Unpacking the Complexities of Contemporary Motherhood in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s ‘Zikora’

By Sreya Mukherjee

Motherhood, for a long time, has remained a contentious issue within feminist discourses. While on one hand, motherhood is perceived as a biological constraint for women, pinning them down within the confinement of the domestic sphere, motherhood is also recognized as an empowering experience. The ambivalence associated with motherhood might be one of the reasons behind mainstream feminism’s disassociation with motherhood as critical discourse and lived experience. The lack of intellectual interest in motherhood and the dearth of resources in the emerging field of motherhood studies had prompted Adrienne Rich, the pioneering motherhood studies scholar, to famously remark, “We know more about the air we breathe, the seas we travel, than about the nature and meaning of motherhood” (11). Moreover, patriarchal discourses exacerbate the already complicated scenario by presenting motherhood in a reductionist and essentialist manner.

Throughout history, motherhood had mostly been viewed as an essential component of womanhood. Therefore, arguments imbued with patriarchal hues such as, “motherhood is what makes a real woman”, “motherhood fulfils the experience of womanhood”, etc. pervade literary, historical and sociological accounts. The essentialist conception of motherhood denied women the right over their own body, because motherhood was not viewed as personal choice, but rather as a compulsion that was thrust on every human being who was born female. The patriarchal obligation which subjected every female to the experience of motherhood, not only jeopardised the life of numerous women by ignoring/dismissing the health complications arising out of pregnancy, but also excluded a large section of females who did not identify with cis-gender heterosexual women.

Feminism in each of its subsequent waves, i.e., first, second and third waves, initiated dialogue on motherhood, which had hitherto been shoved away from the mainstream narratives. However, each wave of feminism employed a unique approach and attitude to the question of motherhood. For instance, the first wave of feminism which is usually characterised by the women’s suffrage movement espoused belief in equity and equal opportunities for both men and women. Therefore, the first wave feminism with its focus on equal salary and equal employment opportunities for working class women, initiated dialogue around maternity, motherhood and postnatal care. Literature, especially the literary works produced by female writers in the late 19th and early 20th century, gave voice to the concerns expressed by the first wave feminists. An appropriate example, in this regard, would be the short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” which was published in 1892. The short story was trailblazing in the truest sense of the word, because it presented a harrowing picture of postpartum depression, a topic that was hitherto dismissed or hushed down in patriarchy’s scheme of glorifying motherhood.

The second wave feminism, characterised by its most popular slogan, “The Personal is Political,” politicized, or in other words entrenched in the public sphere the private and intimate details of womanhood/female experience such as menstruation, pregnancy, abortion, etc. Second wave feminism, in its endeavour to liberate women from the confines of ‘home,’ represented the institutions of family and motherhood along with the traditional values associated with them, as entrapments devised to ensnare women. Despite the second wave’s radical stance on motherhood, which at times verged on extremism, it nonetheless empowered women with a choice that had been denied to them throughout history, which is the choice to opt for motherhood. The right bestowed by second wave feminism on women to control their own body and the freedom to opt for motherhood was, needless to say, revolutionary.

In the 21^st century, the hitherto predominantly white feminist movement took an intersectional turn, empowering marginalised women to speak for themselves, which they had been denied for long. Though the representation of women at top-level positions is still shamefully negligible, it must be acknowledged that 21^st century intersectional feminism has come a long way. However, the picture is not as rosy as it appears to be. In fact, the saddening truth is that even in the modern 21st century the basic right of women to control their own body is contested by various sections of the society, especially by the right-wing extremist groups. U.S.A. and several European countries witness frequent political and ideological clashes between ‘Pro-Choice’ (individuals/groups who support women’s right to abortion) and ‘Pro-Life’ (individuals or groups who deny women’s right to abortion mostly by citing Biblical/theological references to the foetuses’ right to life and the subsequent sin incurred by denying the foetuses their endowed life). While women have achieved remarkable successes in all walks of life, they still continue to grapple with the contentious issue of motherhood. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie poignantly captures the complications and complexities of 21^st century motherhood in her short story, titled “Zikora: A Short Story,” which was published in 2020.

Adichie is certainly not the first African writer to portray the nuances of motherhood and childbearing. In fact, motherhood has constituted one of the fundamental themes in the works of prominent African writers of the 20^th century such as Flora Nwapa, Mariama Bâ, and Buchi Emecheta, to name just a few. A few of the significant works of the first and second generations of African women writers that grapple with the themes of motherhood, marriage and womanhood are: Second Class Citizen (1974), The Joys of Motherhood (1979) by Buchi Emecheta, Flora Nwapa’s One Is Enough (1981), and So Long a Letter (1981) by Mariama Bâ, among others. However, these authors do not depict the immense physical pain of delivering a child, which is very much a part of motherhood. Adichie’s work is pioneering, in the context of African motherhood literature, as she doesn’t shy away from portraying the raw physical and emotional pain of childbearing, which entails labour and delivery. Obioma Nnaemeka, the Nigerian-American feminist who introduced the concept of ‘nego-feminism,’ exhorts the emerging third generation of African women writers to “reinscribe herself in history on her own terms” (154). Adichie unapologetically and unabashedly reinscribes herself and her Nigerian heritage on her own terms in “Zikora.”

Zikora is the eponymous protagonist as well as the autodiegetic narrator of “Zikora: A Short Story.” Zikora is a 39-year-old Nigerian woman, who is an immensely successful lawyer based in Washington DC. She had an almost perfect life; she belonged to a wealthy and influential Nigerian family, a “Georgetown degree” (Adichie 9), a top-level position at a prestigious law firm, and most importantly an ideal boyfriend. It seemed as if she was destined to have an enviably happy life, until one day, when her pregnancy ripped apart her picture-perfect world. “Zikora: A Short Story” documents the protagonist’s experience of pregnancy and motherhood. It presents an honest portrayal of childbearing and motherhood in 21^st century and how a successful, independent woman navigates and negotiates with the complexities of contemporary motherhood. The stylistic choice of positing the protagonist Zikora as the autodiegetic narrator of the text is an expedient decision on the part of Adichie because the mental, physical and emotional anguish articulated by someone who is experiencing it renders the text authentic.

The short story begins with Zikora undergoing an excruciatingly painful labour in the maternity ward of East Memorial hospital. The father of her unborn child is not there by her side; instead, her prudish, self-restraint and emotionally distant mother, who flew all the way from Nigeria, is accompanying Zikora. However, her mother’s presence in the hospital doesn’t bring any moral support to Zikora; rather, it has quite the opposite effect on her as she becomes more impatient and conscious of her painful labour in the presence of her mother. While Zikora, making no pretence of forbearance, is crying out loud in pain, her mother, on the other hand is expressing her disapproval at her daughter’s supposedly low endurance threshold. Zikora’s agonising labour was a source of mortification for her mother as she exasperatedly observes, “I was disgracing her now; I was not facing labour with laced-up dignity. She wanted me to meet each rush of pain with a mute grinding of teeth, to endure pain with pride, to embrace pain, even” (Adichie 7).

Her mother belonged to that generation of women who considered patient endurance as the most essential quality of being a woman. She not only imbibed the patriarchal narrative of forbearance being a woman’s greatest virtue but also wanted to inculcate it within her daughter as well. She would always advise Zikora to “bear it, that is what it means to be a woman” (7). All through her life, Zikora’s mother had been an embodiment of self-restraint and forbearance, which had made her a dignified and well-respected woman in her community but at the cost of distancing her daughter. Zikora had always found her mother’s uprightness to be suffocating and did everything in her power to avoid empathising with her.

When Zikora’s father married another woman and abandoned Zikora’s mother for her inability to bear him son, Zikora blamed her mother for her father’s decision to leave them. Zikora had refused to see that it was her mother who had been wronged by her father, and not the other way around. It was only after Zikora herself became a mother after undergoing the agonising labour that she could comprehend life through her mother’s perspective. Motherhood brought forth a real transformation in Zikora as she learnt to accept her mother for who she was and made effort to reconcile with her. Adichie portrays the emotionally fraught intergenerational motherhood through the tumultuous relationship between Zikora and her mother. Through Zikora and her mother’s relationship, Adichie also critiques the patriarchal discourse that instigates both sons and daughters to despise their mothers. It instils fear especially in daughters that they would gradually turn out to be like their mothers, which is a dreadful eventuality and must be avoided at all costs.

Zikora is deserted by her boyfriend, Kwame when she informs him about her pregnancy. She was under the impression that Kwame will celebrate this news because she had informed him earlier that she is stopping her contraceptive pills and he seemed to be fine with it. She had assumed that Kwame will take the hint that since she is not taking any contraceptives, there are chances that she might conceive. However, when she conveys him the news of her pregnancy, he becomes utterly flummoxed, a reaction that Zikora had least expected. Zikora, later while talking to her cousin Mmiliaku, articulates her confusion at Kwame’s uncharacteristically stupefied reaction to her pregnancy, “I don’t understand how we could have unprotected sex for so long and then when I get pregnant, he reacts like he never knew it could happen” (14). To which Mmiliaku responds that it is possible that Kwame might really have had no idea about how Zikora conceived because “men know very little about women’s bodies” (15).

Zikora feels frustrated with what she presumes to be Mmiliaku’s naivety. After all, how could a 37-year-old man who had been educated at Cornell, one of the most prestigious Ivy League institutions, and who is working at a successful law firm in Washington DC could not know about the negative correlation between contraceptive and conception. However, she couldn’t shrug off Mmiliaku’s opinion about men’s lack of knowledge about the female body. She starts surfing the internet and stumbles upon a blog that posts men’s anonymous interviews about their sexual relationship, and she is appalled to see their blatant ignorance about the female body. The interviewed men confess that they never had any comprehensive sex education and consequently they self-taught themselves through pornography, which filled their mind with wrong ideas and unrealistic standards. It then dawns on Zikora that well-educated and refined men like Kwame “with a healthy sex life could still harbour a naivety, a shrunken knowledge, about the inner workings of female bodies” (15). Adichie thus subtly brings to fore the Victorian-attitude of the modern education system that while paying lip service to the ideals of women empowerment, brushes under the rug important topics like sex education.

Adichie evocatively portrays the paradoxes of contemporary motherhood through the maternal experiences of Zikora and Mmiliaku. Zikora chose to have the baby but at the cost of her relationship with Kwame. She might seem to be asserting her bodily autonomy by her decision to keep the pregnancy but her breakup with Kwame takes a brutal toll on her mental and physical health. Throughout her pregnancy, she keeps begging Kwame to reconcile their differences. Even after repeated rejections, Zikora, swallowing her dignity, tries to reach out to Kwame after the birth of their child through texts and phone calls, but ends up being blocked by him. Adichie critiques the common perception that a successful ‘career woman’ like Zikora enjoys being a single mother. Mmiliaku, on the other hand, despite being a university-educated woman, ‘settles’ in the opinion of Zikora, for an older man who treats Mmiliaku as a sex-object. He physically, sexually and verbally assaults Mmiliaku, and gets her pregnant five times. Mmiliaku, unlike Zikora, has no right over her body. Her opinions and decisions about pregnancy don’t matter to her husband. Thus, when she is pregnant for the sixth time, she borrows money from Zikora, to discreetly get an abortion. Despite their different maternal experiences, they both share a loneliness that at times makes them utterly exhausted under the heavy burden of motherhood. When Zikora confides in Mmiliaku that she is afraid of raising her child all alone, Mmiliaku replies, “Some of us have men and are still doing it alone” (14).

Adichie also highlights 21^st century’s prejudiced attitude towards motherhood. Though women, after a long history of struggle, have won themselves the right to participate in the public sphere and economy, society still discriminates against women who exhibit characteristics that are traditionally associated with femininity such as, wanting to have kids. Zikora in order to not miss out on her next promotion, initially had to hide her pregnancy, and when it became impossible to hide, she started working overtime to impress upon her coworkers that her pregnancy was not obstructing her work efficiency. While her competitor, another woman, named Donna proclaimed herself to be “child-free” as if it was the greatest virtue to be aspired by every working woman. Donna took every opportunity to convey to her colleagues that Zikora is not the right candidate for the next promotion because her pregnancy and ensuing motherhood will make her a liability for the company. In order to be taken seriously, Zikora had to trivialise her experience as a pregnant woman by joking about it so that she appeared to be “in control, even slightly reckless, as though my pregnancy were a glamorous adventure that would certainly not affect my work” (12).

It could therefore be concluded that Adichie in “Zikora: A Short Story” evocatively highlights the multifaceted challenges faced by mothers in today’s dynamic socio-cultural landscape. In the course of analysis undertaken in this paper, it becomes evident that the text encapsulates not only the enduring spirit of contemporary motherhood but also the intricate interplay of cultural expectations, personal aspirations, and the evolving roles of women, especially in the context of motherhood. By engaging with the intricacies of maternal experiences and the myriad dimensions of contemporary motherhood, this paper contributes to the ongoing discourse on gender roles, maternal identity, and societal transformations.

Works Cited

Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. Zikora: A Short Story. Amazon Original Stories, 2020.

Nnaemeka, Obioma. “From Orality to Writing: African Women Writers and the (Re)Inscription of Womanhood.” Research in African Literatures, vol. 25, no. 4, 1994, pp. 137–157.

Osigwe, Kelechi Chioma. “Zikora: A Short Story.” English Academy Review, vol. 38, no. 1, 2021, pp. 81–85, doi:10.1080/10131752.2021.1926106.

Bio:
Sreya Mukherjee (MA, EFLU) is a Junior Research Fellow at the Department of Indian and World Literatures in EFLU (English and Foreign Languages University), Hyderabad. She is working on the representation of motherhoods in the Indian epics for her doctoral research. Her areas of interest are mythology, women’s writing, translation studies and postcolonial literature.

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