Buchi Emecheta

Buchi Emecheta was born in Nigeria's capital, Lagos, but her parents were from the smaller town of Ibuza, and an awareness of the differences between city life and traditional village life is reflected in many of her novels, particularly those set in Nigeria. The Joys of Motherhood (1979), for example, one of her most celebrated novels, tells the story of Nnu Ego, who marries and moves to the city with her new husband, makes countless sacrifices for her children and yet dies alone. The  novel depicts the shock suffered by the generation which bore the brunt of the transition to a more modern lifestyle, trapped in old beliefs but surrounded by a changing  society.

The Slave Girl (1977), which won Emecheta an award for Best Black Writer in the World, also deals with the contrast between village and city life, and the effects of colonialism, with Christianity playing a major role in what is basically a fictionalisation of the life of Emecheta's grandmother. The story of Ojebeta, the slave girl, is an extreme example of the lives of women in a patriarchal society. while also standing for the slavery of a whole  continent under colonial rule. Ojebeta's parents die in an influenza epidemic, the seven-year-old girl is sold by her brother to a distant relative. Her slavery, Emecheta makes clear, is a version of the domestic slavery to which even free women are subjected. The novel is a witty and provocative presentation of the interaction between four different levels of slavery, colonial, religious, indigenous African and the domestic slavery of marriage.

In her depiction of village life in a choral style Emecheta's work resembles that of Chinua Achebe, but unlike Achebe she concentrates on the experiences of women. This places her, despite her protestations, in the feminist/womanist tradition alongside writers such as Ama Ata Aidoo and Angela Carter. She could also be associated with a number: of migrant writers who have written about London, including Jean Rhys and Sam Selvon.

 
Emecheta attended several schools in Lagos, and in her autobiography, Head Above Water (1986), records being introduced to writers such as Jane Austen, Lord Byron and Charles Dickens. The list of her literary influences, however, would not be complete without including the strong influence of an oral tradition, which can be seen in her deceptively simple prose-style, and in the cumulative effect of her novels as a whole. When taken together, the novels work as a complex series of tales that offer individual perspectives, while at the same time including the reader in the history of an imaginary people. This overall integrity arises from the fact that many of the novels are auto bio- graphically based, and therefore deal with similar concerns.

The autobiographical novels In the Ditch (1972) and Second-Class Citizen (1974) fictionalise Emecheta's arrival in Britain, her struggles against prejudice and an abusive husband, separation from him, and the attempt to rebuild a life while living in a council estate. She married at 16, and had five children with in the next six years. In 1962 she joined her husband in London but separated from him four years later. One of the factors which made her leave her husband was his burning of the manuscript of her first novel, an earlier, more idealised version of a couple's life that would later become The Bride Price (1976). At the age of 22 she had to fend for herself and her five children while studying and writing In the Ditch, her first published novel, which dissects the harsh life of single mothers living on benefit in a state of virtual classlessness.

The depiction of difficulties faced by immigrants is also a theme of Gwendolen (1989, published as The Family in the USA) and Kehinde (1994). Kehinde is particularly well crafted. The narrative follows the eponymous character's struggle to come to terms with her husband's desertion and his return to Nigeria, first by following him and becoming entangled in extended family politics, which include her husband's second wife and his sisters, and finally by returning to England. Like many immigrants, Kehinde and her husband believe that returning to Nigeria will be akin to going back to a paradisiacal place where they can be happy ever after. This dream of a welcoming homeland is exploded in the novel, a theme which resonates with the notion of 'imaginary homelands' put forward by Salman Rushdie.

The illusion of the homeland' is further explored in The New Tribe (2000), the first of her novels to feature a male protagonist; Chester is abandoned at birth and brought up by Reverend Arlington and his wife. His feelings of alienation result in a fruitless quest for an imaginary African kingdom of which he is the rightful prince. The ‘tribe’ he is looking for, however, is not to be found in his origins, but in a future multicultural society, which is perhaps the new tribe to which the title alludes.

 
Emecheta's heroines experience conflicts while trying to build an identity across different cultural discourses. The conflicts are based on those experienced by Emecheta herself, such as cultural estrangement arising from postcoloniality, race, gender and class issues, and migration to Englami. Readers often feel unnerved by her work because of its seemingly self-contradictory nature.

Emecheta has been careful not to fall into the trap of the immigrant who looks at her country's affairs from a distance, and she can be seen as a new kind of syncretic (combination of different forms of belief), postcolonial writer, whose identity refuses to be resolved in favour of either of its elements, the ‘African’ or the ‘Western’.