The groundbreaking Nigerian novelist Buchi Emecheta passed away this Wednesday at the age of 72. The following short tribute to her writing and life was sent to us by Chukwuebuka Ibeh, a young writer living in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. - Eds.
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My friend, Chris, is a lover of novels, and of writing in general. We started talking to each other and eventually became friends, because we had certain traits in common, our likes for one: we both think Adele angelic; we both have ferocious fascination for novels; we both love yam.
My friend loves Buchi. I had not known this, not until I starting talking one time about her novel Second Class Citizen, and he confessed his admiration, thrilled at the thought that I had a soft spot for Buchi as well. We spent that long night discussing our love for Ona's feminist ideology and our regard for Nwokocha Agbadi's prowess and wittiness, our fascination for Adah's determination and our subtle resentment for Francis. I had never had that type of insightful discussion with anyone before, and what I felt afterwards was a strange kind of fulfillment and pride, similar to how I feel when a reader sends me an email to express admiration for my work.
A few weeks after that night, I googled Buchi to confirm a certain rumor, after the carefully constructed headlines on The Guardian and Bella Naija had left me feeling light-headed. It was true. Buchi was dead.
Perhaps it was the newspaper write-ups, so effortless and so mundane, written with a kind of flourish that suggested to me, for a vague, fleeting moment, that the columnists were probably exaggerating, and Buchi was really not dead. Perhaps she was only asleep! In times like this, I fall back to the rhetoric, as a form of superstition.
My roommates wanted to know what was wrong. ("Buchi? Who's that? The author of Joys of Motherhood? Oh god! When?") But even in their supposed sorrow, I saw it—their glaring nonchalance. Although I knew they really meant no harm—one could not after all feel a sense of great loss for a stranger—I was nonetheless struck by this, miffed.
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When I think of Buchi now, I think of a girl betrothed at the age of eleven, a nascent, blithe girl, with a sort of vivacious ambition that wasn't very typical of girls her age, struggling to carve a niche for herself in a world that regarded as destined, from the time of her birth, to be merely an assistant to another human. So it goes for girls.
All Buchi ever wanted was to go to school and live in the United Kingdom—a semi-heaven, she was lead to believe at that time.
She got what she wanted! School and a momentary happiness; but then she lost her father, and her already-shattered life was shattered further. In the end, after graduating, she was carted off to a man, as originally expected, to be wife to a husband.
No. She wasn't going to be a wife so soon. She was going to continue her education at the University, and get a good job! But, ah, she was female, and solely for that reason was expect to be happy being half-human, to dream not too much, to aspire to being not much. If she wanted anything good to come in life, then she had to get married. Strong-willed as she was, Buchi wasn't one to let go of her dreams for any reason at all. And so, for this reason, she got married, thinking she could thread the needle, satisfying expectations while finding a way to achieve her ambition nonetheless.
* * *
The UK was not the heaven she had anticipated. She was struck by the racial and gender prejudice, the harsh conditions of being a young, female, black immigrant. She felt herself looked upon as a second-class human, suffering a penalty first as a black citizen, and again for being female. In all her years in the UK, the shock of the difference between expectation and reality stayed with her.
Buchi was caught in a failing marriage, an abusive marriage, with too many children, children she could not afford to sufficiently care for, and all this in line with the expectations of her family back home in Nigeria. Meanwhile, she neglected a body—her body—that desperately needed to be tended to. Nonetheless: Buchi was herself. She spoke on issues that bothered her—race, patriarchy, immigrant struggles, misogyny. Despite how very unpopular her views were, and how 'disadvantaged' she was, she was not one to be silenced, not one to easily 'conform' in order simply to belong. Buchi was a phenomenon to be inevitably discovered, one way or the other, like a ripe fruit among the bitter and unripe. Hers was not a random kind of confidence, like the trivial commodities easily found in any market. Her confidence was unique—a soul-confidence, a self-assuredness, that, in the midst of the many disappointments she faced, somehow kept her sense of self together.
She eventually left her husband. In a British courtroom, her husband denied knowing her and having children by her. She watched him from where she stood, frozen, knowing there was nothing she could do to debunk his claims. He had burnt all the evidence—children's birth certificates, marriage certificate, and all. It seemed to her that life was gradually shutting its doors in her face, like a polite gentleman who does not want the services of a desperate door-to-door seller. Nonetheless: she was herself, propped up with a stiff certitude—her children would not be sent to social security. Though the world had let her down, she would not do same to her children. She looked at her steel-faced husband with his menacing aura, a man she had once thought she loved but could no longer recognize; at the white judge who watched her with curious interest, obviously oblivious of the fact that the woman in question did not know how to fix the puzzle her life had been from childbirth; at the many Nigerians onlookers who sat motionless in the rows of benches, their shoulders hunched upwards in disgust and outrage at this woman who was bringing shame to them, disrespecting her husband before these foreigners.
Those onlookers would later tell their family members about the Nigerian woman had come to the UK and been corrupted, so much that she could now audaciously drag her husband to court. The family members would clap their palms together, and sneer, their gossipy voices intoning, Inukwa! (Igbo, for the exclamation of false shock: Did you hear that? Can you believe that?)
But... she was herself. Buchi took custody of her children, and simply nodded when the judge excused her husband from paying alimony.
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Buchi wanted a world where women did not have their docile duties stamped on them at birth. She wanted a world in which young women might enjoy the privileges easily available to single men but which are withheld from women unless they submit to the validation of marriage. Buchi wanted a world where people don't utter the world 'female' with that subtly condescending tone. A world in which mothers who have just given birth will not be patronized with false congratulations—"Oh, a girl? Well, thanks be to God..."—while knowing what words were mildly swallowed: "Let us pray it'll be a boy next time."
Buchi was not the kind to carry placards and chant the feminist song, flaunting her solidarity for the equality of all genders. But she was a feminist. Even in her quiet, almost subdued, almost reticent way, she was a feminist. Throughout her life, her great and ongoing act of feminist courage was the decision to be herself.
Banner graphic source: A 2014 photo of Lagos (cropped) by George Esiri (Reuters), reproduced here under fair use guidelines.
See also: [NERObooks homepage] [tag:essay] [tag:tribute] [tag:Africa] ["I Have Learnt to Learn" by Chukwuebuka Ibeh] ["Kayo" by Chukwuebuka Ibeh] ["On Sun-Baked Street" by Chukwuebuka Ibeh] ["Five books that tell beautiful stories about Lagos" by by Zaynab Quadri] ["Buchi Emecheta, pioneering Nigerian novelist, dies aged 72," The Guardian]
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