OTHERNESS IN BUCHI EMECHETA’S KEHINDE AND SECOND CLASS CITIZEN

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OTHERNESS IN BUCHI EMECHETA’S KEHINDE AND SECOND CLASS CITIZEN

Abstract

This study examines Buchi Emecheta’s motives in portraying the otherness of Igbo women through her novel Second-Class Citizen (1974). In this novel, Emecheta presents African women’s experience of otherness within a broad context of social inequalities resulting from monolithic and unyielding societal construct in the West and in the Third World. In fact, Buchi Emecheta is a marginalized African woman writer crafting fictionalized autobiography of the experience of determined first-generation diasporic mother in Second-Class Citizen while living in exile far from her home of origin. By depicting the bodily and migratory experiences of the African woman and her sense of self, Emecheta reassigns previous generalizations of “Mother Africa”. At this point, the figure of determined mother comes to the fore as a strategy of resistance to cultural expectations imposed on women or established customs as being stultifying to women, preventing self-development throughout the novel. Accordingly, in Second-Class Citizen, the mother figure is motivated by the desire both to change the community and the societal construction of citizen in London and to achive discursive agency.

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

Background of the study

As for my survival for the past twenty years in England, from when I was a little over twenty, dragging four cold and dripping babies with me and pregnant with a fifth one- that is a miracle. And if for any reason you do not believe in miracles, please start believing, because my keeping my head above water in this indifferent society, which is probably succeeding in making me indifferent and private too, is a miracle (Emecheta, 1994, 1986: 5).

In her autobiographical work, Head above Water (1994, 1986), Buchi Emecheta describes her position as a “Third World” person since as an Igbo woman, she is a native of Nigeria and has spent much of her life in Britain. Born in Lagos, Nigeria in 1944 to “scantily educated parents” from Ibuza, Emecheta grew up in her home country and through a scholarship was educated at a Methodist Girls’ High School in Lagos (Emecheta, 1994, 1986: 16). At sixteen, Emecheta left school and married a native young man.

After leaving high school and a two-year working experience as a librarian at the American Embassy in Lagos, Emecheta was able to save enough money to send her husband to study for a degree at London University and to leave for London with her two children two years later, in 1962 (Jagne and Parekh, 2012: 148). Once she arrived in England, Emecheta realized that the Blacks in general were not warmly welcomed. In Emecheta’s words, “Our hosts in our new country simply refused to see beyond the surface of our skin” (Emecheta, 1994, 1986: 29).

Together with the racial discrimination her family experienced in Britain, Emecheta also realized that her marriage was in danger. She found herself in a difficult situation; nevertheless, she gained courage to write her first manuscript, The Bride Price. Unfortunately, her husband burned it. In such a case, her marriage ended in a divorce when she was a mother of five children. However, Emecheta continued her education, receiving an honors degree in sociology and a master’s degree in philosophy at London University (Jagne and Parekh, 2012: 148-49).

Her writing career was influenced by Igbo story-telling tradition. Under the influence of it, Emecheta desired to be a story-teller herself (James, 1990: 37). Shortly after, she published In the Ditch (1972), followed by other novels which explore different sides of African women’s conditions. As Mary E. Modupe Kolawole explains in her work, Womanism and African Consciousness, “Buchi Emecheta represents the ambivalent heritage of African women, and her experience is a symbol of the dual heritage in a practical way” (187). In this respect, most of her fiction tells the experience of Igbo women fluctuated between the social norms of their own society and those enforced by British colonialism. As a writer of diasporic origin, Emecheta then illustrates how these forces oppress these women in her fiction from the consciousness of being an African and a woman (Umeh, 1996: xxxv).

Even though Emecheta portrays the hard times of black women in her fiction, she rejects feminist labelling in relation to her works and herself. She then highlights that “the main themes of my novels are African society and family; the historical, social, and political life in Africa as seen by a woman through events” (Bruner and David, 1985: 11). She further adds that “I always try to show that the African male is oppressed and he too oppresses the African woman… I have not committed myself to the cause of African women only. I write about Africa as a whole” (Bruner and David, 1985: 11). Here, through her fiction, Emecheta’s intention is to both portray the oppressed African women in racist or patriarchal societies and to show the negative impact of this oppression on the lives of African men.

Her rejection of being labelled as a feminist is also highlighted in her speech: “Being a woman, and African born, I see things through an African woman’s eyes… I did not know that by doing so I was being feminist. But if I am now a feminist then I am an African feminist with a small ‘f’” (Nfah-Abbenyi, 1997: 7). Subsequently, she clarifies her perception of feminism in an interview: “I do believe in the African type of feminism. They call it womanism, because, you see, you Europeans don’t worry about water, you don’t worry about schooling, you are so well off. Now I buy land, and I say ‘Okay, I can’t build on it, I have no money, so I give it to some women to start planting’. That is my brand of feminism” (Nfah-Abbenyi, 1997: 7). Regarding the “African type of feminism”, “womanism,” the term phrased by Alice Walker, refers to women of color who hope to define themselves instead of being defined by others (Bates, 2005: 99). In this manner, Emecheta hopes not to be defined by Western feminist ideology, the origins of which reinforce the superiority of white Western women.

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