Part+Three+Female+Sexuality+–+The+Body+As+Text+Procreation,+Not+Recreation+Decoding+Mama+in+Buchi+Emecheta’s+The+Joys+of+Motherhood+by+Marie+Umeh,+from+pgs.+189-204

Excerpt taken from //Emerging Perspectives on Buchi Emecheta//, ed. Marie Umeh

Part Three: Female Sexuality – The Body As Text Procreation, Not Recreation: Decoding Mama in Buchi Emecheta’s //The Joys of Motherhood// by Marie Umeh, from pgs. 189-207

“A feminism that does not speak of sexual pleasure has little to offer women in the here and now.” -- Amber Hollibaugh

“Like gender, sexuality is political.” -- Gayle Rubin

“…It is a permanent task of feminist literary criticism and scholarship to contest and delegitimize the ‘under-textualization’ of women and ‘women’s affairs’ in the mostly male-authored writings which claim to speak on behalf of the ‘nation’, the continent, the Black World.” -- Biodun Jeyifo

“All sexuality is constructed.” -- Michel Foucault

Many Africanist and feminist scholars have written essays on the theme of motherhood and its foil, barrenness in Buchi Emecheta’s //magnum opus, The Joys of Motherhood.// For example, Carole Boyce Davies contends that although there is no single view of motherhood in the works of male and female Igbo writers, motherhood is crucial to a woman’s status in African society. It is through motherhood that a woman is esteemed (243). Eustace Palmer, in another essay extols the novel as a first in African literature to present the female point of view in registering its disgust at male chauvinism and patriarchy’s unfair and oppressive system towards mothers (39). For Eustace Palmer, Nnu Ego’s famous lament, “God, when will you create a woman who will be fulfilled in herself, a full human being, not anybody’s appendage?” contradicts the “phallocratic” images of happy, cheerful mothers in African literature (46).

Besides the novel’s preoccupation with Igbo society’s making the female body a fetish for begetting sons, it is my contention that the book is also about female sexuality among the Ibuza/Delta Igbo and by extension African women generally. Female sexuality expressivity is taboo in Igbo society. Hence, the author cloaks issues of female erotic and hedonistic experiences, and their attendant sexual deprivation, in a number of semiotic codes. //Joys//, as a result, is laced with cultural codes and feminist messages protesting the culture’s outer oppression of women which results in their inner repressions and denial of female sexual desire, passion, and fulfillment.

//The Joys of Motherhood// is the story of Nnu Ego, the daughter of Chief Nwokocha Agbadi and his concubine Ona. Nnu Ego is the reincarnation of a slave girl who was killed by Chief Agbadi and his sons. According to the oracle, the revenge of the slave girl is heaped on Nnu Ego. So, Nnu Ego is barren in her first marriage to Amatokwu and loses his love and affection. On the brink of a nervous breakdown, Nnu Ego returns to her father’s compound where he makes sacrifices to the oracle so that Nnu Ego’s //chi// will have a change of heart. Nnu Ego is lucky in her second marriage, to Nnaife Owulum: although she finds him repulsive, she stays with him because he impregnates her and together they have healthy children: three boys and four girls. By the end of the novel, Nnu Ego realizes that while nurturing children brought her status in Igbo society, it does not bring her personal fulfillment. Her life was marked with loneliness, poverty, and strife. Nnu Ego dies a premature death at the age of forty-five, all alone, separated from Nnaife and abandoned by her sons who went abroad to further their education. Her sons, disappointed that she dies before they were in a position to provide their mother with a life of comfort and joy, give her the costliest second burial ceremony the Ibuza people have ever witnessed. They even erect a shrine in her honor so that childless women can appeal to her for children. Ironically however, Nnu Ego never answered prayers for children.

Between Ona, Agbadi’s glorious woman, and Nnu Ego, the offspring of their love, there was a great schism: of character; of pleasure and its consequences; of will to power, and of mother and daughter. The story of Ona and Agbadi was the great drama; Nnu Ego was its tragedy. The cruelest irony of //The Joys of Motherhood// is that Nnu Ego became what Ona dreaded: the forgotten, unfulfilled wife. When Nnu Ego did not conceive children from her first husband, she was denied his companionship. After having seven children with her second spouse, including three sons, she dies after losing her mind, alone again, by the roadside. In her //magnum opus//, Emecheta makes her strongest indictment against the powerful paternal presence, where the bride’s father receives the bride price and the bride gets nothing in return for even her children belong to their father. As Ifeyinwa Iweriebor quotes from Robert Magabe on the ironies of the patrilineal system: “The child born of a woman despite the nine months spent in her womb, was never hers by customary right of ownership, and remained her child only as long as the marriage between her and her husband was good” (176).

Igbo society, according to //Joys//, effaces female sexual desire and expressivity by subconsciously programming its female kith and kin to carry a “moral albatross” around their necks (1). To prevent female rebellion, which would lead to a complete disregard for tradition and the ways of the ancestors, various methods have been devised by patriarchy to control Igbo women’s sexuality: clitorodectomy, rape, incest, sexual deprivation, ostracization, fear, humiliation, and the psychological sexual binding of women. Generally speaking, the only time a woman is regarded as being chaste and pure is when the sex act is performed by her husband for his recreation, and for her procreation. The wife’s joy does not figure into the equation.

The idea that chastity and fertility are jewels possessed by good daughters is delineated early in //Joys//, when Nnu Ego’s in-laws “came to thank Chief Nwokocha Agbadi, the great elephant hunter, for giving them his precious daughter. They did so with six full kegs of palm wine because Nnu Ego has been found to be an unspoiled virgin” (31). This education of young girls only promotes the moral ethic that for women //plaisir//, to borrow Julia Kristeva’s term, is achieved only through happiness in marriage and motherhood. The sexual codes by which the lives of Igbo women are governed are listed in order of importance: the glory of a woman is a man; a woman without a son is a failure; marriage is for the production of male heirs to continue the husband’s lineage; and a complete woman is the mother of healthy sons. These codes give voice to the historical repression of female sexuality in African society. By inscribing the inner repressions Igbo women live by, and by giving voice to the inarticulate, covert codes controlling the emotions of women, Emecheta exposes how female sexuality is denied, camouflaged and replaced with euphemisms that enable the male to restrict female sexuality.

The argument advanced by Africanists that more critical problems such as AIDS, hunger, cultural genocide, war, and imperialism warrant our attention, as usual marginalizes women’s concerns. It may be recalled that similar criticism by modern critics was aimed at another female novelist, Jane Austen. How could she be so involved only in the private lives of insignificant women when the French Revolution was dominating European history? The truth of the matter is that women’s dignity was important to Jane Austen. Similarly, female sexuality and its exploitation is important to contemporary Black women writers like Buchi Emecheta. In fact, one attitude toward female sexuality would positively influence many of our social ills. Sexual fulfillment is at the core of our lives touching every human being from adolescence to old age. And women is the logos and topos of sexuality. Obioma Nnaemeka argues that the African woman writer’s awareness of the male gaze compels her to compromise her actual rage through ambivalent fictional characters (142). On the contrary, Emecheta’s women, from Adah to Kehinde, become pariahs in their communities for their protests against retrogressive cultural norms. Emecheta scrutinizes the denial of female sexual desire and fulfillment in the novel, //Joys//, with the same zeal and emotion with which she describes the victimization of mothers by Igbo society’s double standards for women and primacy of sons. Who says mothers don’t need //plaisir//? Who says sons, not //jouissance//, make women complete? Who says children, not loving partners, bring happiness to women? And who says the glory of a woman is a callous, insensitive partner? More African writers need to delineate the pain and suffering of our women. If they do not or worse, if they are not allowed to, we will continue to live in a society where the odds are stacked against women, where one group will be allowed to explore life to the fullest and the “other” forced to pretend that sexual fulfillment is unimportant and sinful. In short, there would be more “madwomen in the attic.” It is therefore significant that madness, sickness, and premature death are the metaphors for Emecheta’s mothers. (2)

Emecheta protests against the sexual blinding of women in a number of ways. First, she delineates the right to female sexuality and //jouissance// in her characters, Nnu Ego and Nnu Ego’s mother, Ona and Adaku. Then she protests against the sexual deprivation of wives, mothers, and barren women in Agunwa, Nwokocha Agbadi’s senior wife, Adaku, and Nnu Ego in her first marriage to Amatokwu. Emecheta’s focus on female sexuality is evident in a number of episodes in //Joys//. It is clearly stated in Nnu Ego’s sexual desire and pleasure with her first husband, Amatokwu. The author writes, “Nnu Ego and her husband Amatokwu were very happy” (31). So satisfying and powerful was Nnu Ego’s sexual pleasure that when Amatokwu stopped loving her and transferred his affection to his second wife, Nnu Ego pleads with him at first, to come to her bed. When he fails to come, she becomes “thin and juiceless” (33). Upon recognizing Nnu Ego’s “nervous conditions” and psychological imbalance, Nwokocha Agbadi takes his daughter back to his compound to appease her //chi//, in hope of restoring her mental health. When Nnu Ego recovers and shows signs that she needs male companionship, Nwokocha Agbadi finds his daughter a second husband. He makes it a point of searching for one “who could spare time to think. The art of loving, he knew required deeper men. Men who did not have to spend every moment of their time working and worrying about food and the farm” (36). However, what Nnu Ego got was Nnaife.

The normality of the female sexual experience in a community that accentuates “the joys of motherhood,” all the while undermining the “joy of sex” for women, is also evident in the characterization of Ona, Nnu Ego’s mother, and Adaku, Nnu Ego’s co-wife. Ona, for example, enjoyed “it,” “it” meaning “the joy of sex” (15). Ona confesses to Nwokocha Agbadi at one point in the book that he is the “greatest joy of (her) life” (24). And during that famous erotic scene in African literature between Ona and Agbadi, Ona is burning with desire for Agbadi, and she is not too timid to express her passion. In response to Adbadi’s foreplay and sexual arousal, she implores him to take her sexually. She cries, “please, I am in pain” (20).