Doing Motherhood, Doing Home: Mothering as Home-Making Practice in Half of a Yellow Sun

Barbara Jilek

doi:10.3390/h9030107

Abstract

Home and motherhood are tightly interwoven, particularly in the dominant conceptualizations of home as a physical and emotional refuge from the public world. However, a closer look into these concepts helps question the naturalization of both motherhood and home, revealing them as shaped by complex lived experiences and relations instead. I argue that such a rethinking of home and motherhood beyond essentialist discourse is prominent in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s postcolonial novel Half of a Yellow Sun. Drawing on concepts and theories from the fields of gender studies and geography, and taking into account the postcolonial, Nigerian context of the novel, I address how Adichie’s 2006 piece of historical fiction thematizes the intersection point of motherhood and home as a relational practice. Adichie provides alternative conceptualizations of motherhood and home through her focus on performative, ritualized mothering practices that also function as relational home-making practices and that stretch beyond gender and biological relations. Through the central ambivalence that emerges in the novel when the female protagonist chooses and practices a traditional mother role but simultaneously does not correspond to the dominant Nigerian ideal of a mother, Adichie destabilizes binary views of both home and of motherhood.

Highlights

There is a long-standing custom that pictures the mother and her child as the epitome of homeliness.In her article on Australian housing in the 1950s’, Carla Pascoe notes a frequent conflation of home with a caring mother figure and explains that “[w]omen and children have traditionally been associated with the home as a place of shelter” (Pascoe 2017, p. 185)
I showed that mothering is portrayed as a multi-faceted, performed, and performative practice that “does” home in Adichie’s novel
This practice is neither dependent on gender nor on blood ties between those who create home in a relational manner

Summary

Introduction

There is a long-standing custom that pictures the mother and her child as the epitome of homeliness. As I aim to show, in the author’s 2006 historical, postcolonial novel Half of a Yellow Sun, motherhood is portrayed as a performative practice that is neither limited to a particular gender nor to biological. 103), the literary treatment of non-biological mother-child relationships carries subversive potential by offering an alternative to dominant representations of femininity and motherhood in Nigeria. Considering the author’s public speaking in favor of feminist values and of more complex, diverse literary narratives (Adichie 2009, 2013), I agree that Adichie’s re-imagining of the past is strongly shaped by a present where the notion of mothering as a highly gendered practice is a topic of unabated significance in a Nigerian and in a global context.

Home as a Relational Practice

Performing Motherhood

Doing Motherhood—Doing Home in Half of a Yellow Sun

Conclusions