The Joys of Motherhood

Nnu Ego's first marriage ends because her husband Amatokwu, when she fails to conceive quickly, sends her back to her father as damaged goods, and that early humiliation sets the terms for everything that follows: she arrives at her second marriage, to the gentle but chronically underemployed Nnaife, convinced that bearing children, especially sons, is the only currency that can ever make her a complete woman. Emecheta doesn't quarrel with that belief in the abstract, she lets it collide with an economy it was never designed for. In the Igbo village world Nnu Ego's mother Ona knew, many children meant labor, land claims, and old-age security; in colonial Lagos, where Nnaife earns wages doing a British family's laundry, every additional child is simply another mouth with no land behind it.

Nnaife's jobs track the family's entire relationship to colonial power: laundering a white couple's clothes, then conscripted to fight a war that has nothing to do with him, each position paying just enough to keep the household from starving and never enough to let Nnu Ego's investment in her children pay off the way village tradition promised it would. Her co-wife Adaku offers the novel's clearest alternative, walking away from the household entirely to build an independent life through trade and, eventually, sex work, a path Nnu Ego is constitutionally unable to choose because she has staked her entire identity on being exactly the kind of mother the old system rewarded and the new one cannot afford to.

The novel's title is ironic from its first page, but Emecheta saves the sharpest turn of the knife for after Nnu Ego's story is technically over: her grown children, launched by her sacrifices into relative prosperity, build her a shrine so that other women can pray to her spirit for fertility. It is exactly the kind of honor Nnu Ego spent her life believing children would eventually deliver, arriving only in death and only as a service performed for strangers rather than for her. Emecheta lets the shrine stand without commentary, trusting the reader to register that a woman who never had a friend or a comfortable old age has been repurposed into a fertility goddess by the very ideology that used her up.