writer; lecturer; college teacher; sociologist
Personal Information
Born Florence Onye Buchi Emecheta on July 21, 1944, in Yaba, Lagos, Nigeria; daughter of Jeremy Nwabudike (a railway worker and molder) and Alice Ogbanje (Okwuekwu) Emecheta; married Sylvester Onwordi, 1960 (separated, 1966); children: Florence, Sylvester, Jake, Christy, Alice.
Education: B.Sc. (with honors), University of London, 1972.
Religion: Anglican.
Memberships: Member of Home Secretary's Advisory Council on Race, 1979-, and of Arts Council of Great Britain, 1982-83.
Career
British Museum, London, England, library officer, 1965-69; Inner London Education Authority, London, youth worker and sociologist, 1969-76; community worker, Camden, NJ, 1976-78. Writer and lecturer, 1972-. Visiting professor at several universities throughout the United States, including Pennsylvania State University, University of California/Los Angeles, and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1979; senior resident fellow and visiting professor of English, University of Calabar, Nigeria, 1980-81; lecturer, Yale University, 1982, London University, 1982-; fellow, London University, 1986. Proprietor, Ogwugwu Afor Publishing Company, 1982-83.
Life's Work
Nigerian-born novelist Buchi Emecheta was considered one of her country's most distinguished literary names, though she moved to England in the early 1960s. Emecheta's novels draw heavily upon Nigerian beliefs and postcolonial culture and often portray the clash that occurs when the modern world encroaches upon indigenous African value systems. Many of her works are autobiographical in nature, feminist in spirit, and portray a place in which the cruelties of European colonization endure for generations. Emecheta described her novels as "stories of the world," but from a female perspective, as she told Essence writer Elsie B. Washington "These women face the universal problems of poverty and oppression, and the longer they stay, no matter where they have come from originally, the more the problems become identical."
Emecheta was born in 1944 in Yaba, near the large city of Lagos, and was of Ibo heritage. The Ibo are one of Nigeria's main ethnic groups; they, the Hausa, and Yoruba groups created highly developed city-states and even empires before the Europeans arrived to conduct a thriving slave trade in the fifteenth century. Nigeria was under British rule from 1906 until 1960. As with her future fictional characters, the destiny of Emecheta's parents was shaped by this colonial economy: both were educated by missionaries and joined the Church Missionary Society and moved to the city to find work. Though her father worked for the railway, the spiritual home of the family remained the village of Ibuza, and as a young girl Emecheta traveled back there often--"during the rains, to help on the farm and to learn our ways," she recalled in a paper delivered before the Second African Writers Conference and published in 1988's Criticism and Ideology. Her parents were determined to instill a degree of traditional Ibo values in her, she noted. "If I lived in Lagos I could start to have loose morals and speak Yoruba all the time."
Emecheta was close to her aunt, who was the oldest woman in the family, and in Ibo culture such females hold a place of respect as "Big Mother." During Emecheta's childhood, her Big Mother, quite old and nearly blind, told fantastic stories of the family's Ibo ancestors. "We would sit for hours at her feet mesmerized by her trance-like voice," Emecheta recalled in Criticism and Ideology. "Through such stories she could tell the heroic deeds of her ancestors, all our mores and all our customs. She used to tell them in such a way, in such a sing-song way that until I was about fourteen I used to think that these women were inspired by some spirits."
Tough Times in London
In 1962, when she was just eighteen, Emecheta moved to London with her new husband. Though her English language skills were still lacking, she was determined to improve them and begin writing. The birth of five children kept her from pursuing that goal for a time, and her husband's lack of ambition forced her to work outside the home. She found a job in the library of the British Museum in 1965 and later became a youth worker with London Education Authority. In her spare time, Emecheta wrote, but her husband resented her literary aims, and he burned her first manuscript. By 1966, her marriage had disintegrated and she realized that writing might provide a more stable income for her and her children. "I thought I would wait to be as old as Big Mother with a string of degrees before writing," she noted in Criticism and Ideology. "But I had to earn my living and the only thing I could do was write." She enrolled at the University of London, earned a degree in sociology, and began writing a column about the African/London experience for the New Statesman in 1972. Her essays about the culture shock she experienced, her failing marriage, racism in London, and her struggles as a working mother of five and were collected into her first book, In the Ditch.
Emecheta's first novel was Second-Class Citizen, published in 1974. Here she drew from an earlier period in her life, when her husband was in graduate school but indifferent to his studies and abusive toward her. The Bride Price, her second published novel, was actually written in the 1960s. The first of her works to be set in Nigeria, it centers upon a young woman struggling with the cultural traditions that restrict her life in a most cruel way: her father dies when she is thirteen, and her uncle literally inherits her. She is allowed to continue her education but only because it will increase her "bride price," the sum her uncle will receive for contracting her marriage. She falls in love with a teacher, a man from a less exalted family, and elopes with him. A Nigerian superstition warns that such a woman will die in childbirth, and the heroine fulfills this prophecy at the close of The Bride Price.
The Sorrows of One Mother
Emecheta lived in Camden, New Jersey, for a time and supported herself as a community worker there in the mid-1970s. She continued to write, and her works from this period include Slave Girl and The Joys of Motherhood. This latter work, published in 1979 with a title designed to convey irony, is typical of Emecheta's fiction. Young Nnu Ego, from the village of Ibuza, returns to her family home in shame when she does not conceive a child as a new bride. Her father then sends her away to marry a man in Lagos, named Nnaife, and Nnu Ego detests him at first sight. Nnaife has a lowly job as a laundry worker for a white family, and Nnu Ego views him with a contempt she extends to Nigerian men in general. "Men here are too busy being white men's servants to be men," she thinks. Nnu Ego becomes pregnant but at first gives birth only to girls considered valueless offspring in Nigerian culture. Finally, she has a son, but he dies before he is a month old, and Nnu Ego descends into grief over him and her situation. She tries to kill herself, and a crowd gathers near the bridge to watch--"a thing like that is not permitted in Nigeria, you are simply not allowed to commit suicide in peace," the novel states, "because everyone is responsible for the other person."
More prosperous times eventually arrive for Nnu Ego and her eight children, especially when her husband finds a better job, but when her brother-in-law dies, Nnaife inherits his four wives, and one comes to live with his and Nnu Ego's family. Tensions in the household increase, and here Emecheta shows the ways in which Nigerian traditions clash with the realities of modern life. A man like Nnaife cannot earn enough in a city to support such customs, but in Ibuza such a polygamous lifestyle is possible, for each wife has her own small household. In the end, their family falls apart, and the imposition of Western ways and a foreign economic system destroys Ibo traditions that once ensured stability and continuity. Male children, for instance, are expected to care for elderly parents, but Nnu Ego's sons will not do so for her. Educated in British schools, one emigrates to Canada, while the other rejects his Ibo heritage and fully adopts the European belief in economic self-sufficiency. Nnu Ego dies by the road side, alone. "She died quietly there, with no child to hold her hand and no friend to talk to her," the novel concludes.
Another View of Polygamy
Emecheta, though a committed feminist, does not view polygamy as a negative system. "In many cases polygamy can be liberating to the woman, rather than inhibiting her, especially if she is educated," she told the audience assembled at the Second African Writers Conference. "The husband has no reason for stopping her from attending international conferences like this one, from going back to university and updating her career or even getting another degree. Polygamy encourages her to value herself as a person and look outside her family for friends."
Another work that added to Emecheta's literary reputation was 1982's Double Yoke, the story of two young Nigerians who meet while university students. Ete Kamba and Nko are eager to experience life away from their families for the first time, and fall in love. They engage in premarital relations, but Ete Kamba is more conservative than Nko and comes to resent her assertive mind and desire for independence. They separate, and then her professor attempts to seduce her. "The novel is both comic and tragic in its depiction of Nko's and Ete Kamba's youthful, emotional extravagances and the campus response to their transgressions," noted Jewelle Gomez in a Black Scholar review of Double Yoke. "Here, as in Emecheta's other novels, she speaks with an undeniably Nigerian voice; makes clear the Nigerian woman's circumscribed position in society and her skillful adaptation to it."
Portraits of the Dispossessed Extolled
Emecheta's novels have earned critical accolades from the literary establishment. "Emecheta is no ideologue," remarked New York Times Book Review critic Reginald McKnight, "her characters do not utter or think words that would not come from them; they are not mere representatives of larger social movements but real, complex human beings, shaped by the vicissitudes of class, culture and sexual politics. She raises the right questions, but never harangues. She writes with subtlety, power and abundant compassion."
Other novels from Emecheta include Adah's Story, The Moonlight Bride, and The Family. In The Rape of Shavi, first published in 1983, a plane crash in rural Africa is welcomed by tribespeople there, but the foreigners steal some valuable minerals and repair their plane just before the local chief forces them to wed; his heir stows away on the plane with the Britons. Emecheta also wrote an autobiography, Head above Water, and a 1990 novel that delves into the colonial experience in the Caribbean. The title character in Gwendolen is just eight years old when the novel opens and lives in Granville, Jamaica. Gwendolen remains with family members when her parents emigrate to England--referred to as "Molder Kontry"--but is traumatized when her grandmother's boyfriend sexually assaults her. Eventually she joins her parents in London, and her father also abuses her. The work, written in Jamaican patois, also chronicles her deep humiliation at school because of her language skills. McKnight, writing in the New York Times Book Review, called it a "rich, complex and fast-moving novel."
Emecheta's 1994 novel, Kehinde, depicts the ongoing conflict for Africans living abroad. Kehinde Okolo is a 35-year-old Londoner of Nigerian descent with a management position in international banking. She is also married with two children, but her husband's small business does not satisfy him, and he wishes to return home. In his village, he is likely to become chief, and in the end, Kehinde agrees to the plan but stays in London for a time to sell their home. When she arrives in Nigeria, she finds that her husband has taken another wife, with whom he now has two new children. In the village, Kehinde has no status her position in the family is eclipsed by her husband's sisters and finds herself increasingly troubled by circumstances that surrounded her birth. She was a twin, but the other was stillborn, and their mother died in childbirth; Kehinde suffers from the belief that she was responsible.
Emecheta returned to Nigeria frequently and to her family in Ibuza. In addition to pursuing her creative work, she held numerous academic posts including stints at Yale and London universities. For a time in the early 1980s she ran a publishing company called Ogwugwu Afor; as of 1979 she was a member of the Britain's Advisory Council on Race. "I am simply doing what my Big Mother was doing for free about thirty years ago," she said of her career as a novelist in the Criticism and Ideology paper. "The only difference is that she told her stories in the moonlight, while I have to bang away at a typewriter I picked up from Woolworth's in London."
Awards
Jock Campbell Award for literature by new or unregarded talent from Africa or the Caribbean, New Statesman, 1978; selected as the Best Black British Writer, 1978, and one of the Best British Young Writers, 1983.
Works
Selected writings
- In the Ditch, Barrie & Jenkins, 1972.
- Second-Class Citizen (novel), Allison & Busby, 1974, Braziller, 1975.
- The Bride Price: A Novel (paperback published as The Bride Price: Young Ibo Girl's Love; Conflict of Family and Tradition), Braziller, 1976.
- The Slave Girl: A Novel, Braziller, 1977.
- The Joys of Motherhood: A Novel, Braziller, 1979.
- Titch the Cat (for children; based on story by daughter, Alice Emecheta), Allison & Busby, 1979.
- Nowhere to Play (for children; based on story by daughter, Christy Emecheta), Schocken, 1980.
- The Moonlight Bride (for children), Oxford University Press in association with University Press, 1981.
- The Wrestling Match (for children), Oxford University Press in association with University Press, 1981, Braziller, 1983.
- Destination Biafra: A Novel, Schocken, 1982.
- Naira Power(novelette directed principally to Nigerian readers), Macmillan (London), 1982.
- Double Yoke (novel), Schocken, 1982.
- The Rape of Shavi (novel), Ogwugwu Afor, 1983, Braziller, 1985.
- Adah's Story: A Novel, Allison & Busby, 1983.
- The Moonlight Bride, G. Braziller, 1983.
- Head above Water (autobiography), Ogwugwu Afor, 1984, Collins, 1986, Heinemann, 1994.
- A Kind of Marriage (novelette), Macmillan, 1987.
- The Family (novel), Braziller, 1990.
- Gwendolen (novel), Collins, 1990.
- Kehinde, Heinemann (Portsmouth, NH), 1994.
Further Reading
Books
- "Mother Africa: African Women and the Land in West African Literature," African Horizons: The Landscapes of African Fiction, Greenwood Press, 1998, pp. 35-54.
- Petersen, Kirsten Holst, ed. Criticism and Ideology: Second African Writers' Conference, 1988.
- Black Scholar, November-December, 1985, p. 51.
- Essence, August, 1990, p. 50.
- New York Times Book Review, April 29, 1990.
- Publishers Weekly, February 16, 1990, p. 73; February 7, 1994, p. 84.
- World Literature Today, autumn, 1994, p. 867.
— Carol Brennan
