Joys Of Motherhood Research Articles

The Colonized Gelding: Marital Violence in The Joys of Motherhood

The Colonized Gelding: Marital Violence in The Joys of Motherhood

Mami Wata and the Occluded Feminine in Anglophone Nigerian-Igbo Literature

This article examines the ways in which literary representations of the sacred feminine have shifted and evolved in anglophone Nigerian-Igbo literature. Beginning with an examination of the precolonial tradition of Mami Wata, or mother water, goddess worship among Igbo communities, this article traces the ways in which colonial imposition both fossilized previously flexible standards of gendered discourse and promoted largely Judeo-Christian norms for gendered behavior as part of a total political, economic, and social process of domination, which resulted in an effacement of the sacred feminine from literary representation. This effacement, however, has been redressed in recent years through a shift in engagement that has allowed the anglophone Nigerian-Igbo writer to return to the feminine as a means of voicing an alternative tradition, turning away from the colonialist problematic of earlier works. This evolution in discursive representations of gender and femininity is explored through readings of Achebe's Things Fall Apart , Nwapa's Efuru , Emecheta's The Joys of Motherhood , and Abani's GraceLand .

A Critical-Stylistic Study Of Mind Style And Characterisation In Buchi Emecheta’s "The Joys Of Motherhood"

Although much research has gone into Buchi Emecheta’s literary art, hardly has any statements being made about the situation of mind style in her works. This study, however, considers the critical –stylistic value of mind style in the characterisation of Nnu Ego in Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood. It reveals the author’s deployment of emotive lexis, figurative language, and conversation to depict Nnu Ego’s world of naiveties, selfcontradictions, failures, and frustrations, all adding up to the character’s odd conceptualisation of reality. I claim that Nnu Ego’s portrayal, has, additionally, been used to interrogate feminist, colonial, and classist issues, albeit on a relatively small scale. Keywords : mind style, stylistics, lexicalisation, feminism, colonialism, Buchi Emecheta

AWS Ode: African Writers Series

AWS Ode*African Writers Series Thomas Sayers Ellis (bio) So long a letter the slums numbered spines and night fell bright as the will to die, or the joys of motherhood. Its beautiful feathers. Black and white in love. The wound is proof “of how terrible orange is,” black sunlight. Here’s Nuruddin’s Sardines. Beware soul brother the thirteenth sun is a child of two worlds. A hammer blows its ambiguous adventure. Because of women, a woman in her prime, Zambia shall be free. The smoke that thunders thunders like a sunset in Biafra. Robben Island neglect is worse than Lokotown regret. Girls at war with a question of power like Efuru and Idu survive the peace like wrong ones on the dock. The mangy-dog we killed detained interpreters. [End Page 1056] A blade among the boys, bound to violence, ripples in the pool. Maybe the mourned one was a naked needle riding on the whirlwind. A man of the people. Maru, bewitched, Maru, going down river road, eating chiefs, their dead roots, will kill you quick, quicker than this earth, my brother. The barbed wire satellites. A simple lust, the smell of it, ordained by the oracle. I remember Ruben’s masterful use of silhouette. Small pass books with powerful faces, passports. Wirriyamu, an ill-fated people, the grass is singing not even God is ripe enough. Devil on the cross, my Mercedes is bigger than yours, your narrow path’s uneven ribs. Some short century for sure, the busiest political spider web in nature and this most difficult thing to hold together, was held together by Heinemann, the healer of God’s bits of wood. [End Page 1057] Thomas Sayers Ellis Thomas Sayers Ellis, a native of Washington, DC, is an assistant professor of Creative Writing at Sarah Lawrence College. This co-founder of the discontinued Dark Room Collective also teaches at The Lesley University low-residency MFA program in Cambridge, MA. He is author of The Maverick Room, winner of the 2006 John C. Zacharis First Book Award, Song On, The Genuine Negro Hero, a chapbook, and The Good Junk (Take Three #1). The University of Michigan Press will soon publish his Breakfast and Blackfist: Notes for Black Poets. He has also published poems and interviews in Agni, Callaloo, The Kenyon Review, The Nation, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, and other periodicals. He lives in New York City. Footnotes * For Chinua Achebe on the fiftieth anniversary of Things Fall Apart. Copyright © 2009 The Johns Hopkins University Press

No Woman’s Land: Marriage in the Fiction of Buchi Emecheta

As one of the major ways by which interaction between men and women is regulated in society, marriage has offered a useful yardstick for the assessment of gender relations in many works of African fiction authored by women. The paper examines the way in which the prominent female Nigerian novelist Buchi Emecheta portrays marriage in several novels, including Second-Class Citizen, The Bride Price, The Joys of Motherhood and Double Yoke. Emecheta believes that many of the cultural assumptions which inform marriage gloss over the inherent contradictions that are inherent in its duality as institution and relationship. As institution, marriage ostensibly provides women with the best context within which to fully realise themselves as women; as relationship, the promise of such self-fulfilment is exposed as arbitrary and hypocritical, Many of Emecheta’s principal female characters become aware of this disjunction, and it crystallizes the challenges confronting them as women in a patriarchal society. In this way, she shows how marriage, far from achieving its professed role of affirming the stability of culturally-sanctioned gender relations, actually disrupts them. This paper begins by examining the biological and social drives that underpin marriage, and the way in which they combine to make it an ambivalent condition for women, ostensibly celebrating their femaleness while entrenching their subordination to men. It then focuses on the concept, objectives and process of marriage as these are dramatised by characters and situations in Emecheta’s novels. The paper concludes that Emecheta characterises marriage as essentially indefinable, with unfocused aims and conflicting processes.

The Dynamics of African Feminism: Defining and Classifying African Feminist Literatures (review)

Reviewed by: The Dynamics of African Feminism: Defining and Classifying African Feminist Literatures Pia Thielmann The Dynamics of African Feminism: Defining and Classifying African Feminist Literatures By Susan ArndtTrenton, NJ: Africa World P, 2002. 234 pp. ISBN 0-86543-898-6 paper. Foreword by Obioma Nnaemeka. Translation by Isabel Cole of Feminismus im Widerstreit: Afrikanischer Feminismus in Gesellschaft und Literatur. Münster: Unrast Verlag, 2000. 205 pp. ISBN 3-89771-201-6 paper. The first five chapters of Susan Arndt's monograph provide a clear overview of the various terminologies and ideas of African feminisms, such as Molara Ogundipe- Leslie's stiwanism, Catherine Acholonu's motherism, Obioma Nnaemeka's negofeminism, and Mary Kolawole's and Chikwenye Ogunyemi's versions of womanism. Arndt shows how they do, or do not, relate to Western feminist concepts. With African feminists, Arndt criticizes African American feminists for speaking for black women and "women of color" internationally, thus claiming authority over African women with whose conditions and needs they may not be familiar. African feminists, in contrast, address African women's various different situations and needs that are based [End Page 156] on widely accepted but discriminatory conventions. While the term womanism is also used by African scholars, its ideas differ from Alice Walker's womanism in so far as the issue of female homosexuality is not an issue close to African women's heart whereas motherhood is. The author establishes that the only obligatory characteristic that makes for an African-feminist text (Arndt's hyphenation) is the criticism of African gender relations, and points out that this essential component is often combined with optional characteristics that acknowledge that African women—and men—"suffer not only from sexism and patriarchal social structures, but are also victims of racism, neo-colonialism, cultural imperialism, religious fundamentalism, socio-economic mechanisms of oppression and dictatorial and/or corrupt systems" (73). Arndt creates a classification model of reformist, transformative, and radical African-feminist literatures and defines their respective concerns: Reformist feminist texts criticize individual traditional and modern conventions that discriminate against women. They present alternatives that improve women's situations, holding true that improvement within given structures is possible. Men are criticized as individuals, but they can change; thus a happy ending is made possible. Transformative feminist texts offer a fundamental critique of patriarchy. Men's behavior is presented more sharply and as being typical for them as a group. Women's complicity in the reproduction of gender discrimination is also thematized. Both men's and women's reproduction of discriminatory structures is seen as surmountable. Radical texts "argue that men (as a social group) inevitably and in principle discriminate against, oppress and mistreat women. [. . .] A disturbing lack of alternatives and perspectives distinguishes these texts" (85) from reformist and transformative ones. The second part of Dynamics provides a close reading ofselected narratives by African women writers and tests them against Arndt's categories. Grace Ogot's The Graduate, Ifeoma Okoye's Behind the Clouds, and Flora Nwapa's Efuru make up the list of reformist texts. Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo's "Ubaaku," Mariama Bâ's Une si longue Lettre, Buchi Emecheta's The Joys of Motherhood, and Bessie Head's "The Collector of Treasures" form the group of transformative texts under study. Pat Ngurukie's "Mother of Daughters," Nawal El Saadawi's Women at Point Zero, and Calixthe Beyala's Tu t'appelleras Tanga are interpreted as examples of radical African-feminist texts. While Arndt creates a hierarchy of radicalism, she obviously favors reformative African-feminist texts as the ones with the highest chance of contributing to changes in discriminatory attitudes and practices. Acknowledging the fluidity and overlaps of these categories that may make it difficult to place all African-feminist texts within this roster, she nicely accomplishes her goal of providing a tool "to categorize a literary work as feminist or nonfeminist on the basis of clearly comprehensible criteria" (23). Thus, her work is a perfect textbook about African women's literature. My students love it. Copyright © 2005 The Indiana University Press

Gendered Hauntings:The Joys of Motherhood, Interpretive Acts, and Postcolonial Theory

This essay examines varying representations of in-between spaces within the colonial context in order to consider the complex politics of interpretation. By counterposing Buchi Emecheta's Joys of Motherhood and Homi Bhabha's concept of hybridity, it interrogates their divergent constructions of colonial liminality as well as the sources of such differences. While Bhabha's spatialized analytical approach facilitates a productive reading of this Nigerian novel, Emecheta's construction of colonial life stands at odds with the more celebratory conclusions arrived at in Bhabha's work. One pivotal point of difference revolves around gender. The spirits and instances of haunting found in Emecheta's text not only help us map out where interpretation, gender, and considerations of justice converge, within and beyond the text; they also flag the problems with interpretive acts when gender dynamics remain unaccounted for or hidden. Such issues, I suggest (following Avery Gordon), force us to consider more complex constructions of identity.

Gendered Hauntings: The Joys of Motherhood, Interpretive Acts, and Postcolonial Theory

Gendered Hauntings: The Joys of Motherhood, Interpretive Acts, and Postcolonial Theory

Representing the African Woman: Subjectivity and Self in The Joys of Motherhood

The Joys of Motherhood has been called Buchi Emecheta's most outstanding novel. Beyond exhibiting “the power of characterization, manipulation of point of view and narrative method,” the novel offers a sustained exploration of the African woman's experience, a much-needed theme in current African literary discourse (Palmer 33). The paramount issue that still needs to be considered, however, is whether the academy today has a clearer picture of the conditions of African women than it had more than two decades ago when Maryse Conde spoke out against the “heap of myths […] rapid generalizations, and patent untruths” that have clouded the personality and the inner reality of African women and called on African women to speak for themselves (132). I find it troubling that even as African women are beginning to speak for themselves and to write about their lives, the popular misconception of African women as slaves, brutalized and abused by a patriarchal society, still overwhelmingly defines Western critical attitudes.

The African Novel in English: An Introduction

Introduction - reading the African novel a brief historical survey of the African novel Chinua Achebe "Things Fall Apart" Buchi Emecheta "The Joys of Motherhood" Ayi Kwei Armah "The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born" Ama Ata Aidoo "Our Sister Killjoy" Nadine Gordimer "Burger's Daughter Alex la Guma "In the Fog of the Season's End" Ngugi wa Thiong'o "Devil on the Cross" Tsitsi Dangarembga "Nervous Conditions".

Womanist and feminist aesthetics: a comparative review

Alice Walker's womanist theory about black feminist identity and practice also contains a critique of white liberal feminism. This is the first in-depth study to examine issues of identity and difference within feminism by drawing on Walker's notion of an essential black feminist consciousness. Allan defines womanism as a (r)evolutionary aesthetic that seeks to fully realize the feminist goal of resistance to patriarchal domination, demonstrated most powerfully in The Color Purple. She also recognizes the complexities and ambiguities embedded in the concept, particularly the notion of a fixed and unitary black feminist identity, separate and distinct from its white counterpart. Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and Drabble's The Middle Ground, she argues, do not allay Walker's concerns about white liberal feminist practice, but they reveal signs of struggle that complicate the womanist/feminist dichotomy. Emecheta's The Joys of Motherhood, an ostensibly womanist text, fails to fit the race-restrictive womanist paradigm, and Walker's own aesthetic trajectory - before The Color Purple - places her outside womanist boundaries. Finally, Allan's intertextual reading reveals significant commonalities and differences. In the current debate among competing feminisms, this critical appraisal of womanist theory underscores the need for new thinking about essentialism, identity, and difference, and also for creative cooperation in the struggle against domination.

Bessie Head's the Collector of Treasures: Change on the Margins

subject of Bessie Head's stories is change itself, and specifically the threshold where change takes place. Change has become the issue of women's writing since independence-change and not simply rights or equality. Though there has been continuous concern with abuse of women, a concern voiced in the miserabilist school of Sembene's Voltaique or Emecheta's Joys of Motherhood, or presented in more chauvinistic terms in Jagua Nana, it is in the stories of Bessie Head, Mariama Ba, Buchi Emecheta, and Ama Ata Aidoo that the very boundaries between men and women, between past and present roles, those that are set in place in the constitution of women's identities, are called into question. With Bessie Head, in fact, boundaries, the forces that maintain and perpetuate them, and those forces that dissolve them, could be said to be the focus of and key to her work.' Especially in the short stories of Bessie Head we find qualities that support this approach. One frequently finds there characters who are sketched, and whose one or two dominant traits assume such proportions as to give the stories an allegorical aspect. They appear for an episode or two in which the point of their appearance is established and the question of their fate determined. lines of their lives are reduced, brought into focus, and purified. crossing of lines forms the quintessential action. With Bessie Head an ironic fatalism governs these women's lives, seen in the gap between the narrative point of view and those of the characters. Galethebege's Christian faith, in Heaven Is Not Closed, is described as sincere and heartfelt by a narrator whose sympathies are closer to Galethebege's non-Christian, skeptical husband. More often the irony stems from the internal gap inherent in the position of the women themselves: caught in a network of social custom and constraint, the women in Head's stories experience moments of transition, blasphemy, violence and death, either because of the strength of their desire, as with Galethebege, Life, or Rankwana in The Deep River, or because of their insistence upon preserving integrity and independence, as with Life, Dikeledi, and Mma-Mabele. conflicts often occur within the characters themselves, even when external constraint is brought to bear. What emerges is a pattern of struggle between powerful, repressive forces and equally adamant drives grounded in desire and refusal. passage across this landscape of combat does not lead to a new vision of history, does not pave a path through history, but rather traces magical lines and horizons that set off one time and place from another. Dawn, nightfall, cusps of existence where existential decisions are made - these are boundaries given meaning by personal

Postpartum Psychiatric Disorders

The literature on postpartum psychiatric disorders (PPD) is reviewed with particular reference to recent advances in the field. Despite the prevailing tendency to consider PPD as a manifestation of other pre-existing psychiatric disorders (i.e. affective, schizophreniform, organic, neurotic, etc.) a growing number of studies point to the uniqueness and specificity of postpartum symptomatology. Theories of etiology, psychosocial as well as biological, are still wide-ranging and unconvicing. Attempts to predict PPD and/or to identify mothers-to-be at risk are based largely on retrospective studies or else are hindered by the use of nonspecific instruments. Society's implicit belief in the "joys of motherhood" may have further contributed to the obscurity surrounding these frequently occurring disorders. Interventions follow conventional methods of psycho- and pharmacotherapy but the multidisciplinary treatment approach especially for women with acute PPD who require hospital admission is gaining wider acceptance. The inpatient psychiatric mother-baby intensive care unit model is part of this approach.

What They Told Buchi Emecheta: Oral Subjectivity and the Joys of “Otherhood”

While positive constructions of identity may be used in the service of historically oppressed groups, readings that isolate either “African” or “feminist” identity in the works of Nigerian novelist Buchi Emecheta highlight the problematics of both literary selfrepresentation and postmodern deconstruction of identity. An examination of Emecheta's autobiography Head above Water and her novel The Joys of Motherhood, however, suggests that Emecheta's works respond to a West African vernacular tradition of storytelling that resists the application of normative models of identity and instead demonstrates the importance of each individual to the community. This vernacular tradition, elaborated in Emecheta's work by a nonparadigmatic tension between “oral” and “literate subjectivity” (a tension potentially present to varying degrees in non-African subjectivity but “marked” in West Africa by multilingualism and the copresence of vernacular and literate languages), provides a critique of productivist, authoritarian discourse.

Western Time, African Lives: Time in The Novels of Buchi Emecheta

Describing dilemma of African philosopher, Abiola Irele writes: the professional philosopher in Africa today operates in a of cultural and social tension. For although his mind has been moulded by principles of Western philosophy, he too is confronted by vast body of world views and thought systems which contrive to inhabit consciousness of majority of Africans and to determine a fundamental attachment on their part to a traditional way of life, a that commands his attention and makes demands of his philosophical loyalties. Faced with a dualism both of modes of thought and of modes of existence, philosopher in Africa is compelled to undertake an examination of implications of this dualism for his discipline and for his practice of that discipline with specific reference to African situation (10). Such is dilemma of novelist Buchi Emecheta, Igbo Nigerian, Londoner, and woman. Torn between loyalties of race, culture, and sex, Emecheta writes about a world lost and a world becoming, a world destroyed and a world indestructible. The Africa of Emecheta's novels is a continent reeling in two times: Western diachronicity and traditional African synchronicity. And in these novels, Emecheta chronicles personal dilemma of African confronted and lured by Western time and Western culture. The author herself and her female characters struggle to find their place in this world in these times. In this essay I am specifically concerned with four of Emecheta's novels, The Bride Price (1976), The Slave Girl (1977), The Joys of Motherhood (1979), and The Rape of Shavi (1983). Three of these novels, The Bride Price, The Slave Girl, and The Joys of Motherhood, are set in Lagos and Igbo village of Ibuza. Additionally, each of these three focuses on life of an Igbo woman, documenting problems unique to women at this time of cultural intercourse and confrontation and exploring complexities of female lives in a culture guarded by champions without sufficient powers to save it and challenged by powers bent on its destruction. For everyone, male and female alike, these were unique and difficult times, times that witnessed changes and times that incited controversy. These were times that defied tradition. It is no wonder, there-

Technique and Language in Buchi Emecheta's The Bride Price, The Slave Girl and The Joys of Motherhood

Technique and Language in Buchi Emecheta's The Bride Price, The Slave Girl and The Joys of Motherhood

The Joys of Motherhood

The Joys of Motherhood

The Joys of Motherhood

The Joys of Motherhood

Review: The Joys of Motherhood by Buchi Emecheta

Book Review| January 01 1980 Review: The Joys of Motherhood by Buchi Emecheta Buchi Emecheta. The Joys of Motherhood. New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1979. 224 pp. $8.95. Janet Cheatham Bell Janet Cheatham Bell Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Explorations in Ethnic Studies (1980) 3 (1): 70–71. https://doi.org/10.1525/ees.1980.3.1.70 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Janet Cheatham Bell; Review: The Joys of Motherhood by Buchi Emecheta. Explorations in Ethnic Studies 1 January 1980; 3 (1): 70–71. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/ees.1980.3.1.70 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentEthnic Studies Review Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright, ©EES, The National Association for Ethnic Studies, 19801980 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.