T
he Joys of Motherhood. You wouldn’t know just from the title of Buchi Emecheta’s 1979 novel that this book is full of what-may-have-begun-as-hope-but-ended-up-in-sorrow-and-irony. I did not ‘get’ the subtext at first as a teenager who wanted four children: two girls and two boys. I didn’t read it for many years, instead burying my head and heart in
Pacesetters’ novels. And then I finally read it as an adult, as a parent, a mother of three: two girls and one boy. Tragically bittersweet. Are there glimmers of hope? Perhaps, because Nnu Ego—daughter, sister, wife, mother, protagonist—becomes the mother she desires, several times over. But the painful reality soon dawns, of being woman, mother, child, embroidered and woven together in the multiplicity of traditional beliefs, British colonialism, life in the village and in the city, all in early 1940s Nigeria. Is it different today?
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