The author of The Joys of Motherhood, Buchi Emecheta, portrays colonialism from a far different perspective than what the reader is used to. Traditionally, one expects to read about a white superpower exerting its influence on "primitive" or "animal-like" natives. However, Emecheta writes about the white-native relationship from the perspective of Nnu Ego, a tribal African woman from Ibuza. Nnu Ego creates an animalistic view of the white man, rather than talking of them as superior beings.
There are several examples in The Joys of Motherhood that show Nnu Ego's negative feelings towards white outsiders and their Victorian values. For instance, she seems to feel that the ways of the white man are disgusting and foreign. She calls Lagos "a soft place" and also describes it as a "place where men's flesh hung loose on their bones, where men had bellies like pregnant women, where men covered their bodies all day long (46)." This shows that Ego felt disdain for the white man's foreign ways in tampering with the traditional values of the Ibo. Further evidence suggests that the whites in Lagos can be considered primitive and animalistic. Nnu Ego refers to white women as being "pale like pigs" and "how could our men stand them? (75)". This portrays white people as animals, therefore considered inferior to Nnu Ego's fellow Africans.
Why all this animosity towards the white man? Perhaps this is fueled by the sharp difference between Victorian values and Traditional Ibo values. Nobody asked Nnu Ego's people if they would like to be put to work at the hands of white foreigners in pursuit of their own individual economic gain. Therefore, being subjected to these standards and having to abide by them should seem quite difficult and eventually lead to disdain for whites. Emecheta's way of portraying whites as primitive and ugly facilitates her message that subjecting outsiders to your way of life is animalistic and brutal in itself.
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I never really thought of the novel in that way. It is a new perspective that makes sense. I didn't think that the novel came off as white vs. native (animal-like tribals). I thought that they were mainly people of the same race, although people of Nnu Ego's homeland did go to Lagos to work for whites. It was not only the whites that were "fat and lazy" but any man that grew up/lived in Lagos. It was interesting to see how Nnu did take a standpoint that the people of Lagos did not compare to that of Ibo. Good call on this!
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