Remembering Buchi Emecheta, Nigerian novelist, feminist, my mother
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Elisabeth Janaina
Feb 3, 2017, 11:45:25 AM2/3/17
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Remembering Buchi Emecheta, Nigerian novelist, feminist, my mother
Posted on February 1, 2017 by Sylvester Onwordi
When her husband burnt her first handwritten manuscript, Buchi
Emecheta did not give up. She persevered and went on to become the
celebrated author of The Bride Price, The Joys of Motherhood, and
more.
Buchi Emecheta, 1944-2017, with her five children. Photo courtesy of
Sylvester Onwordi.
Buchi Emecheta, 1944-2017, with her five children. Photo courtesy of
Sylvester Onwordi.
An Ibusa village girl, brought up in Lagos of the 1940s, Buchi
Emecheta had a life that was always overshadowed by the poverty and
the deprivations of her early years. She was a poorly, undernourished
child both physically and emotionally, but with a ravenous desire to
survive.
She lost her father (my grandfather), who doted on her, when she was
eight years old. He was a railway worker who died of complications
brought on by a wound sustained in the swamps of Burma, where he had
been conscripted to fight for Lord Louis Mountbatten and the remnants
of the British Empire. With his passing, Buchi and her younger brother
were left at the mercy of a mother who, due to lack of education, was
unable to appreciate the talent in her young daughter.
It was a benefactor in Ibusa, Mr Hallim − a former Permanent Secretary
in the government − who, according to family legend, spotted the
intelligence in the young girl with the large forever watchful eyes.
He gave her the support she needed and encouraged her to continue her
education, rather than work in the market selling oranges as her
mother wanted. She won a scholarship to a prestigious high school in
Lagos where she mixed with girls of the Nigerian nobility.
In her first year there, her mother also died and she was passed back
and forth between distant relatives within the Ibusa community in
Lagos. During holidays, while her classmates returned to their family
mansions, she elected to remain in the empty dorms taking refuge in
books and in her imagination regaling her friends on their return with
the wondrous things she had done during the summer.
She used to tell us as children that if you believe in yourself
strongly enough then you could make any dream come true. It was almost
an article of faith with her, one which made her the forceful
character she became, but which could also render her impatient with
people who were less driven than she was. When her schoolteacher beat
her in front of the class for announcing that she wanted to be a
writer, she bore the pain in silence and became more determined than
ever to make her transgressive dream a reality.
Years later, in the UK, when her husband burned the handwritten
manuscript of her first novel, she again quietly determined that she
would find her own way. She surprised him with a separation, and set
about raising her five small children alone (of which I was the second
eldest), while studying at night school for a Sociology degree and
working by day as a librarian at the British Museum.
Some writers write because they have to. Buchi was a compulsive
writer. She once admitted half-jokingly that writing kept her sane and
that this and the love of her children were what motivated her to get
up in the mornings. She would write whole manuscripts longhand before
later transcribing them to type, and hardly was one novel finished
when she would be starting on the next, bouncing ideas around the
kitchen table, which was where she did her writing − an activity that
seemed as normal to us as children as her singing songs, cooking the
dinner or her storytelling.
I recall as a child at the close of the 1960s being very poor, living
in a series of one- and two-room slum apartments, and later, on
various council estates. By my mid-teens I realised that we had
somehow become comfortable and middle-class. We could afford holidays
and even a car − a red Austin 1100, in front of which I remember my
mother proudly posing in her black gown and mortarboard for graduation
photos to send to Ibusa to let the folks back home know that she had
“arrived”.
These changes were reflected in Buchi’s often-autobiographical
literary output, from In The Ditch, her breakthrough novel, which
dealt with a single black mother struggling to cope in England against
a background of almost Dickensian squalor; Second-Class Citizen, which
focused more squarely on issues of race, poverty and gender, through
Gwendolyn and The New Tribe.
The main source of inspiration for her writing, however, was Africa,
and in particular the villages of Ibusa in eastern Nigeria where her
family came from. Even though she had spent a relatively brief period
of her childhood there, the villages and the stories she heard on her
visits with her mother left an indelible mark on the impressionable
young girl and became the lodestone for all she wrote. In The Slave
Girl, The Bride Price and the ironically titled Joys of Motherhood,
she poignantly captured, in a manner reminiscent of her male
contemporary Chinua Achebe, a vanishing Igbo culture in the process of
transition to modernity.
Buchi was flattered by her success, but also bemused and irritated by
it. A feminist in all she said and did, her feminism was deeply
inscribed in her identity as an African woman with African values, and
her political discourse did not always chime with the 1970s rhetoric
of her sisters in the UK and USA. Writing was a vocation but it was
also a job, a way to feed the family and keep the wolves from the
door. Always preferring the life of the family, she would return from
some far-flung conference and plonk herself in front of the telly with
a sigh of relief to be back home.
A constant refrain throughout my childhood was that she would one day
return to Ibusa − a place that took on an almost mythical significance
for us within the family. She made many plans to return over many
years, even building a house in the village while working as professor
at the University of Calabar – an experience that formed the basis for
her novel Double Yoke. But having lived in the UK for so many years,
she found it increasingly difficult to adapt to life in Modern
Nigeria. She found that even Ibusa, in her long absence was
transforming itself into a town and a conurbation that she barely
recognised any more.
The death of her two daughters affected her in later years, and I felt
that as a person and as a writer she was never quite the same again.
As she entered middle age, some of her drive seemed to leave her and
the passion for writing that had fuelled her for so long became
swallowed in a private grief. My deepest sorrow was that Buchi did not
understand how much she was loved and appreciated by her readership
not only in continental Africa, but all over the world. I also felt
that always living a provisional life based to some extent on
survival, she did not really allow herself to enjoy the full fruits of
her success. A few weeks before receiving her OBE, she suffered a
devastating stroke, which left her housebound, increasingly disabled
and unable to travel or to write.
Though towards the end of her life, illness stole from her the ability
to manipulate words, the cruel beauty of dementia allowed her to take
refuge once more in her imagination and to return in her own way to
Ibusa. There she would revisit with us, and later on her own, the
landscapes of her early years, peopled with characters and stories
that she would no longer be able to write about.
Sylvester Onwordi is the son of the late Buchi Emecheta. He is a
psychologist, medical anthropologist and runs a small publishing
company.
If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or
subscribing to the RSS feed to have future articles delivered to your
feed reader.
This entry was posted in African Politics Now. Bookmark the permalink.
One thought on “Remembering Buchi Emecheta, Nigerian novelist,
feminist, my mother”
R.C. Ofodile says:
February 2, 2017 at 7:47 pm
Dear Mr Onwordi, Thank you so much for that moving piece. I was
your mother’s ‘reader’ in my childhood, from the late 70s in Nigeria.
In the 90s and the first decade of this century, I was privileged to
meet her at a number of literary events in England. The last was at
the Brixton Library in South London in 2005. I had the impression from
Second Class Citizen that her mother, ‘Ma’, had died while Buchi was
in hospital having her first child. ‘Adah’ in that book had expressed
satisfaction that ‘Francis’ was unable to pay the huge bride-price
that Ma and other relatives wanted, because ‘Adah’ was well-educated.
However, this is just the curiosity of a fascinated fan. Accept my
sympathies. Your mother was exceptional, a role model for all who
would be determined, industrious, courageous and family oriented. I
wonder if she will be brought back to Ibuza for interment.
Posted on February 1, 2017 by Sylvester Onwordi
When her husband burnt her first handwritten manuscript, Buchi
Emecheta did not give up. She persevered and went on to become the
celebrated author of The Bride Price, The Joys of Motherhood, and
more.
Buchi Emecheta, 1944-2017, with her five children. Photo courtesy of
Sylvester Onwordi.
Buchi Emecheta, 1944-2017, with her five children. Photo courtesy of
Sylvester Onwordi.
An Ibusa village girl, brought up in Lagos of the 1940s, Buchi
Emecheta had a life that was always overshadowed by the poverty and
the deprivations of her early years. She was a poorly, undernourished
child both physically and emotionally, but with a ravenous desire to
survive.
She lost her father (my grandfather), who doted on her, when she was
eight years old. He was a railway worker who died of complications
brought on by a wound sustained in the swamps of Burma, where he had
been conscripted to fight for Lord Louis Mountbatten and the remnants
of the British Empire. With his passing, Buchi and her younger brother
were left at the mercy of a mother who, due to lack of education, was
unable to appreciate the talent in her young daughter.
It was a benefactor in Ibusa, Mr Hallim − a former Permanent Secretary
in the government − who, according to family legend, spotted the
intelligence in the young girl with the large forever watchful eyes.
He gave her the support she needed and encouraged her to continue her
education, rather than work in the market selling oranges as her
mother wanted. She won a scholarship to a prestigious high school in
Lagos where she mixed with girls of the Nigerian nobility.
In her first year there, her mother also died and she was passed back
and forth between distant relatives within the Ibusa community in
Lagos. During holidays, while her classmates returned to their family
mansions, she elected to remain in the empty dorms taking refuge in
books and in her imagination regaling her friends on their return with
the wondrous things she had done during the summer.
She used to tell us as children that if you believe in yourself
strongly enough then you could make any dream come true. It was almost
an article of faith with her, one which made her the forceful
character she became, but which could also render her impatient with
people who were less driven than she was. When her schoolteacher beat
her in front of the class for announcing that she wanted to be a
writer, she bore the pain in silence and became more determined than
ever to make her transgressive dream a reality.
Years later, in the UK, when her husband burned the handwritten
manuscript of her first novel, she again quietly determined that she
would find her own way. She surprised him with a separation, and set
about raising her five small children alone (of which I was the second
eldest), while studying at night school for a Sociology degree and
working by day as a librarian at the British Museum.
Some writers write because they have to. Buchi was a compulsive
writer. She once admitted half-jokingly that writing kept her sane and
that this and the love of her children were what motivated her to get
up in the mornings. She would write whole manuscripts longhand before
later transcribing them to type, and hardly was one novel finished
when she would be starting on the next, bouncing ideas around the
kitchen table, which was where she did her writing − an activity that
seemed as normal to us as children as her singing songs, cooking the
dinner or her storytelling.
I recall as a child at the close of the 1960s being very poor, living
in a series of one- and two-room slum apartments, and later, on
various council estates. By my mid-teens I realised that we had
somehow become comfortable and middle-class. We could afford holidays
and even a car − a red Austin 1100, in front of which I remember my
mother proudly posing in her black gown and mortarboard for graduation
photos to send to Ibusa to let the folks back home know that she had
“arrived”.
These changes were reflected in Buchi’s often-autobiographical
literary output, from In The Ditch, her breakthrough novel, which
dealt with a single black mother struggling to cope in England against
a background of almost Dickensian squalor; Second-Class Citizen, which
focused more squarely on issues of race, poverty and gender, through
Gwendolyn and The New Tribe.
The main source of inspiration for her writing, however, was Africa,
and in particular the villages of Ibusa in eastern Nigeria where her
family came from. Even though she had spent a relatively brief period
of her childhood there, the villages and the stories she heard on her
visits with her mother left an indelible mark on the impressionable
young girl and became the lodestone for all she wrote. In The Slave
Girl, The Bride Price and the ironically titled Joys of Motherhood,
she poignantly captured, in a manner reminiscent of her male
contemporary Chinua Achebe, a vanishing Igbo culture in the process of
transition to modernity.
Buchi was flattered by her success, but also bemused and irritated by
it. A feminist in all she said and did, her feminism was deeply
inscribed in her identity as an African woman with African values, and
her political discourse did not always chime with the 1970s rhetoric
of her sisters in the UK and USA. Writing was a vocation but it was
also a job, a way to feed the family and keep the wolves from the
door. Always preferring the life of the family, she would return from
some far-flung conference and plonk herself in front of the telly with
a sigh of relief to be back home.
A constant refrain throughout my childhood was that she would one day
return to Ibusa − a place that took on an almost mythical significance
for us within the family. She made many plans to return over many
years, even building a house in the village while working as professor
at the University of Calabar – an experience that formed the basis for
her novel Double Yoke. But having lived in the UK for so many years,
she found it increasingly difficult to adapt to life in Modern
Nigeria. She found that even Ibusa, in her long absence was
transforming itself into a town and a conurbation that she barely
recognised any more.
The death of her two daughters affected her in later years, and I felt
that as a person and as a writer she was never quite the same again.
As she entered middle age, some of her drive seemed to leave her and
the passion for writing that had fuelled her for so long became
swallowed in a private grief. My deepest sorrow was that Buchi did not
understand how much she was loved and appreciated by her readership
not only in continental Africa, but all over the world. I also felt
that always living a provisional life based to some extent on
survival, she did not really allow herself to enjoy the full fruits of
her success. A few weeks before receiving her OBE, she suffered a
devastating stroke, which left her housebound, increasingly disabled
and unable to travel or to write.
Though towards the end of her life, illness stole from her the ability
to manipulate words, the cruel beauty of dementia allowed her to take
refuge once more in her imagination and to return in her own way to
Ibusa. There she would revisit with us, and later on her own, the
landscapes of her early years, peopled with characters and stories
that she would no longer be able to write about.
Sylvester Onwordi is the son of the late Buchi Emecheta. He is a
psychologist, medical anthropologist and runs a small publishing
company.
If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or
subscribing to the RSS feed to have future articles delivered to your
feed reader.
This entry was posted in African Politics Now. Bookmark the permalink.
One thought on “Remembering Buchi Emecheta, Nigerian novelist,
feminist, my mother”
R.C. Ofodile says:
February 2, 2017 at 7:47 pm
Dear Mr Onwordi, Thank you so much for that moving piece. I was
your mother’s ‘reader’ in my childhood, from the late 70s in Nigeria.
In the 90s and the first decade of this century, I was privileged to
meet her at a number of literary events in England. The last was at
the Brixton Library in South London in 2005. I had the impression from
Second Class Citizen that her mother, ‘Ma’, had died while Buchi was
in hospital having her first child. ‘Adah’ in that book had expressed
satisfaction that ‘Francis’ was unable to pay the huge bride-price
that Ma and other relatives wanted, because ‘Adah’ was well-educated.
However, this is just the curiosity of a fascinated fan. Accept my
sympathies. Your mother was exceptional, a role model for all who
would be determined, industrious, courageous and family oriented. I
wonder if she will be brought back to Ibuza for interment.
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