Kathleen McLuskie and Lynne McInnes warn us that misinterpretations by white feminists of Black women's writing leads to what they term an "anthropological impulse" during which the text is construed, not as a literary artefact, but as a comparative, educational document that highlights the similarities and differences between women of the First and Third Worlds (3-7). These misreadings are undertaken in a variety of forms, either simultaneously or separately, depending on the reader's political and cultural context. The female-authored African text has appealed to Marxist feminists, for example, for its representation of women in pre-industrialised societies which Marxists frequently interpret as pre-patriarchal. The text thus becomes idealised for depicting an unsullied existence that contrasts the capitalist and patriarchal systems that oppress women in the West. In such essentialist readings, the women depicted in the text are set up as exemplary models of a true and natural femininity, an image of what European women could be without the controlling presence of capitalist and patriarchal hegemonies.

 
    A further misreading is the construction of Black women as double victims of racism and sexism, a process which elevates them at the same time to models of female strength. As McLuskie and McInnes emphasise, such a misinterpretation is dangerous because it ignores the individual circumstances of African women by reading them and their experiences as universal. They may also draw the conclusion that if all Black women are read as victims of racism and sexism, then their literary creativity must only be augmented by the experience of suffering. Finally, they reduce the reading of the text from a process of signification to an act of anthropological voyeurism that grants the outsider/reader the power to observe and draw one-sided conclusions about another form of human existence. The Joys of Motherhood, with its anecdotes about the myriad of customs and people in Lagos alone, emphasises the population's heterogeneity and works against such homogenizing and voyeuristic tendencies.


    Alternative methods of analysing woman-authored African literature are possible. Florence Stratton suggests that we examine it within the context of African literature generally, by comparing and contrasting it with colonial and anti-colonial writing by men. On the other hand, Susheila Nasta argues that it must be read within the context of writing by Black women globally, especially those women who share a history of slavery or European colonisation. Being aware of both methods simultaneously allows the western reader to contextualise African literature within a tradition of Black literary creativity, textual and non-textual, and to locate it within the political and social upheaval in which the authors and texts may find themselves. With the establishment of a meaningful dialogue between the reader of the First World and the writer of the Third, our response to African literature might contribute to contemporary debates on literary theory and the European canon and, despite the risk of misinterpretation, widen discussions on postcolonial and feminist literature.


    Conventional feminist responses to The Joys of Motherhood are unsettled by an unfixed, third-person narrative that maps the life of one woman, and the cultural and self-constructed expectations of motherhood to which she is subjected. The maternal body itself directs the narrative, which is structured around the ability of its central character, Nnu Ego, to bear children. While the novel contains a series of epiphanies as Nnu Ego confronts personal and social crises, it is not a quest novel in the European sense of the tradition. Her purpose is not to achieve liberation or even self-knowledge, but to bring into the world many healthy sons who will care for her in old age. Her dependence upon her maternal body to provide her with identity, status and, finally, personal welfare, defies the conventions of the Euro-American feminist quest in which women's pre-ordained roles as wives and mothers are consciously over-turned. Instead, Nnu Ego represents women who, from birth, are assigned as chattels. Their true value becomes known once they are old enough to marry and conceive children, in particular sons. So, while women are extremely important in one way, their status is completely lost, or is never gained, if this maternal expectation remains unfulfilled. While relating the crisis of motherhood that disrupts and then destroys the life of Nnu Ego, the unstable narrative itself exposes the difficulties of defining female subjectivity beyond the constraints of fertility and motherhood. Consequently, the troubles that Nnu Ego encounters in her life are mirrored in the text, which seems either unable or unwilling to fix female identity beyond the condition of motherhood.
 

    The narrative hints that the elusive "real woman" might lie in the powerful image of Nnu Ego's own mother, Ona. On her deathbed she urges her lover, Agdabi, to allow their daughter to have a life of her own. Through this scene, Ona asserts that a real woman is someone whose feelings of worth do not depend on fulfilling the expectations of a father and husband; in other words, a woman who does not define herself as a chattel, but as an independent individual. Ona's refusal to marry is ostensibly to please her father, but we learn that the real reason is to allow her to maintain her sexual and economic independence. Agdabi's interpretation of Ona's dying wish is, however, quite different from what one may assume given Ona's ideas concerning women's independence.  He believes that for his daughter to achieve womanhood, she must be married and become a mother of sons and, to do this successfully, she must accept the authority of her father and husband.  The conflict between dominant cultural constructions of womanhood—to which Nnu Ego is compelled to adhere—and an untrammelled female subjectivity symbolised by her mother Ona is established early in the text. This dichotomy concerning female identity underlies the novel's ambiguities, and causes the series of events that lead to Nnu Ego's decline. It is her untimely death that permits narrative closure and emphasises both the danger and the hopelessness of her quest.


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