The image of Africa as female recurs in anti-colonial, as well as colonial discourses. In an appropriation of the Mother Africa trope by anti-colonial male writers, Africa is frequently represented as the figure of a woman, who is on the one hand, young, beautiful, and fertile, and on the other, "raped", degraded, and impoverished. Stratton argues that these contradictory images do not reflect genuine concerns for the economic and political position of African women, but instead represent a projection of the degradation that men feel as a result of colonisation. Despite this, mothers and motherhood remain a powerful symbolic force in both male- and female-authored Black literature. In a parallel reading of the Joys of Motherhood with Alice Walker's Meridian, Barbara Christian asserts that matrilineal connection is an important theme for women writers of the Black Diaspora because it counters the damage to the family caused by slavery and European colonisation. To Christian, textual representations of the joys and sorrows of motherhood are capable of emphasising the historical and cultural connections between Black women worldwide. But, possibly because of the apparent permanence of motherhood in the face of unrelenting political and social change, African male writers have represented women as politically static and ahistorical.

    The Joys of Motherhood
and Meridian vigorously re-write this assumption, revealing women as both victims and agents of change. For the female African writer, the mother figure is also capable of bridging the gap between the oral storyteller and the creator of the written word, thus strengthening the connection between women's traditional role and that of the published author in English. Most importantly, however, the image of the mother is capable of re-assigning the figure of women in African literary discourse. According to Stratton, whether a woman is "canonised as mother or stigmatised as prostitute, the designation is degrading, for he [the male writer/narrator] does the naming and her experience as a woman is trivialised and distorted" (52). Stratton proposes that pregnancy and childbirth in male-authored African literature have come to signify the writer/narrator's own interpretation of his nation's history, in particular, how each pregnancy might indicate the potential for a new beginning for the nation as well as his own renewed potency.  Female-authored representations of women and motherhood are capable of re-writing these metaphors. The Joys of Motherhood addresses the false consciousness of the Mother Africa trope through the life story of Nnu Ego. By relocating motherhood from metaphor to social realism, Emecheta critiques the ways in which the myths of motherhood are imposed on Nigerian women and also re-writes the Mother Africa trope of anti-colonial discourse. As Stratton notes, The Joys of Motherhood succeeds in exposing the unreliable male-authored narratives of African nationalism, narratives in which lofty ideas of nationhood are masculine in nature, while social and political difficulties that beset the newly independent nation are presented as feminine.

    Nevertheless, Nnu Ego's journey through life is marked by a series of tragedies that in many ways mirror the tragedies of modern Nigeria. By deliberately centring on the experience of one woman, however, the text implicitly critiques the way in which the troubled nation is inscribed in male-authored texts. First of all, through circumstances beyond her control, Nnu Ego leaves her traditional homeland. Her journey to Lagos represents the urban drift that
brings about the breakdown of traditional Igbo society. Her husband's employers, Dr and Mrs Meers, exert domestic control over Nnu Ego and her family, mirroring British control over Nigeria. The colonials are marginalised in the text and eventually they disappear from it altogether, but their impact on the lives of urban workers like Nnu Ego and Nnaife is permanent. The colonial belief that the relationship between the British and the colonised people of the Empire was a successful parent-child one is refuted through the actions of Dr and Mrs Meers. Certainly, they treat their native servants like children; but as parental figures they are dysfunctional and irresponsible, much like the colonial power they symbolise. When Dr and Mrs Meers abandon their colonial home, Nnu Ego and Nnaife experience great hardship and uncertainty regarding their future. In this way, the couple comes to represent the colonised land which is first of all exploited, and then deserted without adequate resources to survive.


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