SOURCE: “Buchi Emecheta: The Shaping of a Self,” in Komparatistische Hefte, Vol. 8, 1983, pp. 65-78.

[In the following essay, Ogunyemi provides an overview of Emecheta's literary career and the major themes in her novels.]

Easily the most poignant event in Nigeria's Buchi Emecheta's career as a novelist was her husband's crime in burning her first manuscript, a version of what, rewritten, would become The Bride Price. The manuscript had become an extension of Emecheta authenticating her unacknowledged and unacclaimed breadwinning role vis-à-vis her male dependents. The burning was therefore of great symbolic significance. It represented her husband's destroying what was left of their fragile marital relationship. It represented, in another sense, the immolating of Emecheta, the “second-class citizen,” struggling to free herself from the bonds of her father, her brother, and, most especially, her husband. Her husband was intelligent enough to see the manuscript for what it really was: a violent threat to the status quo of his marriage. He acted accordingly to preserve what he thought was left of his manhood.

Undeterred by that incendiary act, or perhaps, incensed by it, Emecheta went on to write and has had published five important feminist novels. She is currently the most prolific and controversial of all black African female novelists. The novels are: In the Ditch (1972); Second-Class Citizen (1974); The Bride Price (1976); The Slave Girl (1977); and The Joys of Motherhood (1979). The first three novels I regard as apprentice pieces which prepared Emecheta for her fourth attempt whose promise has now been fulfilled in her much more mature novel, The Joys of Motherhood. As she moved from the autobiographical to a more fictive medium, she became more expansive. No longer are her talents restricted by the stifling egotism of the earlier novels. The subtle change is noticeable in the differing dedications to her works: the first novel is dedicated to her father; the second to her children; the third to her mother; the fourth to her friend and publisher, Margaret Busby; and the fifth to “all mothers.” These dedications reveal an unconscious struggle involving a shift from the private, the personal, and the subjective to a feminist world that is quite public. Here, she attempts to reach out to a universal sisterhood where woman recognizes her peculiar predicament and yearns to become her sister's keeper. Outgrowing her father, she embraces her mother to emerge as a firebrand upholding the feminist faith.

Emecheta's shaping of herself took the form of an eighteen-year self-imposed exile in England that had the limiting effect of confining her to an outdated view of her country, Nigeria. It explains her inability to link the past meaningfully with the realities of present-day Nigeria. Indeed, the long exile has done her a greater harm. This manifests itself in her ambivalent attitude towards her material; her viewpoint shifts between shame and pride in her people, a feeling of inferiority interlaced with a need to be tough to gain approval of those who matter to her—her British audience. Her ambivalence reveals an English strain in her attitude towards life, a strain in constant conflict with her innate Africanness. Consequently the works tend to be pulled apart by the tensions of these opposing forces. Her circumstances have generated in her career an emotional and intellectual crisis which has in turn resulted in a crisis in the creative process. In The Joys of Motherhood, she resolves the impasse by seeming to come to terms with her Africanness.

In the Ditch and Second-Class Citizen are so slight and interconnected thematically and chronologically that they could have appeared as one novel. They function cathartically for Emecheta in expurgating the grossness of her childhood and marital life while fortifying her to endure the so-called joys of motherhood and creativity. She had to come to grips with her life before she could establish herself solidly in the imaginative world.

Adah, Emecheta's projection of herself in Second-Class Citizen, said she had a broad knowledge of black American writers, having come in contact with them through her job in different libraries. Her vast reading in black American literature has had its effect on In the Ditch, grounded as it is in the protest tradition of Richard Wright and his imitators. The opening skirmish with the rat and roaches are in the tradition of Wright's Native Son. But Emecheta's scene lacks the immediacy and the symbolic significance of Wright's account. Apparently the black rat, Adah, is surrounded by white rats waiting for the fairy godmother, the social worker who helps them to exist in the ditch and ultimately pulls them out of it. Emecheta's protest thus lacks the urgency and hopelessness of Wright's version of the black American situation since it excludes, to a large extent, the injustices associated with racism. Its feminist thrust is also weakened because, on the level of plot, it is the women's patience rather than their resistance to the authorities that is finally rewarded when they are rescued by the social workers.

The victim in this novel is woman. Her crime is that she is a woman and head of a single parent family. The victimizers (the authorities) are ready to listen (albeit reluctantly), a factor which unwittingly undercuts the necessity for Emecheta's elaborate protest. The weakness in the conception of the novel is further brought out by the character of Adah, who, in spite of her seeming unsureness, copes, supported by the very authorities Adah-Emecheta criticizes. The technical flaw in the book lies in Emecheta's preference for the historical perspective over the symbolic, which in a few concentrated scenes can underscore concisely yet pervasively and emotionally the quality of life in the ditch. We are made to see Pussy Mansions as an improvement on Adah's former abode, yet she still complains. She spreads herself thin and the reader soon becomes immune to her querulous tone.

In the Ditch concentrated on social problems as they affect the single woman with a family—problems of housing, child care, education, support, and male companionship. The work is tailored to suit feminist ideologies but its presentation of the heroine's dilemma is so wearyingly pedestrian as to reduce its cogency. Affected by vestiges of the oral tradition, misplaced in this milieu, the novel is an extended praise poem of Adah in her struggle to survive without a husband, tied down by five children, in a hostile environment. Adah is a heroine par excellence; she is remarkable for her strength of character in the black matriarchal tradition and the representativeness of her social predicament. Hence one would agree with Emecheta's publisher “that readers will expect to be told how Adah came to be in the predicament with which the story is concerned,” which, we are promptly informed, “is to be the subject of another book.”

Although the opening of Emecheta's first novel echoes the manner of Native Son, there is a strong African undercurrent in her sarcasm and humor. It is the ironic banter of the Igbo, west of the Niger, a verbal style that helps them endure pain and deprivation. The strain is obvious in this sentence: “One of the frightened cockroaches ran into Adah's hollow for maternal protection.” This is protest literature with a humorous difference; Emecheta accepts herself. Unfortunately she fails to maintain the standard and the novel is mired in infelicities. Her inability to discriminate consistently between Adah and herself is apparent in the use of pronouns. A few examples will suffice to illustrate the point. “She did not feel like asking for grants just for the kids' Christmas presents. I want to give my children my own presents, what I actually work for … ideas came to her head” (emphasis supplied). The problem in delineating the inward flow of thought through the stream of consciousness technique remains unresolved until four novels later.

Another major problem with her preoccupation is that she protests on too many fronts: welfarism, racism, and sexism. She sacrifices character for her subject to such an extent that none of the characters besides Adah comes alive. Furthermore, her long sojourn in Britain has blurred her vision of Nigeria. She remarks for instance that during the Biafran War, “Most of them (Adah's people) had died from snake bites, running away to save their lives.” Such gross misrepresentation of present-day Nigerian realities and her tendency towards exaggeration make her work inauthentic. Her bitter marital experience induces her to end the novel lamely with the white Whoopey impregnated by an African and with Adah empathizing by cursing “all African men for treating women the way they do.” This sweeping statement reveals an attitude which intrudes again in another stereotype: “One of the boys (Adah's son) was shivering, his brown, bony naked body shaking as if doing an African sex dance.” The tone of denigration is subdued in this first novel mainly because the other memorable characters are white. The conflict in the writer comes out into the open more explicitly in her next novel.

The second novel, Second-Class Citizen, is also feminist in ideology. It delineates the second-class citizenship of Adah in two senses: first as a black person in a predominantly white world, then as a woman in a male-controlled world. It has aroused some furor not for its radical stance for blackism and feminism but for its conservatism in projecting white paternalistic and/or stereotypical attitudes towards Africa. As one reviewer rightly complained, Emecheta dwells on those aspects of Nigerian life which “the average British would wish to hear about the African.”

This tragic pass is apparent in the indiscriminate use of animal images which pervade the entire work and reveal her incredible and deep-seated alienation and contempt for the African. Unsurprisingly, Adah's husband, Francis, comes in for such debasement. On one occasion, he “reminded Adah of a snake spitting out venom. Francis had a small mouth, with tiny lips … so when he pouted those lips like that, he looked so unreal that he reminded the onlooker of other animals, not anything human.” Later, Francis “was like an enraged bull,” angered by Adah's refusing him sex, a typical Igbo female ploy. We can hardly miss the reference as she reaffirms his bestiality: “All that Francis needed to be taken for a gorilla was simply to bend his knees.”

If her husband is an animal, she is (economically) the “goose that laid the golden eggs” and (sexually) the “wicked temptress luring her male to destruction.” But she destroyed Francis with neither money nor seduction; rather, like a witch, by the magical power of the words which make up the novel, she devastated him. Her struggle is for emancipation from wifehood through motherhood to selfhood. For Adah sees the husband-wife relationship as destructive and corruptive, and the woman is victim. One of man's offensive weapons is the penis, used to break woman's individuality (frigidity to Francis), and needed to subjugate the woman through pregnancy and childbearing.

Emecheta therefore retaliates in typical western fashion with a Freudian weapon, the pen. In using her pen she declares her emancipation from her husband and Igbo patriarchal convention. The height of her newly acquired liberty is demonstrated in the boldness of her public narration of her private story. But like Okot p'Bitek's Song of Lawino in its defence of tradition, Adah's revolutionary statement of her case against tradition is so one-sided that we wish the “first-class citizen” could have been given the equal time that p'Bitek was compelled to provide with his Song of Ocol. If we were to imagine Emecheta stating her case before a group of Igbo elders (male and female), would they not have condemned her as much for the self-centered crudity of the telling as for the story itself?

Second-Class Citizen is a satire against Francis, who comes to represent the Igbo man or the African man; under criticism is man's vaunted role as breadwinner coupled with his exaggerated notions of manhood in which the woman is unjustifiably treated as a subordinate. As forceful as the attack might be from a feminist stance, the work nevertheless is both morally and aesthetically dissatisfying to a reader who comes from a culture where it is unethical to reveal the unpleasant details of a marital breakdown. The western Igbo avoid such impropriety by using the custom of “ikpo si ike,” a procedure which allows a hostile spouse, privately, to bare the buttocks to the full view of the partner as a sign of divorce when a relationship has broken down irretrievably. Its finality saves the couple the enervating experience of a public proceeding. Emecheta, originally a western Igbo, was to use this neat means to effect a separation between Aku-nna's mother and her new husband in The Bride Price. Her treatment of the collapse of Adah's marriage in Second-Class Citizen is somewhat coarse when considered, as the novel must be, in an Igbo context. To an Igbo, Emecheta's acquired English sensibility is insensitive and distasteful.

From the foregoing, it is ironical that Adah was irritated by Francis' and Pa Noble's (the noble savage?) toadyish behavior towards white women. Of Second-Class Citizen we can ask Emecheta a modified version of what Adah in her anger asked Pa Noble: “Why did you not tell your white audience that your father had tails, Ma Emecheta … Why must you descend so low? Just to gain approval from these people?”

But then the novel is a Bildungsroman and Adah is confused at this point in the novel. She grows from ignorance to a slight awareness of her power, the extent of which she does not yet fully recognize. Her story itself is pathetic: the heroine develops a confused identity commencing from her arrival in London and culminating in the burning of her manuscript. The trauma speeds up her Anglicization and encourages her feminism to the detriment of her Africanness. Since Francis did not bargain for an English wife, he intentionally hurt her by insisting that they were not married, a statement of truth in conservative Igbo eyes, since the traditional bride price, symbol of female subjugation, was unpaid. As Francis performed his dastardly acts, Adah became the “monkey” poisoned by Francis and the “goat” lashed by him for not doing the impossible. In the image of the monkey is implied some mischief on Adah's part; her book is therefore a “monkey business,” set out to destroy Francis while he in his turn makes her a scapegoat for his intellectual failure. In the final analysis, the weak Francis did have cause to fear the indefatigable Adah, whose resilience enabled her to reproduce a fresh version of her burnt manuscript from whose ashes emerged the dedicated feminist.

Having tackled her personal problems in two novels, Emecheta moves from the autobiographical to the more challenging fictive representation contained in her third work, The Bride Price. But the experiment in The Bride Price reveals a lack of expansive imagination; Aku-nna's story could have been hers; she duplicates thematic patterns, technique, and method of characterization already employed in the first two autobiographical novels.

The animal images which emerged in In the Ditch and Second-Class Citizen reach alarming proportions in The Bride Price. Surprisingly, the heroine, Aku-nna, also comes in for this debasing treatment. At one point in the story all the noise Aku-nna could emit “was like that made by ageing frogs at the sides of marshy streams.” The Yoruba traffic warden has “zebra-like tribal markings,” while some Igbo men puff “thoughtfully on clay pipes like goats chewing grass.” Igbo women are not left out; “the happy group were chattering like monkeys,” while another female character is depicted “wagging her foot like a contented dog.” These images are not carefully worked out to support, for example, a feminist stance. Rather, they betray Emecheta's half-conscious attitudes towards Africans, male and female. She unwittingly takes us back to the days of the anthropological researcher, stereotypically debating the nature of the African. Such writing has its consequences.

Besides this propensity for animal images, Emecheta employs other images that are equally reprehensible. The friends and relatives who mourn Aku-nna's father dance and “like mad Christians gone berserk would roll themselves into balls … working their bodies into lumpy or smooth shapes, like a huge dough being prepared for pastry.” This level of writing speaks for itself.

The novel is further marred by the numerous explanations of customs, obviously meant for a foreign audience who would not notice such a flaw as narrating an essentially Igbo story using Yoruba proverbs. Such sweeping generalizations as “The bride usually won, and then the houseboy would go away in search of his own fortune somewhere else. It was always so, and it still is so among the Ibos in Lagos today. It is one of those unwritten norms which are here to stay” were, by the mid 70s, inapplicable with the advent of smuggling, military rule, civil war, and the beginning of free education in Nigeria. Other infelicities as “They (the male mourners) beat their chests to the rhythm of their agony, they hugged themselves this way and that like raging waves on a gloomy day, and on each face ran two rivers of tears which looked as though they would never dry” cannot bear close scrutiny. They are the signs of an unaccomplished writer. Her outsider's lack of empathetic interpretation shows that Emecheta partly absorbed her perspective not from James Baldwin, whom Adah confesses to have read, but from the Wright of Black Power. Like Wright, she writes about Africa with a western sensibility, so much so that her attack on the tradition of bride price with its feminist thrust becomes suspect; she is no longer “one of us.”

Despite her style and anti-African images, in the denouement of The Bride Price, having prepared us in many ways, Emecheta attributes Aku-nna's death to the violation of tradition. Mutiso's observation about the dissident in the African novel is pertinent here. According to him, “The literature suggests that the modern African individualist is almost by definition a schizoid person. This word is not used lightly, but arises from the fact that whenever the individual has apparently shaken the operational aspects of the communal ethic, it nevertheless returns to haunt his memory.” Aku-nna's dissent haunts her in her last days. The link between The Bride Price and Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms is obvious in the scene where Chike puts a dried leaf on the path of a line of brown ants, disrupting them. The action is reminiscent of Henry's god-like role in his treatment of the ants on the burning log in A Farewell to Arms. The human being is equated to the ant; Chike informs Aku-nna that “each ant would be lost if it did not follow the footsteps of those in front, those who have gone on that very path before.” Aku-nna's defiance of tradition brings about her end in a devastating way that cannot be compared to Adah's success. It is incongruous that the feminist Emecheta should permit such failure considering the fact that she (Emecheta) came out unscathed after her own deviation from the African norm.

We are further prepared for Aku-nna's death by the fact that the heroine, like the writer's mother to whom the novel is dedicated, is an “Ogbanje,” destined to die and return time and again. This belief in reincarnation is however not in keeping with Emecheta's fundamental stance. What is more in tune with her Anglicized world view is the incorporation of Hemingway's use of the “biological trap.” In Aku-nna's instance, the trap lies in her tender age, malnutrition, narrow hips, sickliness, and consequent weakness. That idyllic sojourn in Ughelli, with its reverberations of a “separate peace” and the sentimentality evoked by the lovesick couple, ends in the clinical, ascetic surrounding of a hospital bed, the would-be mother caught by the trap of nature as Catherine was in A Farewell to Arms.

Parallel to the development of the “biological trap” are others: the “psychological trap,” the “superstition trap,” and the “tradition trap.” Emecheta overdoes it by making the odds against Aku-nna overwhelming. Thus Aku-nna's feminist revolt is foredoomed, battered as she is from several angles. If she represents woman-in-revolt with its tragic consequences, Ojebeta, the heroine in the fourth novel, The Slave Girl, represents contrastingly the tragic fate of woman acquiescent to the whims and caprices of society. Emecheta implies forebodingly that the woman is always a loser no matter what her attitude towards life is or the degree of her awareness of her socio-political predicament.

Perhaps it is a coincidence that the heroine of The Slave Girl, Alice Ogbanje Ojebeta, is named after Emecheta's mother, Alice Ogbanje Emecheta; or is Ojebeta's story a fictional version of Emecheta's mother's life? There are chronological and geographical parallels in both stories but it might be wise to leave that line of thought, interesting though it may be.

In The Slave Girl, set at the beginning of the twentieth century, Emecheta is a lot more inventive than before as she weaves a story based on the type of accounts that were rife among the western Igbo—stories of exile and return of members of the clan apparently sold into slavery. She has journeyed back in time. That journey motif is reflected in the name Ojebeta (literally did her journey start today?), a wry commentary on the frequency of the heroine's reincarnation. In the present phase of her existence, she is destined to continue moving back and forth from Ibuza to Onitsha back to Ibuza and off to Lagos. These incessant journeys remind us of the perilous one to Benin undertaken by her father on her behalf to ensure her survival. In her lifetime, Ojebeta journeys from one form of slavery into another as she plays in turns the role of daughter, sister, housemaid or rather pawn, niece, lover, wife and mother—roles which insistently subordinate her to men.

Besides the journey motif, there is implicit in Ojebeta's name, Alice, a connection with Alice in Wonderland. Ojebeta's life is romantic and her journey to Onitsha is fantastical particularly when we recall that her life there is far removed from the reality of her circumstances in Ibuza. Normalcy is restored when she wakes up, as it were, to the possibility of regaining her lost freedom and then returns from Onitsha to Ibuza.

As Ebeogu points out, Emecheta has destroyed the basis of the “propaganda” in this novel that protests against the exploitation of women in traditional society by depicting too many successful female characters such as Uteh, Umeadi, and most importantly, Ma Palagada. In contrast, only Ojebeta is made to represent the enslaved woman; because of the imbalance, Ojebeta's situation appears atypical, contrary to the author's intention. It seems therefore that it is not so much the society which has permitted many women to lead free, happy, productive lives that is to blame for Ojebeta's feminine predicament, but her orphanage, a stressful situation that could retard the progress of an average child in any culture. Ojebeta then emerges as an inadequate medium to convey Emecheta's feminist ideologies, while the more memorable figure of Ma Palagada, who dwarfs her husband and son, and even bequeaths them with a name, unwittingly serves as a forceful antithesis.

In spite of all these conceptual flaws, Emecheta examines the subject of woman's subjugation doggedly. There is new-found confidence in the work as she unifies Ojebeta's African heritage with her acquired Anglo-Christian ones, as signified in the names Ojebeta and Alice. Emecheta makes us believe that the innocent Ojebeta had been preserved not only by the love of her parents but by the talismanic bells and charms, symbols of that parental love. When Ojebeta abandons these ties with her ancestors and accepts a Christian God, life becomes more insecure for her, so that the promise that Ojebeta the child held is not fulfilled in the adult Alice. Her later difficulties can be attributed to her apostasy in the same way that her brother, Okolie, had had to suffer materially and spiritually for betraying the spirit of the ancestors by exchanging his sister for money. Before the end of the story, the reader gradually becomes aware of the fact that Ojebeta is Nigeria, “enslaved” by the British (represented by the bourgeoise Ma Palagada) through her betrayal by her own people for mere bauble. Ojebeta's kith and kin, those to become the colonized, lacked the moral strength and the foresight to present a united front to fight the new, black elitist force which suicidally, would entrench British mores in the society. It must be noted that with reference to Ojebeta's traumatic experience, Okolie, her brother, is as much to blame as his elder brother who shirked the duties of the first son by abandoning his patrimony to settle in Lagos. Nigeria's fate, like Ojebeta's, has been determined on the one side by ignorant, disloyal people.

In this novel, Emecheta begins to get into the spirit of what it is to be an Igbo raconteur with her alienation against things African noticeably minimized. She has realized that a successful story-teller can criticize but cannot afford to be alienated from the people who provide the material for a work of art. Although Eze's voice might sound “like that of a hoarse frog,” yet Ojebeta can stand “quaking like African water lilies on a windy day.” In warming up to her subject, she becomes almost lyrical in parts. Eze's and Uteh's voices in argument “were like a rising song that started with a low tune and gained in volume till it was raised to the highest pitch.” This is a more mature Emecheta. Although she has not completely relieved herself of the shackles of her English sensibility, she has come a long way in integrating her images and developing a more acceptable African world view.

Her improved skills are also obvious in the novel's strong ending. Images of death and corruption dominate The Slave Girl and so do those of avarice, selfishness, and dishonor; they represent the decadence of Nigerian society as encapsulated in Ojebeta's life. Emecheta manages to render these negative qualities from the viewpoint of an insider. In the end, she identifies the politico-cultural perspective of British infiltration into Nigeria with the Anglicization of Ojebeta and her illusory happiness at her lot in her husband's house. Considered in a political context, the tragic irony in the novel lies in Ojebeta's ignorance of the major event that will affect Nigeria— colonization—a large-scale slavery that will determine, socially, economically, and psychologically, the fate of every Nigerian, woman and man. The last paragraph of the novel is indicative of this new era: “So as Britain was emerging from war once more victorious, and claiming to have stopped the slavery which she had helped to spread in all her black colonies, Ojebeta, now a woman of thirty-five, was changing masters.” Ojebeta was blind to her predicament just as Nigeria was in the dark as she drifted into colonialism. Nnu Ego, the heroine in Emecheta's latest feminist novel, finally sees the light which must precede a change.

With the publication of The Joys of Motherhood, Emecheta has come to her own. It is a much more substantial work than its predecessors. It covers the same grounds, thematically, but there is a marked technical development in the writing with its wry humor and underlying irony.

The psychological grounding of the novel is based on the story of a slave princess already narrated by the character, Chiago, in The Slave Girl. The contrast between Chiago's narrative and its dramatization in The Joys of Motherhood shows the extent of Emecheta's growth as a writer. From mere reporting, she now conjures up her subject in vivid scenes as if she had learnt some lessons from Jane Austen. The stream of consciousness which she had hitherto handled awkwardly now finds occasional expression in the recording of the flow of thought in italics, in an almost Faulknerian fashion.

The first chapter is captivating; Emecheta excels herself in the tremendous sweep back in time to explain Nnu Ego's present psychological impasse. She treats in depth the role of one's chi, that is the guardian spirit, in the Igbo person's psychic disposition. In spite of the fact that she scoffs at the idea of a dibia's omniscience, she manipulates the point of view so as to make us see and believe with Nnu Ego on the efficacy of the dibia's juju while we also understand and accept Oshia's disbelief in these local medicine men. Nnu Ego's difficult life stems from the unpleasant circumstances surrounding her half-brother's death blow on the slave princess destined to be her chi. Her inauspicious life becomes a case of a self-fulfilling prophecy as the drama unfolds.

The tempo of the first few chapters starts to flag with the sameness in Nnaife's many marriages, his fathering of children by Adaku, Adankwo, Okpo, and Nnu Ego, and Nnu Ego's numerous pregnancies. These are tales of woe that emphasize the hardships of unplanned families and subsistence living. The burden is the tragedy of woman.

Where then lie the “joys” of motherhood? In expressing the joys, Emecheta is at her best as a western Igbo story teller, for example in the irony implied in the title. Children give joy, we all agree. From that premise, she builds an elaborate story to demolish such nonsense, while at the same time pretending to uphold the age-long idea. She dramatizes the adage that “if you don't have children the longing for them will kill you, and if you do, the worrying over them will kill you.” A mother of boys must be happy; the oldest mother in a polygynous household must be joyous. Such happiness should help woman bear the grind of poverty. But in the background is the motif of the loneliness of the prolific mother. Nnu Ego gradually realizes that motherhood has not brought fulfillment but enslavement to the children. Keenly aware of the “umbilical” ties with her father, husband, and sons; keenly aware of the hardship of numerous children; Nnu Ego ruminates: “God, when will you create a woman who will be fulfilled in herself, a full human being, not anybody's appendage?” Her tragedy, and, by extension woman's tragedy lies in our awareness of her wasted life.

Nnu Ego's epiphany emanates from her brief contact with the feminist character, her co-wife, Adaku. Nnu Ego, turning feminist herself, laments the female predicament in a monologue: “I am a prisoner of my own flesh and blood … But who made the law that we should not hope in our daughters? We women subscribe to that law more than anyone. Until we change all this, it is still a man's world, which women will always help to build.” These ideas push feminism to great heights though coming from Nnu Ego at that point in time they sound anachoristic and anachronistic. An Anglicized black female character like Adah would have been a more appropriate persona than Nnu Ego to voice such female discontent. What is more, several inconsistencies appear in Nnu Ego's character that demonstrate her inadequacy as a feminist. For example, in spite of her seeming revisionist stance, she is horrified at Adaku's bid for freedom from marital drudgery; she regards it as prostitution. Obviously she is an inheritor of traditional male brainwashing. Besides, her criterion as to who out of her children should be formally educated is based on sex rather than on ability, with preference given to the boys over the girls. She also insists on her daughters rather than her sons doing the household chores. Thus the two crucial sources for reeducating a people with a patriarchal heritage and changing the sexist status quo, namely, formal education and the division of labor in the home, remain unexplored by our “feminist” heroine. Emecheta heightens Nnu Ego's ambivalent attitude and so fails to let her grow into a radical, perhaps in a last-minute bid to retain verisimilitude rather than advance, through the heroine, the propagandist tenets which the reader had been made to expect.

Emecheta further confuses the reader about her own stance in her naming of some of the characters. The name Obiageli (she who has come to enjoy her father's and/or husband's wealth), given to one of the twins, seems to be a misnomer coming after Nnu Ego's epiphany since it underscores the stereotype of the parasitic nature of woman. On the other hand, Malachi (which should read Malechi—who knows what the morrow will bring?) generates some hope in its forward looking to a probable female emancipation. It is as if Emecheta herself is not sure of what she wants or is nostalgic about the past with its own order. Her ambivalence towards her subject had been apparent earlier in her portraits of strong women as minor characters in contrast to weak women as central characters (for example, the powerful Ma Palagada as opposed to the pawn Ojebeta in The Slave Girl). In The Joys of Motherhood, the economically independent Adaku and the emotionally strong Ona differ from Nnu Ego. Adaku, like Adah-Emecheta, easily rids herself of her husband in a bid for economic independence while still believing that men “do have their (sexual) uses.” She prefers a man as a companion on a basis of equality rather than as husband and provider, a relationship which gives ground for female incapacitation, if the husband does provide; and for frustration, if he does not. One can only wish then that Emecheta had resolved her doubts during the creative process and made her central characters carry the weight of her feminist convictions.

Besides the diminution of obnoxious images in her writing, there is a further change in Emecheta. By using the pronoun “us” for the first time with herself included, she finally acknowledges her sense of belonging with Africa instead of emphasizing her spirit of dissociation. Her identity crisis seemingly over, the dynamic Emecheta might help to launch a feminist revolt having at last found her place in the Nigerian artistic world.

The organic unity of Emecheta's works lies in her treatment of themes, use of technique, and exploration of a particular sociological background. More often than not, she peoples her novels with impotent men. But within the narrow canvas she has chosen, she has been able to portray the development of both working-class and middle-class Ibuza women from the beginning of the twentieth century to the 1960s. She concentrates on what has been. Her western Igbo reader enjoys the unveiling of the past and feels at home with her irony, a carry-over from the western Igbo language. Her feminist disposition, more western than African, needs further grounding in the Nigerian indigenous cultural milieu to make the impact of her writing felt by those who can effect a change of heart and attitude (if the novels were overtly meant to bring that about)—that is, the African woman and the African man. For the functional purpose of change implicit in her novels, Africans, rather than the British, must serve as her primary audience; otherwise, Emecheta's stereotypic portraits of Africans can only provide light entertainment for the outsider. Fortunately, The Joys of Motherhood foreshadows what can legitimately be expected of a mature, Nigerian feminist literature.