The Joys of Motherhood by Buchi Emecheta

 The Joys of Motherhood by Buchi Emecheta

This blog is a task assigned by Megha Ma’am. In this blog I'll write about the novel ‘The Joys of Motherhood’ which is written by Buchi Emecheta. Here I'll try to answer some of the questions regarding this novel which is mentioned in the task.

Buchi Emecheta- 

Florence Onyebuchi "Buchi" Emecheta OBE (21 July 1944 – 25 January 2017) was a Nigerian-born novelist, based in the UK from 1962, who also wrote plays and an autobiography, as well as works for children. She was the author of more than 20 books, including Second Class Citizen (1974), The Bride Price (1976), The Slave Girl (1977) and The Joys of Motherhood (1979). Most of her early novels were published by Allison and Busby, where her editor was Margaret Busby.

Emecheta's themes of child slavery, motherhood, female independence and freedom through education gained recognition from critics and honors. She once described her stories as "stories of the world, where 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." Her works explore the tension between tradition and modernity. She has been characterized as "the first successful black woman novelist living in Britain after 1948".

The Joys of Motherhood

The Joys of Motherhood is a novel written by Buchi Emecheta. It was first published in London, UK, by Allison & Busby in 1979 and was first published in Heinemann's African Writers Series in 1980 and reprinted in 1982, 2004, 2008. The basis of the novel is the "necessity for a woman to be fertile, and above all to give birth to sons' '. It tells the tragic story of Nnu-Ego, daughter of Nwokocha Agbadi and Ona, who had a bad fate with childbearing. This novel explores the life of a Nigerian woman, Nnu Ego. Nnu's life centers on her children and through them, she gains the respect of her community. Traditional tribal values and customs begin to shift with increasing colonial presence and influence, pushing Ego to challenge accepted notions of "mother", "wife", and "woman". Through Nnu Ego's journey, Emecheta forces her readers to consider the dilemmas associated with adopting new ideas and practices against the inclination to cleave to tradition. In this novel, Emecheta reveals and celebrates the pleasures derived from fulfilling responsibilities related to family matters in child-bearing, mothering, and nurturing activities among women. However, the author additionally highlights how the "joys of motherhood" also include anxiety, obligation, and pain.

Plot -

The protagonist of The Joys of Motherhood, Nnu Ego, is a traditional woman living in a rapidly changing world. The life that she grew up expecting for herself does not come to pass. She expects to become a wife and mother, working hard in her youth for her family, but being taken care of and honored by her children in her old age. However, her children grow up in the city of Lagos with very different values than she was raised with. Several of her children even move away to Western countries, and feel little obligation toward their mother.

Though Nnu Ego lives in early 20th century Nigeria, where colonialism and industrialization are rapidly changing the world in which she lives, we can still relate to her today. All over the world, the way we live is changing. Think about your grandparents. When they were just starting to have children, how do you think they expected to spend their old age? Did it turn out that way? Think also about immigrant families. In so many cases, the children of immigrants grow up with very different values than their parents, much like Nnu Ego's children. Will these children, raised in a different culture, provide their parents with the futures their parents grew up expecting? Now think of yourself. How do you expect to spend your old age? Do you think your future will turn out that way?

Genre

The Joys of Motherhood is a coming of age, or bildungsroman novel.

Point of View

The anonymous narrator of the novel speaks in the third person, focusing mostly on the actions and experiences of the protagonist, Nnu Ego, but while also referencing the many characters who surround her. The narrator’s descriptions are at times objective, told from the position of an outsider or observer of this world. Throughout the work, however, the narrator is omniscient, revealing and analyzing the private thoughts and motives of various characters.

Tone

The tone of the narrator of The Joys of Motherhood is mostly detached, attempting to simply report the characters’ thoughts and actions and not trying to pass judgment on the proceedings. At times, however, sympathy for the plight of Nnu Ego does infuse the narrative’s tone.

Tense

The events occurring in The Joys of Motherhood are described in the past tense.

Setting (Time & Place)

The Joys of Motherhood is set in the early 20th century, from 1909 to the 1950s The novel is set in Nigeria—in Ogboli, a village in Ibuza, and in Lagos.

1) “The most celebrated female character in African creative writing is the African mother.” by Marie A. Umeh according to this, is the character of Nnu Ego celebrating motherhood or not? Explain.

The most celebrated female character in African creative writing is the African mother. Anglophone African writers from the subSaharan area esteem her as the epitome of love, strength and affection. This image of the African mother for the most part reflects traditional African societies' mores. African societies highly regard African women for their reproductive ability, and African writers similarly portray African women in roles where they are protecting, comforting and nourishing their children. Accordingly, two predominant images of the African woman as mother dominates African creative writing. The first holds the African mother as a supreme symbol. This in1age of the African mother as supreme is found in the novel Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. Achebe points out that when there is misfortune and sorrow a man finds refuge in his motherland. Achebe contends that "it is to a mother to whom one turns, of whom one speaks of when nostalgia grips, when distress clouds the vision of the moment, when there is sorrow and bitterness, the mother is there to protect you and that is why we say Mother is Supreme." 1 In this novel, Achebe establishes the mother image as representative not only of maternal love, protection and comfort, but also of power and respect. The second portrayal of the African woman as mother depicts her as an all-suffering , self-sacrificing victim. Take Ama, the mother in Christina Aidoo's short story, "No Sweetness Here," as a case in point. According to Aidoo, the typical mother is one who sacrifices herself for her children. Other views of motherhood in African writing depict the African mother as the symbol of security and dignity.

In Buchi Emecheta's novel, The Joys of Motherhood, one witnesses the collapse of these glorifying images of the African Mother. As a literary artist preoccupied with promoting change, author Emecheta, an iconoclast, breaks away from the prevalent portraitures in African writing in which motherhood is honorific. Children do not always maintain strong and loving ties with their mothers throughout adulthood. As Emecheta states in her novel, "the joy of being a mother is the joy of giving all to your children."  The title of the book, which is taken fromFlora Nwapa's novel, Efuru, is then significant and bitterly ironic.  Dazzled by ambitious sons educated outside of traditional Igbo values, Nnu Ego breaks down and her old secure world gives way to a new one. Fully conscious of the irony in her life, she says, 

"a woman with many children could face a lonely old age and maybe a miserable death all

alone, just like a barren woman".

Here Emecheta constructs a wholly different set of economic, socio-political and cultural imperatives which diverge from the existing literary models.

2) “The title of Emecheta's novel is patently ironic, for it would seem that there are few joys associated with motherhood after all.” Explain.

Set in the British colony of Nigeria in the 1930s and 1940s, The Joys of Motherhood details the life story of an Ibo woman named Nnu Ego who escapes the ignominy of a childless first marriage by fleeing to the distant city of Lagos to start anew with a second husband. Nnu Ego's simple dream of becoming a mother-a dream rooted in the cultural values of Ibo society, where motherhood is the primary source of a woman's self-esteem and public status-is happily realized several times over in this new setting. The pleasures associated with motherhood that the protagonist so eagerly anticipates, however, are ultimately negated by the difficult economic conditions of her new urban environment. In short, there are so few job opportunities for her husband to pursue (and so little ambition on his part to pursue them) that Nnu Ego spends her entire life alternately birthing children and working day in and day out as a cigarette peddler to stave off the hunger and poverty that invariably haunt her household. The novel focuses on this grueling battle, a battle that ends in a loss for Nnu Ego, as she witnesses her beloved sons grow up and leave Nigeria for good and her daughters marry and move away. Nnu Ego's hopes of living out her final years in the company of her grandchildren disappear before she turns forty, and she dies at the side of a country road, alone and unnoticed.

The title of Emecheta's novel is patently ironic, for it would seem that there are few joys associated with motherhood after all. And yet while that reality is certainly one message the novel imparts, there is far more to the text than a critique of motherhood. The fact that Emecheta's novel moves beyond this critique to explore the costs of colonialism for women in urban Nigeria is summarized in a crucial passage midway through the novel in which Nnu Ego pauses to assess the injustices of her life in Lagos: "It was not fair, she felt, the way men cleverly used a woman's sense of responsibility to actually enslave her.... [H]ere in Lagos, where she was faced with the harsh reality of making ends meet on a pittance, was it right for her husband to refer to her responsibility? It seemed that all she had inherited from her agrarian background was the responsibility and none of the booty." [6] This excerpt is key in locating the source of Nnu Ego's anguish not in her position as a mother per se, but in her position as a woman who is asked to assume the same obligations of her "agrarian background" within a new cultural setting that confers "none of the booty" normally associated with such labor. Nnu Ego is able to interpret the inequity of this exchange as something that "enslaves" and "imprisons" her. She is also able to identify, at least on some level, the political economy of colonial Lagos as the Western construct of "the new" that proves to be unaccommodating of her traditional role as wife and mother: she notes, for example, that it is the "harsh reality of making ends meet on a pittance" that secures her thralldom.

Here is one YouTube video which can be helpful for better understanding.