The Joys of Motherhood - Katherine Delgado

Reading the first few chapters of "The Joys of Motherhood" has left me in Awe. This story begins with the "end" and goes back to what led it there. When Nnu Ego loses her baby, I almost cried with her. I couldn't believe that after having married Amatokwu, whom she was madly in love with, but ended up divorcing because he replaced her. Nnu couldn't bear children with him, and after marrying a man she didn't even know and despised after, she was blessed with motherhood. But her chi took him away from her after just weeks of having received him. This story hit home, because I know the pain that people go through when they lose a pregnancy that they wanted so much. But other than the sad story that Nnu Ego goes thru (up till chapter 6) there are many elements of feminism in this story. Buchi Emecheta writes about women who are suppresed and overpowered by men. The only character that possibily stands out as not being suppresed is Nnu Ego's mother, Ona. She was apparently liberal and didn't marry Agbadi. He was her lover and had him praising the ground she walked on because she was forbidden to him. Yet she was being oppressed by her father. Her father didn't allow her to marry and it was said that if she had a son, then he would have to carry on Ona's father's name. With this it almost seemed like the men held the power in the novel. Yet there was this line, said by Cordelia, "Men here are too busy being white men's servants to be men. We women mind the home. Not our husbands. Their manhood has been taken away from them. The shame of it is that they don't know it. All they see is the money, shining white man's money" (51). And so it's interesting to see that though the men think they have the power over their women, the white man has power over them. A few passages before Nnu Ego tells her husband, Nnaife, "I want to live with a man, not a woman-made man" (50). This line reminds me of Woolf's idea that a man needs to me man-womanly and a woman, woman-manly. This is an idea that I think Nnu Ego would strongly disagree.