How I Found Solace in Rereading Buchi Emecheta’s ‘Second Class Citizen’

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Norwich, United Kingdom

We eventually broke apart and I made my way to the boarding gate. Truthfully, I was afraid to leave but I kept my fears to myself as they would undoubtedly be deemed irrational—young people were leaving Nigeria in droves, uprooting their lives and moving to new countries in pursuit of better opportunities. As a writer, it was the norm to travel and see the world in order to write and be successful; it was the norm to get a master’s in creative writing or a related course from a prestigious university. I was following in the footsteps of many writers before me: Buchi Emecheta, Chinua Achebe, Teju Cole, Helon Habila, Chika Unigwe, Wole Soyinka, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Even if I admitted having cold feet to anyone, they would promptly remind me there was nothing for me in Nigeria. Not as a writer, not as a young person. The brain drain had recently intensified with police brutality, rising unemployment, inflation, poor electricity, etc., so, I was lucky to be leaving. I, too, was baffled by my last-minute hesitation; leaving Nigeria had been the solution for as long as I could remember.

I started writing at the age of ten, the same year I decided I was going to be a lawyer. My parents, uncles, and aunts took pride in my ambition and bought me Ladybird storybooks, Bible stories, and Enid Blyton collections. Unsurprisingly, I was writing stories that imitated what I read: my characters were Black, like me, but they mostly had English names; they had tree houses, they talked back to their parents with no consequence; they had curly, long blonde hair and investigated exciting mysteries. That my stories were a poor reflection of my reality was of no consequence. No one took my writing seriously. It was a hobby they supported when it was convenient, like when I won the Ecobank National Essay competition in 2011, and law was to be my focus at university. I often said once I left to study creative writing abroad, people would take my writing seriously. My mother didn’t seem keen on the creative writing part, but she was sure there would be opportunities to leave the country. Until then, I was stuck in Nigeria, studying a ‘serious’ course in a federal university frequently on strike. It was during one of these strikes I discovered Buchi Emecheta’s books and a profile on Buchi Emecheta, which described her as ‘the first successful black woman novelist living in Britain after 1948’. This could be me, I said to myself.

Buchi Emecheta’s success validated my belief that it was possible to have a writing career as a Nigerian woman. I also felt a particular kinship with the protagonist of her novel Second Class Citizen, Adah Ofili. Like Adah, I was comfortable enough, privileged even, but ultimately dissatisfied with life in Nigeria; we both wanted more. Even though I was studying law, a part of me still wanted to explore writing. The first thing I had to do at this point was convince myself that my writing was in fact serious, that it was something I wanted to pursue as a career. A lecturer once explained that although a case could be decided based on a single piece of evidence or witness, there were cases where corroboration was essential. My writing career felt like one of such cases. I believed supporting evidence would ground me in my decision to be a writer and Buchi Emecheta’s work was the perfect study. I studied her work and her writing style intently, and discovered similar authors such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who started studying medicine in Nigeria before leaving for the US and eventually completing a master’s degree in creative writing at Johns Hopkins University. I learned about Sefi Atta, who, after qualifying as a Chartered Accountant, got an MFA in Creative Writing at Antioch University. I decided then that my final piece of evidence would be leaving Nigeria to study creative writing after qualifying as a lawyer.