Second Class Citizen

Adah believes that other people have divergent perceptions of marriage and children from her own. Francis is not a good husband, and he is violent and adversarial, but Adah is aware that not all husbands behave in this way. Likewise, she understands that, though she loves all of her children, and she places the greatest importance on her daughter, Dada. In contrast, many Nigerian parents do not value daughters as much as sons, and many of her neighbors forego parenting in favor of sending their children to foster parents.

The marriage and family structure that Emecheta presents is consistently identified as unusual, with neighbors and other characters leading significantly different lives. Even Adah’s own desires shift from the early part of the novel, in which she would prefer not to get married at all, to the later portions, where she idealizes a better marriage in which she can be content as a housewife. These complex dynamics between husbands and wives, parents and children, and families reveal the spectrum on which marriage and child-raising can exist.

Adah explores her own position relative to other women in the hospital when she has just given birth to Bubu, her third child. The women around her are all in radically different situations than herself; one woman is in a happy marriage with a much older man and another woman is having her first child after 17 years of trying. These two women epitomize the patterns that Adah finds in her discussions with coworkers and in reading novels, and each woman shows a facet of how Adah’s life could be better or worse. The “sleek” woman that Adah meets, who is married to a much older man, feels entirely loved by her husband and his children from a previous marriage. Adah tells her that she is “almost like a princess” because of how lucky she has been (120); the term “princess” suggests that Adah thinks a happy marriage is rare. Until this experience, Adah seems to think that her marriage with Francis is not aberrant, but normal, and it is the happy woman with loving husbands who is rare. This changes when Adah discovers that she needs a dress for her hospital stay; all of the other women have already received dresses from their husbands, and only Francis has failed to meet Adah’s basic needs. Among her neighbors, Adah finds that it is also uncommon for a wife to be the primary earner in a relationship, as most men, including other Nigerian immigrants, work for a living and to support their families, including sending money back to Nigeria.

At the same time, Adah gains a new appreciation for her own children. She thinks of the woman that had to wait 17 years to have a child and “could not imagine the aches and pains” of waiting (121). Though Adah seeks out birth control, she understands that she loves her children, and thinks it would be horrible to not have the children that she has had already. There is also an element of fear in the idea of not having children, as her fertility is part of why Francis’s family values her so highly.

Adah’s experiences in the hospital reframe her understanding of marriage and children, decreasing the value she holds for her relationship, but fortifying her desire to love and provide for her children. By including the hospital episode, Emecheta shows how a bad marriage is not good by virtue of being a marriage, nor are children tokens by which to gain favor with a husband’s family. Adah comes out of the hospital with a better understanding of how terrible Francis is for her and her children, which reflects the lives of many men and women who experience abuse.