Joy of Motherhood

This Blog-post is a response to the thinking activity task on the novel 'Joy of Motherhood'  given by our professor Yesh Bhatt ma'am.

About the Author: 

Buchi Emecheta, in full Florence Onyebuchi Emecheta, (born July 21, 1944, Lagos, Nigeria—died January 25, 2017, London, England), Igbo writer whose novels deal largely with the difficult and unequal role of women in both immigrant and African societies and explore the tension between tradition and modernity. (britannica.com)

Buchi Emecheta, who has died aged 72, was a pioneer among female African writers, championing the rights of girls and women in novels that often drew on her own extraordinary life, its trajectory spanning her struggle for an education to having her books set on school curriculums. Whether in her early vivid documentary novels, In the Ditch (1972) and Second-Class Citizen (1974) – about a young black single mother living in the slums of north London – or in the ironically titled The Joys of Motherhood (1979), set in a traditionally male-oriented society in colonial Nigeria, or in her autobiography Head Above Water (1984), or Gwendolen (1989), Emecheta’s writings epitomised female independence, the necessity to grow stronger in the face of any setback.(theguardian.com)

CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL-TEXT SUMMARY.

The basis of the novel is the "necessity for a woman to be fertile, and above all to give birth to sons" The central character of the story is, I would like to say 'MOTHER' then become a human. Because as the story depicted the culture and its notion of  African society promoted motherhood rather than seeing Women as human beings. While Nnu Ego was able to give birth to a child and after her very painful mental health she was able to receive such respect from society which was possible because of her children. 

As Teresa Derrickson noted in the article, 

The title of Emecheta's novel is patently ironic, for it would seem that there are few joys associated with motherhood after all. 

Derrickson explained the argument that,

Yet while that reality is certainly one message the novel imparts, there is far more to the text than a critique of motherhood. The fact that Emecheta's novel moves beyond this critique to explore the costs of colonialism for women in urban Nigeria is summarized in a crucial passage midway through the novel in which Nnu Ego pauses to assess the injustices of her life in Lagos:

"It was not fair, she felt, the way men cleverly used a woman's sense of responsibility to actually enslave her.... [H]ere in Lagos, where she was faced with the harsh reality of making ends meet on a pittance, was it right for her husband to refer to her responsibility? It seemed that all she had inherited from her agrarian background was the responsibility and none of the booty."

This excerpt is key in locating the source of Nnu Ego's anguish not in her position as a mother per se but in her position as a woman who is asked to assume the same obligations of her "agrarian background" within a new cultural setting that confers "none of the booty" normally associated with such labor. Nnu Ego is able to interpret the inequity of this exchange as something that "enslaves" and "imprisons" her. She is also able to identify, at least on some level, the political economy of colonial Lagos as the Western construct of "the new" that proves to be unaccommodating of her traditional role as wife and mother: she notes, for example, that it is the "harsh reality of making ends meet on a pittance" that secures her thralldom.

In the novel, there is a contract reading between two words which are in the title, 'Joy' and 'Motherhood'. Being a mother, Nnu Ego also forgot her womanhood in exchange for her motherhood. There is a loophole in womanhood we can read from the protagonist that she was able to respect her own womanhood while she has gone through social, political, or even mental trauma. 

Even one can argue why she did not choose her Womanhood instead of believing in Motherhood. Perhaps that time when she lived or the setting of the story is around the colonial and post-colonial eras. This gap helps us to study the decolonizing process of the character from the certain notion of the colonial rules and regulations and their privileged idea of Motherhood. Women called themselves Women if they are capable to give a child. This gap gives further fundamental findings on the subject of  Womanhood.