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| LitNet is ’n onafhanklike joernaal op die Internet, en word as gesamentlike onderneming deur Ligitprops 3042 BK en Media24 bedryf. |
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The Joys of Motherhood
Buchi Emecheta
Among African writers, the Nigerian author Buchi Emecheta is a well-established
figure. None of her works has equalled The Joys of Motherhood in its
well-deserved and enduring fame, however. It can be considered one of the classics
of the African novel tradition. Some readers even see it as a sort of “counterpart”
to the most famous of all African English novels, Achebe’s Things Fall
Apart, in that it depicts the beginnings of the colonisation as this incursion
affected the Igbo people of Eastern Nigeria — but unlike Achebe’s
somewhat male-centred view of Igbo life, Emecheta provides a strongly female
(though no less complex) perspective on the same culture.
The novel has one of the most memorable, striking opening scenes amongst the
many I know. It depicts Nnu Ego, the main protagonist (a young mother living
with her husband, a washerman to a white couple, in the huge city of Lagos)
at the moment that she discovers that her long-awaited baby boy, her first child,
has suddenly and inexplicably died in his sleep. The horror of it is so overwhelming
that she reels back and then rushes away in a state of dementia, intent only
on casting herself from the main city bridge to drown there. But even in huge,
polyglot Lagos, someone in the early morning crowd — a fellow-Igbo —
recognises and restrains her, and she is pacified and returned to her home.
Of course the reader has by now recognised how profoundly sardonic the name
of this novel is, a realisation only intensified as (in the following chapters)
one is taken into the background of Nnu Ego’s situation.
Her mother’s short life, that ended soon after Nnu Ego’s birth, is
vividly told. The chapter called “The Mother’s Mother” begins
by describing Nnu Ego’s father, however, a man who was one of the great
lords of his village community. Already a mature and wealthy man with numerous
wives, Agbadi had only one woman in his heart — Ona, the “priceless
jewel” or apple of the eye of his oldest friend, a delightful, spirited
woman many years younger than himself. Emecheta tells this preamble story with
consummate skill for, although it is an endearingly “romantic” tale,
it is shot through with her sardonic recognition that the relationship is nevertheless
profoundly askew in its power relations. Ona — who seems able (in the old
expression) to twist both her mature lover and her father around her little
finger — is (nevertheless) caught in a sort of cross-fire of possessive
demands upon her from both these men. On her death-bed (she dies when her and
Agbadi’s second baby is still-born) she — poignantly- asks the heart-broken
Agbadi to “allow [their daughter, Nnu Ego] to have a life of her own, a
husband if she wants one. Allow her to be a woman” (28).
Nnu Ego is a considerably more conventional person than her mother was. Always
eager to please her widowed father, she marries the glamorous young husband
whom he chooses for her with great hopes. It all soon turns sour, however, when
she is unable to conceive, and is supplanted by a fertile young second wife
and ignominiously assaulted and rejected by her husband. Well-meaning as he
is, Agbadi decides to soothe his daughter’s wounded feelings by marrying
her off a second time — as far away as possible from their area (where
she might run into her first husband). The second husband, unfortunately, is
even more unsuitable: fat and unattractive, but impenetrably complacent in his
maleness. Nnu Ego, at first full of disdain towards Nnaife, reluctantly begins
to accept him when she falls pregnant. For this short period, and here only,
Nnu Ego experiences something of the joyousness that the title seems to invoke
— but then fate snatches her child from her.
Without the novelist articulating the point in so many words, this loss produces
a neurosis in Nnu Ego that she never overcomes. It enslaves her to ensure the
survival of her numerous subsequent children (especially her sons) at whatever
cost to her own health or quality of life this may require. She withdraws into
motherhood, no longer trading or visiting, and the family falls into real poverty
when Nnaife’s British employers leave. He is forced to accept a job that
takes him out of the country and Nnu Ego is left to fend for herself and her
children. The terrible, terrifying life of the urban poor descends upon them.
Nnu Ego gets a second boy and life gets even harder.
Suddenly, Nnaife returns. At least he has made some money, and for a brief while
they are quite prosperous. Then comes the news that his elder bother has died,
and, according to Igbo custom, Nnaife has to “inherit” one of the
widowed wives — who arrives almost immediately with her daughter, confident
of being accepted. But maintaining the old customs in the urban environment
is hard, almost unbearable for Nnu Ego. Gallingly, she has to lie and witness
her husband and his second wife’s sexual enthusiasm. And in so cash-strapped
a household, rivalries and tensions constantly intensify.
Nnaife’s attitude towards Nnu Ego hardens — he is especially disdainful
towards their twin daughters as “mere” girls.
Suddenly Nnaife is forcefully conscripted into the army, for World War II has
broken out and Britain needs soldiers. The two wives are left to fend for themselves
and the houseful of children. While Nnu Ego again subsides into destitution,
her co-wife becomes a prosperous trader. But because she has no male child and
feels unvalued, the younger woman decides to leave the household, even indulging
in prostitution. Nnu Ego wraps “respectability” around her like a
cloak. In the narrator’s ironic description, Nnu Ego wishes her departing
co-wife well “as she crawled further into the urine-stained mats on her
bug-ridden bed” (169).
The intractable patriarchal perspective that was drummed into Nnu Ego keeps
taking its toll on her. Her boys must be educated; her daughters must help her
to earn. When Nnaife at last returns he does little to lighten her load. His
mind is set on “compensation” for the absconded co-wife. This time
he chooses a sixteen-year-old girl whose bride price swallows up much of his
army pay. Nnu Ego’s outcry against such foolishness is to no avail. “Her
love and duty for her children were like her chain of slavery” (186). The
sons all do well and become highly educated, but further rifts develop in the
family. Given his flabby nature it is predictable that Nnaife blames his quarrels
with his children on Nnu Ego.
Most devastating to Nnu Ego is his venom directed against her when one of their
twin daughters runs away to marry against his wishes. When he is jailed for
his violent attack on the family his daughter went to, the rift between him
and Nnu Ego is final. In her later years (she is in fact only middle-aged),
Nnu Ego returns to the village of her youth, but she is broken in body and spirit.
Although some of her children lovingly support her, she feels abandoned and
betrayed. Her death is a lonely one. Her eldest son gives her the “most
costly second burial” the village has ever seen. But it is too late. All
her bright vitality drained away much too soon.
Perhaps an account of this kind makes the novel seem a mere tale of woe. What
is remarkable, though, is how intelligent a book Emecheta has written. The writing
is beautifully vivid and the detail well observed. Moreover, the author’s
ability to hold one’s attention is superbly skilful. There is always something
of a distance, something of a warning in the narrator’s tone, and surprisingly,
a sort of black humour. For the main character Nnu Ego is, for all the profound
empathy with which her tale is told, a woman who knuckles under, who is to some
extent at least complicit in the web of patriarchal values that enmeshes her.
Her story is tragic — and at the same time ironically cautionary. Emecheta’s
exposure of the woes of modernisation’s uncomfortable incorporation of
ancient hierarchies is one that no reader will easily forget.
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