AFRICAN PROSE BUCHI EMECHETA: The Joys of Motherhood What role does superstition play in the novel?

Answer Details

Superstition and traditional belief play a significant part in Buchi Emecheta's The Joys of Motherhood, shaping the lives, decisions and self-understanding of the characters. Emecheta shows how such beliefs both give meaning to experience and, at times, bind women to suffering.

The chi and the slave woman. The most important superstitious element is the belief in the personal god or chi. Nnu Ego's chi is said to be an angry slave woman who was buried alive to accompany her mistress, Nnu Ego's father's senior wife, to the land of the dead. This slave woman's restless, resentful spirit is believed to influence Nnu Ego's fate. The idea that a wronged spirit governs her fertility and fortune runs through the novel and is used to explain her troubles.

Superstition and childbearing. Belief in the spirit world dominates attitudes to fertility. Nnu Ego's early failure to conceive is interpreted in supernatural terms, connected to the offended slave woman, and she consults a dibia, or medicine man, to appease the spirit and secure children. Her worth as a woman is measured against these beliefs, so that superstition directly governs her happiness and her standing in society.

Superstition and daily life. Traditional beliefs guide many decisions in the community, from the interpretation of dreams and omens to reliance on diviners and rituals in times of crisis. Illness, misfortune and success are read as the work of gods, ancestors and spirits rather than of ordinary causes, and characters act accordingly, seeking spiritual remedies for their problems.

Superstition in death and after. Belief in the influence of the dead continues to the end. After Nnu Ego's lonely death, her children build her a shrine and pray to her for children, following the tradition that a departed mother's spirit can grant or withhold fertility. Ironically, it is said that she never answered such prayers, which itself becomes a superstitious explanation for barrenness in the community.

Conclusion. Superstition, embodied above all in the vengeful chi of the slave woman and in the reliance on diviners and spirits, provides the framework through which the characters in The Joys of Motherhood understand fertility, misfortune and fate. Emecheta uses these beliefs to deepen her portrait of Igbo society while also exposing how they reinforce the burdens placed upon women.