Despite Emecheta's refusal to subscribe to literary nationalism practised by her male counterparts, an important comparison between Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart and The Joys of Motherhood can be made. Emecheta and Achebe are both Igbo writers for whom the novel in English is a means to inscribe and assert the African subject in literary discourse, and whose writing is overlaid with concern about the survival and well-being of the Igbo people. If we look at the texts as parables about individuals, subjected to overwhelming change, who in failing to adapt to these changes do not survive, then there are a number of meaningful similarities. Okonkwo and Nnu Ego symbolise both the positive and negative aspects of their tribal culture. The conflict that they encounter throughout their adult lives echoes their nation's tension between tradition and modernity and, through their own struggle to survive, they anticipate Nigeria's struggle for political independence. The novels are set in different times in Nigeria's history: Things Fall Apart takes place in the 1890s, and The Joys of Motherhood during the middle of the twentieth century. In Achebe's novel, Okonkwo is paralysed by the changes he is forced to consider as colonisation and Christianity threaten his traditional beliefs. As the daughter of a powerful chief, Nnu Ego is compelled to follow the customs of her father's generation but in an urban, colonial environment in which they have little relevance. 

    In their depiction of the inability of the individual to adapt to modernity, the texts invoke Franz Fanon's manifesto for the survival of Africa which proposes that the people must discard all the harmful customs of pre-European contact and adhere only to those that are capable of nurturing the people. At the same time, Fanon urges Africans to take the positive things from European colonisation and disregard the rest. Nnaife's second wife, Adaku, recognises the need to do this if she and her children are to flourish. She picks and chooses from tradition and modernity, discarding the customs that will disadvantage her like being a virtuous wife to Nnaife. As a consequence, she and her daughters thrive. In contrast, Nnu Ego remains loyal to her husband to the bitter end. In a delightful but ultimately destructive twist of fate, her testimony in the British colonial court as the good, traditional wife is what ruins Nnaife's case and lands him in prison. So the virtuous senior wife whom Nnaife has exploited throughout her life is the very person who unwittingly brings about his undoing.
 

    Their son, Oshia, on the other hand, relinquishes all his traditional obligations. According to custom, he is responsible for the emotional and physical well-being of his ageing parents, and his failure to provide for them means they can survive neither the historical circumstances in which they find themselves, nor the painful awareness of their son's neglect. Unlike Adaku, Oshia rejects tradition outright. In this way, he represents the migrant African who takes advantage of all the things that colonisation and independence have to offer, but turns his back on the transformed, but troubled, nation and mother, leaving it and her to flounder. Here the text articulates the connection between the plight of women and the plight of Africa, a connection dominating texts by anti-colonial male writers. But Emecheta never reduces the woman/mother to a symbol for the nation. The novel's concerns are about the condition and status of real women and mothers. If there is a plain feminist message in the Joys of Motherhood, as Updike suggests, then it is borne by the absent mother, Ona, and enacted by the junior wife, Adaku: women must, when they can, seize the right to control their lives if they and their people are to survive.    

 

© Patricia McLean 2003.  All Rights Reserved.

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Bibliography


Christian, Barbara.  Black Feminist Criticism. New York: Pergamon, 1985.

Emecheta, Buchi.  The Joys of Motherhood.  1979. Johannesburg:  Heinemann, 1994.

Fanon, Franz.  The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press, 1963.

McLuskie, Kathleen and Lynne McInnes.  "Women and African Literature", No. 8, Wasfari. 

Nasta, Susheila (ed).  Motherlands; Black Women's Writing from Africa, the Caribbean and South Asia.  Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1991. 

Stratton, Florence.  Contemporary African Literature and the Politics of Gender.  London: Routledge, 1994.