the daughter of a powerful chief, Nnu Ego is compelled to follow the customs of her father's generation but in an urban, colonial environment in which they have little relevance.
In their depiction of the inability of the individual to adapt to modernity, the texts invoke Franz Fanon's manifesto for the survival of Africa which proposes that the people must discard all the harmful customs of pre-European contact and adhere only to those that are capable of nurturing the people. At the same time, Fanon urges Africans to take the positive things from European colonisation and disregard the rest. Nnaife's second wife, Adaku, recognises the need to do this if she and her children are to flourish. She picks and chooses from tradition and modernity, discarding the customs that will disadvantage her like being a virtuous wife to Nnaife. As a consequence, she and her daughters thrive. In contrast, Nnu Ego remains loyal to her husband to the bitter end. In a delightful but ultimately destructive twist of fate, her testimony in the British colonial court as the good, traditional wife is what ruins Nnaife's case and lands him in prison. So the virtuous senior wife whom Nnaife has exploited throughout her life is the very person who unwittingly brings about his undoing.
Their son, Oshia, on the other hand, relinquishes all his traditional obligations. According to custom, he is responsible for the emotional and physical well-being of his ageing parents, and his failure to provide for them means they can survive neither the historical circumstances in which they find themselves, nor the painful awareness of their son's neglect. Unlike Adaku, Oshia rejects tradition outright. In this way, he represents the migrant African who takes advantage of all the things that colonisation and independence have to offer, but turns his back on the transformed, but troubled, nation and mother, leaving it and her to flounder. Here the text articulates the connection between the plight of women and the plight of Africa, a connection dominating texts by anti-colonial male writers. But Emecheta never reduces the woman/mother to a symbol for the nation. The novel's concerns are about the condition and status of real women and mothers. If there is a plain feminist message in the Joys of Motherhood, as Updike suggests, then it is borne by the absent mother, Ona, and enacted by the junior wife, Adaku: women must, when they can, seize the right to control their lives if they and their people are to survive.
