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Undercurrents of Mammy Wata symbolism in Buchi Emecheta's The Joys of Motherhood.

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Buchi Emecheta's sardonically entitled novel The Joys of Motherhood engenders disparate readings. Does Emecheta intend to lance a scathing critique of the traditional role of motherhood in her native Nigeria? Does her protagonist's plight in colonial Africa carry a universal weight? Nigerian sociologist Ifi Amadiume is extremely wary of the Western scholar's attempt to address these questions. Katherine Fishburn, in Reading Buchi Emecheta; Cross-Cultural Conversations, shares her concern, arguing that for Western readers "it is too easy ... to think that we have engaged a stranger in a friendly dialogue when in fact we have only met ourselves in the mirror" (25). On a more vehement note, Obioma Nnaemeka would have Western critics or "foreign Africanists" disengage from the dialogue all together. (1) Irrefutably, most readers of African literature are not equipped with the same historical and cultural experience as the African author. Emecheta, nonetheless, implies the likelihood of a foreign audience to her work by writing about African experiences in English and employing anthropological digressions unnecessary to emic or "insider" dialogues in her novels. A foreign readership is inevitable, as Chinua Achebe observes: "[A] man who brings home ant-ridden faggots must be ready for the visit of the lizards" (76).

Whether the lizard hails from Morocco, Kenya, Orient, or Occident, it must still grapple with the heteroglossia inherent in Nigerian literature, and more specifically in Emecheta's case Nigerian literature about the Igbo people. Fishburn, paying homage to Gadamer, urges Western readers to question their own prejudices and transform them in the reading of African texts. The heteroglossia (or moment in the text puzzling to those removed from the text's cultural source) is not sufficiently negotiated by this introspective approach. To reach a locus of understanding between what is intended and what is perceived necessitates a multidisciplinary approach to African literature that includes recourse to the social sciences. The point of original intention (or the Achebian "where angels fear to tread") remains perhaps unattainable, but the worthy goal of dialogue justifies the quest for a locus. While, as Nnaemeka warns, African fiction is not absolute mimesis of social reality, it is nonetheless integrally related to its societal source. On the subject of culturally embedded literature, Wole Soyinka writes that "much African writing is still rooted in the concept of literature as a part of the normal social activity of man but one that is nonetheless individual in its expression and its choice of areas of concern" (67).

Deriving her title for The Joys of Motherhood from the closing paragraph of Flora Nwapa's Efuru, Buchi Emecheta establishes intertextual dialogue. Susan Andrade considers that in "doing so [Emecheta] appropriates the male purview of the production of texts by conflating it with the female production of children" (100). The male/female power struggle professed by Andrade to drive Emecheta's writing is, in my opinion, overshadowed by themes of river spirit or Mammy Wata worship which consider production (literary, spiritual, biological, and monetary) as witness to women' s ingenuity, spiritual practice, and dedication. Mammy Wata's underlying presence in Emecheta's works is characterized by Chikwenye Ogunyemi "as a mystical background [of] different water deities" whose purpose is "to enhance woman's self-esteem Maternal and fertile, bodies of water exemplify the woman writer's unique contribution to the Nigerian literary corpus" (232).

In Nwapa's Efuru, Mammy Wata symbolism is crucial, as Sabine Jell-Bahlsen points out: "[A]ll of the central characters in Nwapa' s novels ... are women guided and influenced by the water goddess" (34). Ogunyemi concurs that "the present absence of Mammywata as an inspiriting resource to resolve ... troubling issues" is integral to Flora Nwapa's work (4). I propose that Mammy Wata symbolism is equally pervasive and pertinent in the novels of Buchi Emecheta and that moments of heteroglossia in her works are due in part to an oversight of the religion...

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