African Literature

Name: Hirva Pandya

Roll No.: 10

Enrollment No.: 4069206420210022

Paper no: 206

Paper code: 22413

Paper name: African Literature 

Sem.: 4 (Batch 2021- 2023)

Submitted to: Smt S.B. Gardi Department of English, M.K. Bhavnagar University

About Buchi Emecheta 

Buchi Emecheta, in full Florence Onyebuchi Emecheta, (born July 21, 1944, Lagos, Nigeria—died January 25, 2017, London, England), Igbo writer whose novels deal largely with the difficult and unequal role of women in both immigrant and African societies and explore the tension between tradition and modernity.

Most of Emecheta’s other novels—including The Bride Price (1976), The Slave Girl (1977), The Joys of Motherhood (1979), Destination Biafra (1982), and Double Yoke (1982)—are realistic works of fiction set in Nigeria. Perhaps her strongest work, The Rape of Shavi (1983), is also the most difficult to categorize. Set in an imaginary idyllic African kingdom, it explores the dislocations that occur when a plane carrying Europeans seeking to escape an imminent nuclear disaster crashes.

About Novel:Joys  of Motherhood 

The Joys of Motherhood was written by Buchi Emecheta, a Nigerian-born British author, and published by Allison & Busby in 1979. Emecheta has written and published over twenty works, from novels to plays, each of which delve into the complexities of what it means to be a woman and a mother in societies where the morals and traditions are constantly changing. The protagonist, Nnu Ego, has bad fortune with childbearing, and through her life centered on her children, she gains her community’s respect.

Emecheta also criticizes Ibos who use male privilege to their advantage, oppressing women, wives and daughters. Though women can be mothers, bearing children and raising them, the “joys of motherhood” are also painful and anxiety-inducing.

The Joys of Motherhood is one of Emecheta’s most pivotal and well known works, giving criticism on colonialism, tradition, and women’s roles and how they affect one woman, Nnu Ego, and her family

How Buchi Emecheta's The Joys of Motherhood Resists Feminist and Nationalist Readings

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.

WHAT JOYS IN MOTHERHOOD?

Though Emecheta’s text is titled The Joys of Motherhood, the story is about anything but. There is little doubt that Emecheta intended the title of her text to be sardonic and mocking. Nnu Ego fervently desires children and dedicates most of her life to having and raising her children. Unfortunately, in the end, Nnu Ego dies alone and is scorned by her village for not being content with the knowledge that her children were successful. Despite having multiple children who become successful professionally due to her sacrifices, they only return after her death to throw her a grand funeral. She never truly experiences the ‘joys’ promised to her.

In a reflection following her death in 2017, Emecheta’s son, Sylvester Onwordi notes that his mother ‘always preferred the life of the family’ and many scholars have noted that Emecheta’s feminist critique is complicated by the central role of family in African cultures. Emecheta’s text is pointedly critical of how the Nigerian society promises a utopic ideal in motherhood. Then and now, childbirth can be viewed as a culturally controlled activity that is inextricably linked with nationalistic goals when analysed on a macro level. For instance, Nigeria’s four-child policy in 1988 as a means of population control—a decision it took in conjunction with a major pillar of the World Bank’s neoliberal structural adjustment programme—is a good example of the state’s role in dictating women’s reproductive choices.

THE JOYS OF MOTHERHOOD AND ITS SUCCESSORS

Historically and culturally, having large family units were seen as beneficial in agrarian societies for the effective tilling and cultivation of huge swaths of lands (although this view is contested today). This belief is exemplified in The Joys of Motherhood as Nnu Ego’s first husband, Amatokwu, remarries quickly when Nnu Ego is unable to conceive, moving her to another hut for older (read: menopausal and thus unable to give birth) wives, and enlists her in farm work to manifest some other economic value since she cannot produce children to aid in the farm activities. Women producing heirs and necessary labour was considered crucial in such times to generate wealth. Hence, giving context to a cultural order that was created through economic motivations. The more children in a family unit, the more work could be done and, the more productive that family, the better off the community to which they belonged. Hence, the link between reproduction and communal imperatives. In such communities, putting motherhood on a pedestal, could be said to provide a manufactured incentive for women to undergo the challenging process of childbirth and the ensuing lifelong commitment to raising children who can perform labour, thus ensuring economic viability in the long run. This is not to suggest, that childbearing and/or rearing only occurs in response to materialist principles, but that on a societal scale, culture and beliefs around reproduction are often shaped by these principles.

A woman is more than her womb. This is the lesson that Buchi Emecheta’s novel The Joys of Motherhood impressed on me when I first encountered it in my second year of secondary school. A simple idea then and now, yet it remains charged with socio-political tension both in Nigeria as well as in the diaspora. Especially as conversations about reproductive justice and the state’s role in controlling women’s reproductive capacities continues to become polarized and politicized on numerous stages.

It has been more than four decades since the publication of Emecheta’s novel yet the issues it attends to are far from resolved. In 1979, when The Joys of Motherhood was released, second-wave feminism which had largely centred the voices and perspectives of middle-class White women was coming to an end. Meanwhile, what we might refer to as Nigerian feminism today, was burgeoning with the establishment of the political group, Women in Nigeria, in 1983, four years after the publication of Emecheta’s fifth novel. The Joys of Motherhood could be considered as one of the forebears of feminist issues on reproductive justice and culture within the rich Nigerian literary tradition. On par with Flora Nwapa’s 1966 Efuru.

However, it is worth noting that Buchi Emecheta might have disagreed with the feminist label while more strongly identifying with Black womanism as described by Alice Walker—especially given Walker’s nuanced work on race and class. Nonetheless, Emecheta’s oeuvre serves as a foundation for what many Nigerians practice and understand today as feminism. This necessitates reading the Joys of Motherhood as a precursor to contemporary Nigerian feminist texts.

WHAT JOYS IN MOTHERHOOD?

Though Emecheta’s text is titled The Joys of Motherhood, the story is about anything but. There is little doubt that Emecheta intended the title of her text to be sardonic and mocking. Nnu Ego fervently desires children and dedicates most of her life to having and raising her children. Unfortunately, in the end, Nnu Ego dies alone and is scorned by her village for not being content with the knowledge that her children were successful. Despite having multiple children who become successful professionally due to her sacrifices, they only return after her death to throw her a grand funeral. She never truly experiences the ‘joys’ promised to her.

In a reflection following her death in 2017, Emecheta’s son, Sylvester Onwordi notes that his mother ‘always preferred the life of the family’ and many scholars have noted that Emecheta’s feminist critique is complicated by the central role of family in African cultures. Emecheta’s text is pointedly critical of how the Nigerian society promises a utopic ideal in motherhood. Then and now, childbirth can be viewed as a culturally controlled activity that is inextricably linked with nationalistic goals when analysed on a macro level. For instance, Nigeria’s four-child policy in 1988 as a means of population control—a decision it took in conjunction with a major pillar of the World Bank’s neoliberal structural adjustment programme—is a good example of the state’s role in dictating women’s reproductive choices.

In a world rife with materialism due to widespread capitalism, the power dynamics of reproductive agency are influenced by questions of what is profitable, and what has economic value. Consider the situation in China, where the one-child policy was rolled back to two children and is now being rolled back to three given the positive impact of a more youthful population on the economy. Collectively, these show how regulation of women’s reproductive capacities exists within capitalist structures.

THE JOYS OF MOTHERHOOD AND ITS SUCCESSORS

Historically and culturally, having large family units were seen as beneficial in agrarian societies for the effective tilling and cultivation of huge swaths of lands (although this view is contested today). This belief is exemplified in The Joys of Motherhood as Nnu Ego’s first husband, Amatokwu, remarries quickly when Nnu Ego is unable to conceive, moving her to another hut for older (read: menopausal and thus unable to give birth) wives, and enlists her in farm work to manifest some other economic value since she cannot produce children to aid in the farm activities. Women producing heirs and necessary labour was considered crucial in such times to generate wealth. Hence, giving context to a cultural order that was created through economic motivations. The more children in a family unit, the more work could be done and, the more productive that family, the better off the community to which they belonged. Hence, the link between reproduction and communal imperatives. In such communities, putting motherhood on a pedestal, could be said to provide a manufactured incentive for women to undergo the challenging process of childbirth and the ensuing lifelong commitment to raising children who can perform labour, thus ensuring economic viability in the long run. This is not to suggest, that childbearing and/or rearing only occurs in response to materialist principles, but that on a societal scale, culture and beliefs around reproduction are often shaped by these principles.

Despite our pretences to the contrary, Nigeria in the modern era is no different. Miscarriages and stillborn children are still considered a taboo as well. ‘What will people think’ is silently whispered in Church about women who lose their babies to such health complications. The pity towards such women is apparent and thick with condescension. The popular elementary school song declares that motherhood is ‘precious and unaffordable’, however, the reality laid bare in texts like Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood show how stifling and constrictive it can be instead.

With that in mind, the parallels between Emecheta’s Nnu Ego, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Olanna in Half of a Yellow Sun, Lola Shoneyin’s Bolanle in The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives, and Ayobami Adebayo’s Yejide in Stay With Me are striking. These women, like Nnu Ego, had to negotiate their place in a society that had cultural expectations of fertility while struggling to conceive. Yet, what is perhaps most striking is that despite the variance in settings (historical and geographical), these characters have a shared experience. The same issues Emecheta wrote on in 1979 with Nnu Ego, are still being contended within more recent texts such as the 2006 Half of a Yellow Sun, the 2010 The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives, and the 2017 Stay With Me. A poignant scene in Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun that helps underscore this is Olanna’s encounter with the mother (Mama) of Odenigboho accuses her of being a witch because she allegedly did not suck her mother’s breasts a scene made more harrowing when an impassioned Onyeka Onwenu delivers it to a visibly shocked Thandiwe Newton in the film adaptation. The implication here is that Olanna is unnatural and unfit to raise Mama’s grandchildren because she was not nursed by her mother—that is, how can Olanna be a mother when her own mother was not an ‘adequate’ mother to her? It is following this that Olanna and Odenigbo decide to start trying for a child, her failure to conceive making her feel something might be wrong with her body.

PROBLEMATIZING REPRODUCTIVE AGENCY IN NIGERIA

In the foregoing texts, the women are keen to fulfil their prescribed reproductive duties, and everything around steers them towards that promised ‘ultimate destiny’ through which they ought to self-actualize. When they struggle to conceive, that ‘failing’ tattoos shame across their psyche, making them question their bodies. Their personhood seems to be premised on their ability to give birth. The expectation of women to aspire to ‘the joys of motherhood’ is the conventional wisdom that is embedded within our cultures; hence a child is the currency that secures a woman’s place in her in-laws’ home. In a shared cultural context where family comes first, this is rarely seen as a burden.

    What is 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.

    These critical approaches to the Third World text, while potentially rewarding and enlightening, are nevertheless problematic. Donna Haraway, US academic and cultural critic, places The Joys of Motherhood on her reading list to demonstrate to Women's Studies students the pleasures and dangers of misreading writing by Black women. Haraway proposes that the recognised correlation between postcolonial, literary, and gender theories have restructured the various meanings that lie beyond the category of  "women's experience", a category which she argues, "does not pre-exist as a kind of prior resource, ready simply to be appropriated ... 'Experience', like 'consciousness', is an intentional construction, an artefact of the first importance"

Work cited

Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Buchi Emecheta". Encyclopedia Britannica, 21 Jan. 2023, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Buchi-Emecheta. Accessed 30 March 2023.

Emecheta, Buchi, et al. “The Joys of Motherhood Background.” GradeSaver, https://www.gradesaver.com/the-joys-of-motherhood.

Joseph, Mobólúwajídìde. “Buchi Emecheta's 'the Joys of Motherhood'.” The Republic, 18 May 2022, https://republic.com.ng/october-november-2021/the-joys-of-motherhood/.

South, Patricia McLean - Deep. “How Buchi Emecheta's The Joys of Motherhood Resists Feminist and Nationalist Readings.” Deep South - Patricia Mclean - Buchi Emecheta - the Joys of Motherhood - Page 1, https://www.otago.ac.nz/deepsouth/2003_01/motherhood.html#:~:text=The%20Joys%20of%20Motherhood%20is,of%20motherhood%20in%20patriarchal%20cultures.