‘A Full Human Being’: Rewriting Womanhood Through the Body in The Joys of Motherhood

Abstract

This paper explores how womanhood is constructed, contested, and reclaimed through embodied experiences of violence and acts of remembrance, focusing on Buchi Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood. The novel centers on women negotiating patriarchal and colonial systems that define female worth through motherhood. Yet their female characters – Nnu Ego and Adaku – respond in contrasting ways, illuminating different modes of resistance to hegemonic power.
Nnu Ego internalizes traditional expectations, accepting motherhood as her sole path to value and purpose. Her suffering, however, reveals the hollowness of that ideal in a society fractured by colonial capitalism. Her slow disintegration illustrates the violence of cultural continuity under colonial transformation. In contrast, Adaku refuses to be confined by such definitions. Her narrative is one of open defiance, rejecting not only the institutions that restrict her womanhood but also the cultural silence imposed on women. Her final act of resistance becomes a radical form of self-definition.
This paper argues that these narratives function as counter-stories that resist dominant histories of male heroism in postcolonial contexts. The female body becomes both a site of trauma and a medium through which memory is preserved and power renegotiated. Addressing questions posed in the call for papers—such as how women remember violence, recreate themselves, and define womanhood on their own terms—the paper examines how literature by women can disrupt masculinist revolutionary discourse by centering marginalized voices and buried histories.
Ultimately, the study shows that women’s self-perception is not merely an act of mourning but a strategy of survival and political resistance. Through Nnu Ego and Adaku, Emecheta challenges the boundaries of power, gender, and memory in postcolonial societies.