SOURCE: “Mother Africa: African Women and the Land in West African Literature,” in African Horizons: The Landscapes of African Fiction, Greenwood Press, 1998, pp. 35-54.

In the following excerpt, Loflin examines the significance of household environments and architecture in The Joys of Motherhood as indicative of tension between traditional Nigerian communal life and the social pressures of Western modernization.

African Women's Literature

African women writers are sensitive, perhaps to a fault, to the preexisting images of woman's space. Their preoccupation with motherhood and/or barrenness as the crucial element in women's lives, in novels such as Efuru, The Joys of Motherhood, The Bride Price, and So Long A Letter has led Obioma Nnaemeka to characterize these works as “motherhood literature.” Elaine Savory Fido has identified the original “motherland” as the mother's body—that with which we identify, from which we learn to separate. The mother country is also the...