Kris Van der Bijl

In his New Yorker review of Buchi Emecheta’s novel The Joys of Motherhood, American writer John Updike calls the text “a graceful, touching, ironically titled tale that bears a plain feminist message.” Critics like Patricia Mclean, however, note that the novel’s story is “neither plain nor traditionally feminist.” My views are like Mclean’s. I wish to jump into her thoughts to explore my thoughts on the cliched and overused discussions around the use of irony in Buchi Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood. 

The Joys of Motherhood centres around the life of Nnu Ego. Born a woman into an Igbo community not yet entirely decimated by British colonialism, her life is one destined for motherhood. She fails to have children with her first husband, Amatokwu, and must be rescued by her father, Agbadi. A short while later, she married Nnaife, a “man with a belly like a pregnant cow.” They have many children and form a kind of happy marriage. The novel ends when Nnu Ego dies unceremoniously alone on the roadside.

One type of feminist critic can point out that Nnu Ego’s life represents the struggles of a mother’s unacknowledged suffering throughout her life. They can add the polygamy that she had to endure under both of her husbands and the stress of needing to buy food for the entire family when only her husband could work.

The irony of the title is clear here. Nnu Ego has no real “joy” because she was never free. She never was afforded the opportunity to be her own person. From birth until death, she had motherhood thrust upon her. Her life was a struggle. Even as a novel’s protagonist—a position in line with Robinson Crusoe and Achebe’s Okonkwo—she did not become an individual agent through self-actualisation. She dies alone and is barely granted a funeral.

The hole in this argument, as found from what we can loosely title the African feminist perspective, is that their model for a self-actualised woman is inherently Western-based. Those in this camp include Olumide Ogunrotimi and Omolara Kikelomo Owoeye, who champion a “womanism” theory in their article “Notions of Alienation and Motherhood in Buchi Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood.“

Loosely, the irony of Nnu Ego’s motherhood joys is that she realises too late that her traditional form of motherhood is out-of-step with the colonial (and soon-to-be-post-colonial) world. Had she embraced other women, like her co-wife Adaku, and examined their form of femininity and motherhood, she could have escaped a somewhat solitary life and a very lonely death. Questions of what she could have been “form the core of the author’s ironic theoretical (con) textualisation of the motherhood praxis in Africa.”

Patricia Mclean unpacks how the irony comes from the novel’s third-person narration. Mclean notes that it “exposes the difficulties of defining female subjectivity beyond the constraints of fertility and motherhood … [the text] seems either unable or unwilling to fix female identity beyond the condition of motherhood.” Third-person omniscience, that narrator looking from above, sees Nnu Ego’s life as entwined with fertility and motherhood. It cannot see past this. Nnu Ego’s self-actualisation can only occur through the narrative lens beyond her.

One can argue that the novel as a structure cannot capture Nnu Ego’s life. Mclean mentions that The Joys of Motherhood “is not a quest novel in the European sense of the tradition.” She states that “[Nnu Ego’s] purpose is not to achieve liberation or even self-knowledge, but to bring into the world many healthy sons who will care for her in old age.” However, she places a novel tradition in European hands, where epiphanies “to confront personal and social crisis” do not lead to liberation. Nnu Ego cannot self-actualise through the quest story structure as written in a novel format.

Much like she grew up in a world without colonialism, lived most of her adult life under British colonial control, and is told of a future where Nigeria is a post-colony, Nnu Ego is seemingly never without structures and forms. She is constantly working to be a woman within the fluctuating historical setting in a story whose structural form, the novel, seems out-of-step with her life. 

There’s also the matter of English in the novel. While Emecheta published The Joys of Motherhood in English, the characters do not speak it. Whenever we read their thoughts and conversations, they are in English, a language that Nnaife is ridiculed in and exists outside of their internal lives as British colonial subjects.

This may be why her internal thoughts and experiences are so complex to figure out when reading the text. It is meant to be a matter of interpretation, not just because all reading is interpretation, but because we are working with someone whose inner self does not match the world structures—both in the text and the novel’s actual textuality—around her. To me, this is Emecheta’s ironic paradox.

But in closing, I am left to re-return to John Updike’s short comment, still found on most copies, about the book bearing “a plain feminist message.” I hope to have shown that it is not plain, but I have fallen into imposing the structure of irony onto the text. Really, does The Joys of Motherhood need to be called ironic? Is it a case of an easy essay topic for undergraduates? And again, me writing towards something that I cannot say, the cheater’s structure of an argument, does it really bear anything onto the text?

Part of me thought of questioning whether irony can be used to point to the humour in the text, very much borrowing from what David Foster Wallace does to Kafka. I imagine arguments against my making light of Nnu Ego’s plight of being forced to marry a man who is described as having “a belly like a pregnant cow.” I’m also confident that many would see humour here for various reasons, none of which I really care to explore in a blog post.

I think the novel would be fun to explore if one day the structures surrounding motherhood were differently and universally unfunny—or, specifically, something that a critic should take as serious and unserious. Everything would break if chipmunk-hood were replaced with motherhood throughout the text, an obvious and unhelpful thought indicative of fiddly terms.