Dual Forms of Currency

BY LAURA LESAUSKIS





Trying to make a comfortable life is difficult, but imagine trying to do so while having kids every couple of years. On top of that, everyone around you is telling you that having kids is your purpose in life, and that when those kids grow up and become successful, they will take care of you. All the suffering there was in raising those kids, all of that struggle with money is worth it because someone will take care of you when you are older. In Buchi Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood, class conflict can be seen in the characters of Nnu Ego, Nnaife, and Adaku through their struggles with money, conflict with classes, and attempts to raise their social status.

Nnu Ego is the daughter of a very powerful and respected chief in Ibuza, but she struggles with her place in society during her first marriage. Because she is not getting pregnant, she is disregarded by her husband and he takes a new wife. Realizing that her status in his family is slipping because she has not provided them with a son, Nnu Ego confronts her husband, Amatokwo, and his response is "‘I have no time to waste my precious male seed on a woman who is fertile. I have to raise children for my line’" (Emecheta 32). Nnu Ego’s reputation is at stake because she cannot have children to carry on her husband’s name.

For Nnu Ego as well as the rest of the women of Ibuza, her worth only amounted to as many sons as she provided for her husband. Children, especially sons, can be said to be a form of currency for women such as Nnu Ego. After all, the more children the wife has for her husband, the more worth she accumulates. Children provide security in the family, and the more sons the wife has, the better off she is, and the more unlikely it will be that she will be looked down upon by the community. It is the woman’s duty to provide their husband with as many sons as they can.

When Nnu Ego is unable to have a son with her first husband, she returns to her father, and he finds her another husband, Nnaife, one that he hopes will be more understanding and treat her better. Nnu Ego’s intense desire to have "a child to cuddle and to love" has a dark edge to it because she is "bringing such shame to her family" by not being able to have children (34-5). Though she finds him to be detestable because of his "crude ways and ugly appearance," Nnu Ego manages to conceive a child with Nnaife (45). However, she realizes that with the amount of money Nnaife is making she will have to work too in order to provide for the children.

"[F]inding money for clothes… in some cases for the children’s school fees, was on her shoulders" (53). Nnu Ego learns from her fellow Ibuza wives living in Lagos how to make a trade for herself by selling cigarettes (52). She begins to make a meager profit in order to by a second outfit, and continues her trade even after her children are born in order to pay for food and school fees. Much of the time, the family is fully dependent on Nnu Ego’s selling cigarettes, firewood, or even homegrown vegetables from the garden. The work is backbreaking and exhausting, but she must continue on in order to keep her children alive.

Nnu Ego does not consciously realize that she has other choices in life. She believes that her worth is dictated by what her people and family says it is and by how many sons she has. Most of the time she is suffering in some form (emotional or physical), but she reassures herself that at least in "old age [she] would be happy" because then she would have her sons to provide for her (54). She does not outwardly question or protest her position as Nnaife’s wife because of how she was brought up. To question her marriage to Nnaife would be questioning the integrity of her father, whom she loves very much, and that would be comparable to treason. Her consciousness has been shaped such that her father and husband own her in equal parts and the only thing that could stop her husband from abandoning her is the amount of children she produces. As she produces more children, she also bring honor to her father because it shows that she has come from a good, strong gene-pool.

Nnu Ego sees clearly that Nnaife is not the typical African man that she was used to when living at home in Ibuza. "She might not have any money to supplement her husband’s income, but were they not in a white man’s world where it was the duty of the father to provide for his family?" (81) Nnaife barely earns enough money to scrape by each month, leaving Nnu Ego to find out ways to make money to purchase food, pay rent, and tuition fees for the children. Afraid to lose another son, she wishes to let Nnaife "do his duty" by being the sole provider to their little family (81).

However, as things get more difficult like when Nnaife loses his job with the Meers family, Nnu Ego begins believing that her "cross to bear" is supporting her family until Nnaife finds a new job (89). She struggles in taking care of Oshia and selling cigarettes and buying food because Nnaife is too stubborn to go find another job. Instead, he wishes to wait for something to come to him via Mr. Meers’ recommendation. As Nnu Ego goes on, she became more and more "sure this son of hers would live next door to her, whatever profession he chose, as a good son should live near his parents and look after them" (79). But it becomes increasingly clear that this is not the case. She tells herself these things to make life bearable as she struggles with making money to support her children.

Unlike Nnu Ego, whose every move is dictated by the desire to not bring shame to her family, Nnaife does not seem to be bothered by what Nnu Ego and perhaps others from her people might think of him. Nnaife’s conflict is directly with the bourgeoisie in Lagos, the white colonialists and, later, the military. He works in the compound of his "white master" Dr. Meers (41). Slavery had long since been outlawed in Lagos as well as the rest of Nigeria; however, the two classes (Africans and whites) are far from being equal. Meers refers to Nnaife as "baboon," and Nnaife does not really seem to be bothered by it (41). He justifies this demeaning treatment by explaining that "‘We work for them and they pay us. His calling me a baboon does not make me one’" (42). In part, Nnaife is right. He is not a baboon just because Meers calls him that. But the fact that Meers does it in the first place shows the disparity between the classes.

Nnaife is willing to do anything to get paid "as long as it was honest," which is commendable, but the fact that he is willing to let himself be taken advantage of and degraded by his employers shows that he has little respect for himself. Nnu Ego observes that men in Lagos "‘are too busy being white men’s servants to be men… All they see is the money, shining white man’s money’" (51). She sees that Nnaife is still being treated like a slave despite being "free."

In Lagos, men like Nnaife are less concerned with their family, dignity, and freedom. As Cordelia tells Nnu Ego their husbands have "stopped being men long ago. Now they are machines" (53). This is not to say that Nnaife does not feel entitled to being treated with dignity by his wives. He simply does not have the same type of life in Lagos as he would if he lived as a farmer in rural Ibuza. In Lagos, Nnaife is in direct conflict with the classes whereas if he lived in rural Ibuza, he would likely be held in high esteem for being married to Nnu Ego and being the father of so many children.

But from living in Lagos for so long, Nnaife has become "one of the Africans who were so used to being told they were stupid… that they started to believe in their own imperfections" (83). A fine example of this is when Nnaife sees a group of rich whites playing golf and he follows them around, retrieving their golf balls. One of the men refers to the other as "old boy," and Nnaife, "catching the word ‘boy,’ thought he was being addressed…" (93) He was so used to being referred to as "boy" by the Meers and probably other white people he came in contact with that it became all too natural for him to react to the word in such a way. However, Nnaife is not the type of person to let this type of degradation stop him from seeking employment from whoever is willing to pay him.

When Nnaife is forced to join the army, at first, he is hesitant. He does not want to join the white man’s army and fight the Germans for some unknown cause, but when he finds out how much money he will make by doing so, he decides it is the best financial opportunity. Even working as a government employee, Nnaife is still barely making enough money to get by and the government position is a stable job because the railroad always needs to be cleared of grass. By joining the British army, Nnaife sees an opportunity to make money and make his family just a little more financially secure. However, it is debatable whether or not he joined the army as a purely selfless act seeing as how he ended up throwing away most of the money on palm wine and a new wife.

Adaku, Nnaife’s inherited wife, struggles with having sons, but thrives in making money for herself. Nnu Ego sees her as an ambitious woman, a woman "who would flatter a man, depend on him, need him" (118). However, her first impressions of Adaku are wrong. Adaku is the one who conspires against Nnaife, starting a rebellion to force him into giving them more money daily instead of wasting it on palm wine (133). Nnu Ego is inspired by Adaku’s confidence, but at the same time, views her as a threat. If Adaku begins having sons for Nnaife, it could compromise her, Nnu Ego’s, position as the first wife.

Lucky for Nnu Ego, Adaku gives birth to a son that dies days after being born. Adaku knows that she must hurry and produce a son for Nnaife or else risk being tossed aside. Of course, she is bitter about losing her son, and Nnu Ego fears that Adaku will harm hers if they are left alone with her. Adaku may not be the "senior wife" or have any sons, but she can freely express her emotions without being held up to the standards that the senior wife is supposed to set (140). Adaku suffers in the family because she has not given birth to sons.

While Nnu Ego is away visiting her people, Adaku takes her trade to a whole new level, and she makes plenty of money to take care of herself while Nnu Ego is gone without having to spend the money that Nnaife sent to them. But despite her ability to make money, she is still is seen as inadequate because she has not had any surviving male children. When she decides to leave, she does it because she cannot stand the way she is being treated any longer (168).

Unlike Nnu Ego, Adaku is able to finally realize that there is a social disparity between the way wives with sons are treated compared to those who have failed to provide their husband with sons. She wants to set out because she refuses to "be turned into a mad woman, just because [she] has no sons" (169). Those around make it seem like she has a choice in what sex her children will be, and she tells Nnu Ego that women "make life intolerable for one another" (169). Nnu Ego is higher up on the family hierarchy not only because she is the first wife of Nnaife, but because she has provided him with two sons already.

In a way, Nnu Ego has become a type of bourgeoisie. She is held in higher esteem with her family and those of the community for the simple fact that she has had male children. Adaku has not had any male children so her voice in the family is not regarded as important. She has not done anything for the family. She has not provided them with the commodity that they desire so much: male children. Therefore, Adaku is "less" of a woman than Nnu Ego.

Whereas Nnu Ego failed, however, Adaku thrives. Nnu Ego struggles daily with feeding her family and working, but Adaku makes money for herself by selling abada material for lappas at her stall instead of just peppers and other vegetables (170). Adaku does not look for a man for security, and instead lives on her own as a "dignified woman" with her two daughters (170). She even has such a stable job that she sends them to school. She finds that in Lagos sons are not the most important commodity to make life happy and easy.

Nnu Ego, Nnaife, and Adaku all face struggles with class in The Joys of Motherhood. Nnu Ego originally struggles in having sons, but later in life has even greater difficulty in providing those boys with basic human needs like food and clothing. Nnaife will do anything for money even if that means allowing the white men to call him names and degrade him. Adaku is seen as unfit within her family because she has borne no sons for Nnaife, but when left to her own devices, she succeeds in making her life comfortable and helps to ensure that her daughters will grow up to be educated young women. All of the struggles these characters face come down to two things: children and money. Children are regarded as the most precious commodity, but without money, those children will eventually starve to death. Both children and money are things that can raise a person’s social standing or pull them down, and for some characters, like Nnu Ego, being raised up and pulled down happens simultaneously.