Marriage Is a Private Affair Cover Image

Marriage Is a Private Affair

by Chinua Achebe

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Student Question

Why doesn't Nnaemeka write to his father in "Marriage Is a Private Affair"?

Quick answer:

Nnaemeka does not write to his father about his engagement because he fears that a letter would shock him too much. He anticipates his father's strong objection due to Nene being from a different tribe and because his father has already chosen a suitable wife for him from their tribe. Nnaemeka hopes a personal conversation would soften the blow, but his father ultimately disowns him. Ironically, a letter from Nene later evokes remorse in his father.

Expert Answers

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At the beginning of the story, Nnaemeka is talking with his fiancée, Nene, about his father. Nene suggests that Nnaemeka should write a letter to his father to inform him of their engagement. Nnaemeka refuses to write the letter, reasoning that:

It would not be wise to break the news to him by writing. A letter will bring it upon him with a shock.

Nnaemeka predicts that the engagement will be such a shock to his father because Nene is not from the same tribe as them. His father will be shocked that his son is marrying somebody from a different tribe and thus object to the marriage. His father's objection will be especially robust because he has already found a suitable wife for his son from the same tribe.

Nnaemeka hopes that if he breaks the news to his father in person, then the shock and the objection will be less severe. Unfortunately, Nnaemeka's hopes in this regard come to nothing. When his father hears that Nnaemeka intends to marry a woman from a different tribe, he "applie[s] all possible ways of dissuasion," and, these ways failing, eventually disowns his son.

Ironically, it is a letter from Nene at the end of the story which makes the father regret or at least feel remorse for his actions. When Nnaemeka's father reads that he has two grandchildren, he begins to feel "the resolution [that] he...built up over so many years falling in." Later that night he imagines his grandchildren "standing, sad and forsaken...shut out from his house," and, full of remorse, and with "a vague fear that he might die without making it up to them," he endures a sleepless night.

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