Motherhood in-between cultures in The joys of Motherhood, by Buchi Emecheta

Abstract

In “Feminism with a small f” (1988), Buchi Emecheta points out an interesting phenomenon: the transit, the movement between and through cultures. On the one hand, from a small rural Ibo community to Yoruba Lagos, strongly influenced by British colonial values, the protagonist of the novel The Joys of Motherhood [1979], Nnu-Egu, deprives herself of the support network ingrained in and built through the polygamous structure of her original culture. On the second hand, she is thrust into a capitalist, sexist, and individualist symbolic network that prevents her from existing comfortably in the world. Her displacement culminates in a transformation from, in the first context, an “anafemale” whose body is governed by pre-colonial cultural norms as defined by Oyèrónké Oyéwùmí (1997), into a “woman” whose body is influenced by a capitalist colonial logic, which affects, above all, her experience of motherhood.