Eating With Buchi Emecheta
Motherhood and food through Buchi Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood.
Editor’s note: This essay is available in our print issue, Reimagining Nigerian Heritage. Buy the issue here.
He who brings kola, brings life.
Onye wetalu oji, wetalu ndu.
The 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?
The Joys of Motherhood was the fifth book of 18 published by Emecheta (1944-2017)—mother, sociologist, youth worker, professor of literature, and a champion for women everywhere. Her work explores the lot of women, in and outside of Nigeria, looking at place, time and the changes and chaos that people, families, communities experience because of poverty, misogyny and patriarchy. She explores the double standards that impose apparent and differing values between the boy and girl child. Her writing is not without grounded truths; Emecheta was married at 16, living in London at 18, and had the courage to leave an abusive marriage to become a single parent at 22, fending for herself and five children. Her stories are about struggle, freedom, survival and hope.
Nnu Ego experiences everything from intense joy to deep sorrow and abandonment in The Joys of Motherhood. Pain, hopes, dreams, terrors, concerns, confusions, madness, distress, tears, laughter, sleepless nights, heartache, loneliness, community, happiness, excitement, silence, voice, courage, defiance, stubbornness, grace, despair and more…of motherhood. The imaginaries were many, and they did not manifest in the dreamt-of or hoped-for ways of joy and ease. Such was life for Nnu Ego, stunning royal bride and wife twice over. Painfully, too, because what really should have been the joys and burdens of parenthood singled her out—as mother. As it does many women today...
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