Know your author: Buchi Emenecha

worker and moulder and Alice Ogbanje Okwuekwu Emecheta.
Though her father worked for the railway, the spiritual home of the family remained the village of Ibuza, and as a young girl Emecheta travelled back there often “during the rains, to help on the farm and to learn our ways,” she recalled. Her parents were determined to instil 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’s novels draw heavily upon Nigerian beliefs and post-colonial 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 colonisation endure for generations.
Emecheta once described her stories as “stories of the world in which 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 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 mesmerised by her trance-like voice.
“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 14 years old I used to think that these women were inspired by some spirits,” she said.
In 1962, when she was just eighteen, Emecheta moved to London with her new husband Sylvester Onwordi. 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. Her marriage disintegrated in 1966 and she realised 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, I had to earn my living and the only thing I could do was write, she noted. 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.
Her themes of child slavery, motherhood, female independence and freedom through education have won her considerable critical acclaim and honours, including an Order of the British Empire in 2005.
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 centres 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 she fulfils this prophecy at the close of The Bride Price.
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.” Her works include, In the Ditch, Second-Class Citizen, The Bride Price: A Novel (paperback published as The Bride Price: Young Ibo Girl’s Love; Conflict of Family and Tradition) 1976.
Also The Slave Girl, The Joys of Motherhood, Titch the Cat (for children; based on story by daughter, Alice Emecheta), Nowhere to Play (for children also based on a story by daughter, Christy Emecheta), The Moonlight Bride (for children), The Wrestling Match (for children), Destination Biafra, Naira Power (novelette directed principally to Nigerian readers), and Double Yoke (novel), The Rape of Shavi, Adah’s Story, The Moonlight Bride, Head above Water (autobiography), A Kind of Marriage (novelette), The Family, Gwendolen and Kehinde 1994. — Answers.com/ The Herald.