Themes
The Influences of Colonialism
The Owulum family and their experiences are dramatically influenced by the forces of the colonialist world in which they live. Emecheta portrays colonialism ambiguously in The Joys of Motherhood. It forces native populations to adopt and adhere to systems and beliefs foreign to their own. Capitalism, Christianity, and European notions of education and conduct all effectively alter and threaten traditional Nigerian culture. The effects eventually touch all levels of society, eroding tradition and trickling down to harm both families and individuals. Without the changes colonialism and its practitioners ushered in, Nnu Ego’s joy as a mother and the cohesive and interdependent family she long desired could have remained intact and uncompromised. The tragedy of Nnu Ego’s story is that she cannot recognize and embrace change—and that these changes themselves, embraced or not, are not entirely positive forces.
In Nnu Ego’s traditional vision of the family, individual concerns are secondary to the livelihood of the group. Several times in the novel, Emecheta portrays the family as a small corporation, each member contributing to the success and well-being of the “company” as a whole. The younger generation, however, views the family arrangement quite differently. Oshia’s love of learning and desire for an education take him the farthest from the family fold. He makes a severe break with tradition when he accepts a scholarship to study in the United States, where he eventually marries a white woman. Adim, in his own right, retaliates against the strict hierarchies implicit in the family structure. Traditionally, as the second son, his own interests and desires are squelched so that the eldest and the family as a whole can be supported and lifted up. Adim similarly throws off the mantle of tradition and pursues a path much like Oshia’s. The change appears just as dramatically in one of Nnu Ego’s daughters, Kehinde, who desires to break with traditional and societal taboos. Rather than accepting the course that would be best for her family, she asserts her right to happiness and and her right to select a mate of her own choosing.
The Danger of Resisting Change
In the rapidly changing world of Lagos, traditional Ibo culture struggles to continue, and Nnu Ego must find a new and different form of pleasure in her honored status as a mother. Her children’s education and achievements are now becoming the benchmarks of good parenting rather than threats to the repressive traditions that required the next generation to forgo their own goals in service to and respect for the family. The traditions and rituals of the past provide balance, order, and security in a changing world, but those unwilling or unable to compromise or to accept change end up broken and alone. Nnaife is literally punished, with imprisonment, when he cannot accept his daughter marrying into a Yoruba family. Nnu Ego’s punishment is more psychological and emotional, culminating with her dying alone at the side of a road.
The Ambiguous Rewards of Motherhood
In The Joys of Motherhood, motherhood is the source of not only Nnu Ego’s greatest joys but also her greatest defeats. As a girl, she is taught that her sole functions are to bear and raise children. Her initial struggle to conceive and her utter self-defeat when she is unable to exemplify how strongly she believes in this uniquely female destiny that her culture has prescribed. The idea of motherhood informs her fantasies and her dreams. Yet when Nnu Ego actually becomes a mother and struggles to raise her growing family, her idealism begins to change. Nnu Ego ultimately regrets having so many children and investing so much of her life in them since they seem to have little concern for her well-being. She forces herself to accept a vision of motherhood that has been radically modified from the ideas she once cherished. Instead of an honored and revered figure, Nnu Ego becomes a sacrificial lamb, one who gave to her family selflessly while receiving little, if not nothing, in return.
Motifs
Blurred Gender Roles
Nnu Ego and Nnaife, who embody the stereotypical roles of Ibo men and women, represent the traditional thinking of their society and their generation. Yet their world is in flux. The old, formerly unquestioned attitudes have begun to change. Boys do not necessarily serve as their family’s main support. Girls gain respect and power for their skills and education, not just an increased bride price. For the older generation, these changes in perception are often startling and unsettling, as once-solid gender definitions become more fluid. Nnu Ego reacts unfavorably to the fact that her husband is employed washing the personal garments of a woman. She feels such subservience “[robs] him of his manhood.” At the same time, Nnu Ego herself is not untouched by the transformation and blurring of gender roles. While her identity is almost entirely dependent on her status as a mother, she occasionally assumes the traditionally male role of provider and breadwinner to support her family.
Language Barriers
Characters in The Joys of Motherhood often have difficulty understanding one another. These communication barriers suggest a world of division and separation, where English, Hausa, Yoruba, Ibo, and the various other native dialects of Nigeria intersect. Mrs. Meers and Nnaife are deeply connected in their relationship as employer and employee, yet language separates them as much as race and class do—they cannot even pronounce each other’s names correctly. When soldiers enter the Yaba compound to evict Nnu Ego and Oshia, the sharp, foreign words they shout at her are as frightening and daunting as the yelps of the snarling dogs. Language divides and alienates individuals as well as families, communities, and the nation as a whole. In the novel, language barriers and lapses in communication suggest a deeper problem infecting Nigerian society: they indicate an inability to connect to and understand the outside world. Even when characters speak the same language, they still fail to fully comprehend one another’s actions and intentions. For example, Nnu Ego has no idea that Oshia does not plan to stop his schooling so he can return to the family and support them.
Vision
Nnu Ego’s vision of the world, as well as her literal vision, frequently falter as she loses her illusions in the face of new realities. References to imperfect or unreliable sight abound, particularly in the first half of the novel, when Nnu Ego is most mired in her illusions. When Nnu Ego gets married, her vision of the world is distorted by her unrealistic ideas about motherhood and her duty as a woman. During Nnu Ego’s desperate suicide attempt, Emecheta calls attention to her distorted vision. When Nnu Ego first appears, she is stumbling about, blind with grief, “her eyes unfocused and glazed, looking into vacancy.” Later, Emecheta equates Nnu Ego with the blind Hausa beggar whom she nearly knocks over in her hasty retreat from the site of Ngozi’s death. She runs straight into the man “as if she too was without the use of her eyes.” Nnu Ego’s impaired vision suggests her lack of insight. By the end of the novel, realization settles on her, and, for better or worse, Nnu Ego is finally able to see her life for what it is.
Symbols
The Child
The pervasive image of the child in The Joys of Motherhood represents the destiny and supposed common goal of Ibo women. Children represent a complement to a woman’s identity, and her life is viewed as incomplete or unjustified unless she has had children. The child is consistently and idealistically portrayed as an image of completion and female self-fulfillment. These abstract notions of motherhood and its attendant joys inform Nnu Ego’s early years. Her dreams are haunted by visions, including images of babies in peril or children being taken away by her chi. Nnu Ego conjures fantasies of kidnapping Amatokwu’s son and running off to raise the child alone in bliss. As the novel progresses, however, the iconic significance of the child changes. Children are still viewed as a delight, but they are also a source of agony and deep emotional pain. When Nnu Ego slowly strips away her illusions about motherhood and her unrealized expectations, she is left with the unadorned reality of her life as it is, not as she wants it to be.
Palm Wine
Palm wine suggests Nnaife’s refusal to confront reality and his failure to be an active force in shaping and guiding his family. On one level, palm wine represents the negative influences and social ills of life in the city. It also stands for a shirking of male responsibility, and drunkenness becomes emblematic of Nnaife’s detachment as a father. He prefers intoxication to the living reality of what his family has become. At one point, about to drink a glass of palm wine, Nnaife states that the wine in the glass is the only truth he knows. His drinking only masks other problems, and his alcohol abuse plays a key role in sealing his fate during his trial for attempted murder.
Carter Bridge
In addition to the account of Nnu Ego’s actual suicide attempt, references to Carter Bridge appear in the novel both explicitly and teasingly in Nnu Ego’s random thoughts and memories of the past. The bridge serves as an ambiguous or double symbol, standing for various impressions and emotional states at the same time. On the one hand, Nnu Ego sees it as salvation, a gateway to freedom. Suicide is the only way she can address the pain of losing her child, but it is also her frantic response to the claustrophobic and predetermined role she finds herself cast in as an Ibo woman. At the same time, the bridge stands as an emblem of shame. Shame lurks in Nnu Ego’s irrational response to the death of Ngozi and in her desire to seek death as a means of accepting her “failure” as a mother. Shame also lies in her desire to sidestep the expectation that she would bear male heirs. For Nnu Ego, the edge of the bridge represents the precarious intersection of failure and freedom, life and death.
Her love and duty for her children were like her chain of slavery.
Explanation for Quotation #1
This comment, appearing in Chapter 10, summarizes one of the novel’s main themes: that motherhood brings ambiguous joys. While the title of the novel promises a warm portrait of the joys and rewards of motherhood, the novel itself charts a much different course for Nnu Ego and many of the other women who make up her Ibo community. Rather than a self-fulfilling and life-giving role, motherhood and the responsibilities it creates become a form of enslavement. For Nnu Ego, her life, hope, and identity depend on her ability to bear children. In the eyes of society, she has no other primary function and no other means of achieving rank and respect.
Nnu Ego’s struggle is twofold. First, she fears she will face the fate of a barren, cast-off woman when she does not become pregnant after her marriage to her first husband, Amatokwu. Later, when she is blessed with several offspring, she is ill-equipped to feed and clothe them, and the family slides deeper into poverty. Finally, when Oshia, Adim, and Kehinde turn their backs on their familial responsibilities and pursue lives of their own, Nnu Ego questions the point of all the sacrifices and self-denial she has endured, for her children’s sake, through the years.
Plot Overview
Nnu Ego, the protagonist, stumbles across the Yaba compound, almost delusional with grief. She makes her way to the waterfront, heading to Carter Bridge, intent on throwing herself off.
The action shifts to twenty-five years previous to this moment, in the village of Ogboli in the Ibuza homeland. Agbadi, the esteemed local chief, is enamored by the one woman he cannot possess, the beautiful and strong-willed Ona. During a hunting trip, Agbadi is gored by an injured elephant and not expected to live long. Ona slowly nurses him back to health. As he heals, he humiliates her in the compound by loudly forcing his sexual attentions on her. She becomes pregnant as the result of this union. If it is a boy, the child will belong to Ona’s father, but if it is a girl, Agbadi will accept responsibility. When Nnu Ego is born, a medicine man concludes that her chi, or guiding spirit, is the slave girl who was forcibly killed and buried with one of Agbadi’s wives. Within the year, Ona dies during childbirth.
Sixteen years later, Nnu Ego is of marrying age. She is first betrothed to Amatokwu. When she does not become pregnant, relations cool between her and Amatokwu, and she is soon moved to another hut to make room for a new wife. Nnu Ego is relegated to working in the fields and taking care of the new wife’s infant son. When Amatokwu catches Nnu Ego breast-feeding the hungry child, he beats her. Nnu Ego returns to her father to rest and recover, and the marriage ties are severed. Dedicated to finding his daughter a better match, Agbadi arranges a marriage between Nnu Ego and Nnaife, who lives in faraway Lagos. Nnaife’s older brother escorts Nnu Ego to the city and her new life with Nnaife.
Nnaife and Nnu Ego live in the Yaba compound, where Nnaife does laundry for the Meers, a British couple. Happy in her marriage, Nnu Ego becomes pregnant and gives birth to a son, Ngozi. She also starts her own business selling cigarettes and matches beside the road. One morning, she discovers Ngozi dead in their one-room home. Distraught and devoid of hope, she rushes to the waterfront to throw herself off Carter Bridge. Nwakusor, an Ibo man coming off his shift at work, prevents her with the help of the crowd that has gathered.
Recovering from Ngozi’s death is a slow and painful process. Eventually, Nnu Ego becomes pregnant again and gives birth to Oshia. She decides to focus solely on raising the child instead of making extra income at her market stall. But economic pressures set in when the Meers return to England and Nnaife is suddenly out of a job. Nnu Ego resumes her local trade in cigarettes. Nnaife eventually secures a position that takes him far from home, working for a group of Englishmen. While he is away, British soldiers enter the abandoned compound and tell Nnu Ego that she and Oshia must vacate the premises. Nnu Ego takes a rented room in another part of town, where she gives birth to another son, Adim. Left on their own, the family slowly succumbs to malnutrition. Neighbors step in to help. Nnu Ego returns from her search for more contraband cigarettes to find that her husband has returned, flush with money. Nnu Ego secures a permanent stall in the marketplace and pressures Nnaife to find his next job.
One evening, Nnaife’s friends arrive with the news that his brother has died in Ibuza. Nnaife has inherited all of his brother’s wives, but only one will come to live with them in Lagos. Adaku arrives with her daughter, setting off tensions and rivalry between the two women. As Nnu Ego tries to sleep nearby, Nnaife invokes his rights as a husband and has sexual relations with Adaku. Nnaife starts a new job cutting grass for the railroad. With less space and more mouths to feed, Nnu Ego and Adaku become pregnant around the same time. Nnu Ego gives birth to twin girls, while Adaku’s son dies shortly after he is born. Feeling they are not being given enough money to support the household, the women go on strike. Nnu Ego’s firm resolve eventually wavers, and she cooks a large conciliatory meal. But Nnaife does not come home to enjoy it. He has been forced to join the army and is shipped off to India and then Burma to fight in World War II.
With Nnaife away and his pay partially secure in a savings account, Nnu Ego, again pregnant, takes her family to Ibuza and to the deathbed of her father. After his two funerals, Nnu Ego is unwilling to return to Lagos. However, Adankwo, the eldest wife of Nnaife’s older brother, urges her to return to the city to keep an eye on Adako. Nnu Ego returns to find that Nnaife had been home for a brief visit and had left some money for her that she failed to receive. Relations between Nnu Ego and Adako grow increasingly strained, culminating in Nnu Ego’s rude and brusque treatment of one of Adako’s visiting cousins. When Nnaife’s friends step in to resolve the conflict, Adako decides that she and her daughters will move out on their own. Impoverished once again, Nnu Ego spends the last of her savings before learning she had not been receiving her husband’s yearly stipends due to an institutional error. Nnaife returns and spends most of this windfall. Though Nnu Ego is pregnant again, Nnaife decides to return to Ibuza, where he impregnates Adankwo and returns with a teenage bride, Okpo. Nnu Ego gives birth to twin girls.
The family moves to a mud house in another part of town. First Oshia and then Adim announce their intentions of furthering their educations. When Oshia tells Nnaife he has won a scholarship to study in the United States, Nnaife denounces him for his dereliction of his filial duty. Taiwo’s marriage is arranged to an Ibo clerk, but Kehinde runs away to marry a Yoruba. Hearing the news, Nnaife flies into a rage and attempts to murder Kehinde’s father-in-law with his cutlass. Nnaife is put in jail, tried, and sentenced to five years, a stint that is reduced provided he return to Ibuza after his release. Nnu Ego has also returned to her homeland, where she dies several years later, alone by the roadside. Oshia returns to honor Nnu Ego with a costly funeral, befitting her sacrifices as a mother.
Character List
Nnu Ego - The novel’s protagonist. At the beginning of the novel, slim, long-necked Nnu Ego is known for her youthful beauty and is often compared to her mother, the high-spirited Ona. Although she has her mother’s strength and singleness of purpose, she is more polite and compliant and less aggressive and outspoken than Ona. She leaves her husband after she cannot get pregnant, and she later attempts suicide when her firstborn is found dead. Eventually, she settles into a bittersweet life of challenge and sacrifice with Nnaife and her children in Lagos.
Nnu Ego starts out as an innocent, somewhat naïve girl filled with hope and anticipation of the joys and rewards motherhood will bring her. Unlike her mother, Ona, Nnu Ego is not a radical or antagonistic presence, and she dutifully accepts and fulfills her role as a woman in Ibo society. Her initial quest is for justification and validation. When she cannot conceive with her first husband, Amatokwu, the marriage is dissolved and she is filled with apprehension and shame. When her second marriage, to Nnaife, produces a highly prized son, she realizes the happiness denied her, only to have her joy shattered when Ngozi dies in infancy. The death of the child becomes, by extension, the death of Nnu Ego. She sees no reason to live if she cannot succeed in the single role of bearing and rearing children. Slowly, she comes to new realizations about what is truly important to her, and these epiphanies force her to re-examine her role and function as a woman in Ibo society.
Though she is distraught over the death of Ngozi, Nnu Ego feels guilty relief when, later, a daughter arrives stillborn. She begins to examine her essential worth as a woman. Although she becomes a vital economic force in the community, essentially setting up her own business to help her family survive, she is seen as merely an economic unit, a machine for producing and rearing male heirs. Nnu Ego comes to believe that aspirations of being solely a mother and provider are too limiting and dispiriting. Rather than looking forward to a quiet life where she will be well provided for by her sons and daughters, she is a victim of her times, caught at a critical turning point in West-African social history. Rather than serving the collective unit of the family, her children pursue their own courses and seek to place their own self-fulfillment and individual destinies before their family responsibilities. Nnu Ego’s hope and joy become disillusionment as she dies, alone, at the side of the road, an ambivalent figure with little to show for her years of selflessness and sacrifice.
Nnaife is a passive, ineffective figure whose lack of ambition or connections does little to further the livelihood of his family. He allows others to control or intercede for him, all the while believing he is a figure of power, strength, and action. As traditions and times change, they render Nnaife increasingly ineffective in his role as a male authority figure. In the end, he simply playacts at the part of the blustering patriarch rather than truly embodying or living up to the duties he is expected to fulfill. He emerges as an emasculated figure and is unmasked as a poor provider and a drunk, the equivalent of a deadbeat dad. As Nnaife’s traditional male identity grows weaker and more threatened, he descends deeper into alcoholism and an aloof, willful detachment, both of which serve as safeguards and antidotes to reality. In a final act of desperation, he threatens to kill his own daughter and her new father-in-law. In his skewed vision of the world, individual lives and the happiness of his daughter are secondary to more abstract notions of family reputation, honor, and tradition. His subsequent imprisonment serves as symbolic punishment
Ngozi - Nnu Ego and Nnaife’s first child. Ngozi dies in infancy, and his death marks a turning point in the novel, prompting Nnu Ego’s suicide attempt. He is a source of guilt and regret, a specter that haunts Nnu Ego for years.
Adaku - Nnaife’s brother’s wife whom Nnaife inherits when his brother dies. Young, attractive, peaceful, and self-satisfied, Adaku joins the family in Lagos and soon starts a thriving and lucrative business selling in the marketplace. Her wealth and success go unrecognized because she bears no sons, only two daughters. Tired of her role of inferiority, she moves out of the household and threatens to become a prostitute. The name Adaku means “daughter of wealth.”
Adankwo - The eldest wife of Nnaife’s older brother. Tough, strong, wiry, and dependable, Adankwo is in her early forties and a voice of wisdom and reason among the Ibuza women. She advises Nnu Ego to return home to Lagos in order to keep an eye on Adaku. When Nnaife impregnates her with her last child, she refuses to return to Lagos with him and arranges to have Okpo sent instead.
Adimabua - The second living son of Nnu Ego and Nnaife, known as Adim. Observant and intelligent, Adim grows up in the shadow of his older brother. He quickly figures out the entitlement due him as a male and realizes the opportunities denied him as the second oldest. Quick to act, he prevents his father from murdering the Yoruba butcher. Like Oshia, Adim aspires to better things and later leaves Nigeria to pursue his education in Canada. His name means “now I am two” and shows his place in the male hierarchy of the family.
Agbadi - Nnu Ego’s father. Agbadi is a highly respected local chief known for both his skill at oratory and for his physical prowess. Cold, disrespectful, and cruel to his wives, he is loving and indulgent to his daughter, whom he treats as the embodiment of and last link to his beloved mistress, Ona. He is a constant source of support and a voice of reason in Nnu Ego’s life.
Cordelia - Ubani’s wife. Cordelia is kindhearted and a good friend to Nnu Ego when she makes the initially tough transition to life in Lagos. She is also a source of jealousy and conflict. Nnu Ego resents the easier, more stable life Cordelia seems to have, an attitude that sparks squabbles and petty disagreements between the women. Her name reveals the colonial influence on the region.
Mama Abby - A prosperous Ibo woman and confidant of Nnu Ego’s. Mama Abby earns respectability through the advancement of her son, the intelligent, upwardly mobile Abby. Her husband was a European who had worked in the Nigerian colonial service. He eventually returned to Europe, leaving his family well provided for. She, too, is of a mixed racial background. Slim, ladylike, and an eventual mother figure to Nnu Ego, Mama Abby is considered upper class but likes to live modestly with other Ibos. Many of the men view her as a negative influence and do not want their wives associating with her.
Dr. Meers - Nnaife and Ubani’s employer. Dr. Meers is the chief occupant of the Yaba compound and works at the Forensic Science Laboratory in Taba. The doctor makes little attempt to hide his racist attitudes concerning his African employees, overtly calling Nnaife a “baboon.”
Mrs. Meers - Dr. Meers’s wife. Mrs. Meers, the only white female character in the novel, has gray, sunken eyes, and appears to have been prematurely aged by the climate and her life in West Africa. She believes she is kind to her African staff, chiding her husband for his racist remarks, but at the same time she maintains a haughty and aloof demeanor of social superiority in their presence.
Obi Umunna - Ona’s father. A great chief and doting father, Obi Umunna is particularly protective of his daughter’s honor and freedom. He allows her to have lovers but does not force her to commit to a marriage. He prizes only an elusive male heir, which his daughter never produces. He is ridiculed for not finding a suitable match for his daughter and viewed by some as an ineffective father because of it.
Okpo - Nnaife’s sixteen-year-old bride. Okpo is sent to Lagos to live with the family when Adankwo refuses to leave Ibuza. Though she is Nnaife’s wife, Okpo has childlike qualities herself. She understands her traditional role as a wife and praises and flatters Nnu Ego for raising such clever and accomplished children.
Ona - Nnu Ego’s mother. Ona is known for her catlike grace and youthful exuberance as she runs about the village with her breasts exposed. She wears expensive waist beads and is later held to be conservative, haughty, cold, and remote when she wins the role of Agbadi’s favorite mistress. She is often reminded of her place as an Ibuzan women when she openly challenges and taunts her lover.
Oshiaju - Nnu Ego’s oldest surviving son, known as Oshia. Medicine men predict Oshiaju will be an intelligent man of infinite resources whose success will provoke jealousy in others. Tender and firm, Oshia physically resembles his father. He aggressively pursues higher education, working in a laboratory in Lagos and eventually winning a scholarship to a university in America. His name means “the bush has refused this,” referencing his health and the long life predicted for him.
Taiwo and Kehinde - Nnu Ego and Nnaife’s oldest twin girls. Kehinde is quieter and more introspective than Taiwo. She radically breaks with tradition by marrying a Yoruba man. Taiwo is the more fun-loving and adaptable twin. She aspires for a dependable husband and stable home life, both of which she finds with the clerk Magnus. He finds his ideal match in an uneducated wife content with the more traditional role of bearing and raising children.
Ubani - Friend of the Owulums. At first, Ubani is a cook in the Meers’s compound. A good provider, he later gets Nnaife a job cutting grass for the railroad. He is a stable presence in the lives of those around him. He is the one who calmly informs Nnaife that his son, Ngozi, has died.
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