Representing and Resisting Maternal Melancholy in Buchi Emecheta’s Second-class Citizen and The Joys of Motherhood

This chapter examines the representation of – and resistance to - maternal melancholy in two of Emecheta’s novels, Second-Class Citizen (1974) and The Joys of Motherhood (1979), which explore the lives of female characters as wives and mothers in (post)colonial Nigeria and as migrants in Britain. Combining postcolonial trauma theory (Craps 2013, Visser 2015, Atkinson 2017) and African-feminist theories of motherhood (Arndt, 2002, Oloruntoba-Oju and Oloruntoba-Oju 2013, Fongang 2015), I examine Emecheta’s depiction of her female characters’ experiences of and reactions to motherhood and its losses – including infant mortality, involuntary childlessness, and the loss of sustaining communal bonds. The novels demonstrate how dramatic socio-cultural shifts from colonialism to independence, from rural village life to urban dwelling, emigration from postcolony to metropolitan centre all impact women’s ability to negotiate and mitigate the challenges and losses of motherhood. I argue that Emecheta’s work evinces an affective and ideological ambivalence towards motherhood and that her characters’ ‘recovery’ from maternity-related traumas remains partial. There is, moreover, a persistence of negative emotional affect based on sex-based oppression across colonial, postcolonial and diasporic contexts, which is not fully mitigated by discourses of self-recovery, improvement and fulfilment, but which nevertheless contributes to the texts’ resistant and productive qualities.