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Chapter 12: The Collapse
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Second Class Citizen, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Class, Gender, and Race
Culture vs. Individual Freedom
Motherhood and Art
Family and Love
Economics vs. Aspiration in Education
Summary
Analysis
Adah gives birth to Dada in May. For five months afterward, Adah happily stays home, cares for her children, and writes The Bride Price. If Francis were English—or simply a different person—this setup would have worked. Yet he is “from another culture”: he believes that since Adah has extensive education and his parents were asked to pay a high bride-price for her, she should be working rather than “doing nothing.” He starts arriving late to his own job, no longer pleased by the power he felt as a breadwinner since it doesn’t cow Adah. She has plans to start working part-time, from home, as a seamstress.
Adah’s joy at caring for her children and pursuing her novelistic aspirations suggests that she would be perfectly happy to be a stay-at-home mother and an artist if she didn’t have to hold down a conventional job for purely economic reasons. Okpara, whom the novel suggested was a highly conventional Ibo/Igbo man, assumed that Francis was the one paying his family’s bills, which suggests that it would be culturally normal in Ibo culture for Francis to support Adah rather than vice versa. Yet here, the narrator states that Francis resents Adah not working—“doing nothing”—because he is ”from another culture” than that of the UK, implying that it is normal in Ibo culture for men to rely on or even exploit their wives’ labor. These characterizations of Ibo culture are somewhat in tension with one another, though not necessarily contradictory—which may be why the narrator adds that the marriage might have worked if Francis were still Ibo but was perhaps less resentful and less used to exploiting other people.
Themes
Adah writes The Bride Price by hand in “four school exercise books.” She feels tremendously happy writing, even though she judges her book to be “over-romanticised,” compensating for her unloving marriage. While writing, she forgets everything but her children. She still hopes that the UK will change Francis’s retrograde attitudes about women and that if she shows him her manuscript, he’ll realize she’s not wasting time. She has noticed that the children are happy when she is happy, but that they become extremely frightened when Francis yells or hits her.
Adah writes her novel in “school exercise books,” implying that her education gave her not only credentials and access to jobs but also the literary ambitions causing her current joy. That she forgets about everything but her children while writing suggests that motherhood and authorship are her two great ambitions in life, her twin sources of happiness. Her realization that her children become terrified when Francis is physically abusing her, meanwhile, makes explicit that she has maternal as well as individual reasons to leave Francis—yet she still desperately hopes that he will discard his misogyny and that their family can stay together.
Themes
Before Adah shows The Bride Price to Francis, she shows it to her former coworkers at the library. Bill tells her that it’s high quality: she should type up the pages and send the manuscript to a publisher. Adah wonders whether she could really become a writer. Finishing the manuscript made her feel as “fulfilled” as if she had had another child, and when she mentions that to Bill, he told her the novel was her own “brainchild.”
This scene makes clear that novel-writing for Adah is on par with giving birth to a child, the other major creative act of her life: The Bride Price is not just her creation but her “brainchild,” figuratively a younger sibling to Titi, Vicky, Bubu, and Dada. Contrary to stereotypes about mothers not having enough time to be artists, the novel suggests that motherhood and authorship are not only similarly “fulfill[ing],” but that it's possible for a woman to do both.
Themes
Adah decides that she needs to study more to become a “real” writer. She decides that, because her English is uncomplicated, she’ll use the “simplest” books as models: the Bible and the works of Shakespeare. She also decides that her novels will need to focus on a “special thing,” thinks that thing might be the people who visit the library, and tentatively plans to ask Francis whether one learns about people in sociology.
Previously, Adah pursued an education to help her survive. Now she wants more schooling in pursuit of a higher ambition: becoming a “real” writer, a “real” artist. Amusingly, she thinks of the Bible and the works of famous English playwright William Shakespeare (1564–1616) as the “simplest” literary works she knows. Since many native English speakers have trouble with Shakespearean English, the allusion indirectly suggests that Adah is a far more sophisticated writer and reader than she has yet realized. Author Buchi Emecheta did earn a degree in sociology from the University of London in 1972, another biographical detail letting readers know that Adah is a semi-autobiographical character.
Themes
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Adah tells Francis about The Bride Price and asks him to read it. He says that he’d rather watch TV and derides her for thinking that anyone cares what she, a Black woman, writes. Adah points out that libraries carry Flora Nwapa’s novels. Francis still refuses to read Adah’s “rubbish,” so she puts her notebooks with her library books and plans to buy a typewriter. She believes now that Francis will never appreciate her mind because she’s a woman. She thinks perhaps they should have stayed in Nigeria, where she might not have written a novel till she turned 40, as she’d always planned. But it’s too late: she has written the book and won’t turn back.
Francis claims that no one wants to read what a Black woman writes—a claim that suggests he is cruel to Adah not only out of misogyny but also out of the racism he has internalized after suffering discrimination in the UK. When Adah points out that this claim is literally false—people read the novels of Flora Nwapa (1931–1993), a female Nigerian novelist—Francis insults Adah’s book as “rubbish” without answering her point. Though Adah recognizes that Francis’s dismissal is sexist, it still makes her wonder whether she should have stayed in Nigeria and waited to write until she was older as she originally planned. Her wondering shows the influence that Francis’s sexism has over her thoughts even as she recognizes it for what it is.
Themes
When Adah returns from grocery shopping the next Saturday, she sees Francis burning paper over the stove. She demands to know what he’s burning. He smiles at her the way he always smiles when telling the story of how he once poisoned a friend’s pet monkey, or of how he once whipped a goat while demanding it add two and two. Then Adah sees the cover of one of her school exercise books and realizes that Francis has burned The Bride Price—the basis of her aspirations, which she planned to show Titi, Vicky, Bubu, and Dada when they were old enough.
Buchi Emecheta’s abusive husband really did burn the manuscript of the first novel she wrote, which she had to entirely rewrite and later published as The Bride Price—yet another detail revealing Adah to be a semi-autobiographical character. When Francis burns Adah’s manuscript, it shows his sadism and total lack of respect for Adah’s aspirations and creative power, despite the support she has given him and the love she has tried to show him.
Themes
Adah, exhausted, tells Francis that Bill called The Bride Price her “brainchild” and asks how he could murder her child. Francis claims that he read it and that his family wouldn’t like his wife writing such a novel. Adah finds herself unable to forgive Francis for murdering her “brainchild,” despite everything else she’s forgiven. She gets a job at the British Museum, finds a new, dirty two-room apartment, and moves out. As she’s moving, Francis breaks her fingers and bruises her mouth; their landlady, hearing the fighting, calls the police to protect Adah.
After resolving many times to leave Francis, Adah finally does leave him only after he murders her “brainchild.” The language she uses, “brainchild,” indicates that she leaves Francis because his abusive behavior is incompatible with her fulfilling her creative potential—but also hints that she leaves him because she recognizes he might be a physical or psychological threat to her human children as well. Thus, the fate of The Bride Price symbolizes how Adah must free herself from Francis in order to be the artist and the mother she wants to be.
Themes
A month after moving, Adah learns she’s pregnant again. Then Francis follows Titi and Vicky home from school to Adah’s new address and bashes at the apartment window, trying to get in. Adah lied to her new Yoruba landlord and told him her husband was back in Nigeria, so she lets Francis in before the landlord can investigate the noise. Francis announces that Nigerians don’t get divorced: his father beat his mother until Francis himself got old enough to intervene, but they never divorced.
When Francis casually mentions that his own father beat his mother until he himself got big enough to stop the abuse, it reveals that Francis likely learned his loveless, abusive, and misogynistic behavior from his early family environment—just as Adah learned to love others from her positive childhood experiences with her affectionate, responsible father. Thus the novel suggests that childhood experiences with family members strongly influence later behavior, especially behavior in romantic relationships.
Themes
Adah points out that Francis violated Nigerian norms first by failing to support his wife and children. She also accuses Francis of never having reciprocated his mother’s love, since he never sent her money back from the UK. She quotes a proverb: men who treat their mothers badly treat their wives badly. In response, Francis violently assaults Adah. The landlord hears the commotion but doesn’t want to intervene. Eventually, Adah’s upstairs neighbor, an elderly Irish man named Devlin, breaks down Adah’s door and stops the assault.
In previous scenes, Adah has internally criticized Ibo/Igbo and Nigerian culture as being sexist. Now, however, she explicitly acknowledges that Francis has failed her not just by adhering to sexist cultural norms, but by failing to adhere to more positive cultural norms about men supporting their families. The proverb that Adah quotes highlights the novel’s earlier implication that people’s childhood relationships to their parents strongly condition how they relate to romantic partners as adults. Finally, Francis’s violent assault on Adah shows that his abuse is escalating.
Themes
After Francis leaves, Adah decides that she cannot cope with his violence on top of the economic stress she’s under, supporting four children on her own. She decides to involve the law. The Indian doctor’s wife, who’s also a doctor, tells Adah that if Francis would hurt her so badly, he might do something worse in the future. She writes Adah a note to get her two weeks off work. She also offers to testify for Adah, but Adah ultimately doesn’t take her up on the offer, worried that the court might order Francis imprisoned.
The law nominally protects women against violent abuse by their husbands, but in practice, it is often difficult for women to secure such protections—showing the gap between gender-egalitarian laws and the sexist cultures those laws apply to. Despite Francis’s repeated assaults on Adah, she still doesn’t want him imprisoned, which may indicate either her residual love for Francis or her long-held fear of police.
Themes
In court, Francis claims that Adah’s injuries are due to a fall. When the magistrate awards Adah custody of the children and asks how much child support Francis can pay, Francis claims that he and Adah were never married. Then, in their Ibo language, he tells Adah that he burned their marriage certificate, their children’s birth certificates, and her passport. The magistrate says Francis must pay child support anyway, because Adah can’t raise them on her own—and Francis suggests the children be put up for adoption. Adah, feeling a sudden jolt of energy, tells the magistrate she’ll care for the children herself and “never let them down.”
Francis’s suggestion that his and Adah’s children be put up for adoption parallels his burning of The Bride Price: these two actions show that Francis’s abuse is utterly incompatible with Adah fulfilling her creative potential, whether that potential is maternal or artistic. Francis’s decision to burn Adah’s and the children’s identity documents highlights this parallel: in both a figurative and a literal sense, he is trying to destroy Adah and their children’s identities. Adah’s defiant response—that she will “never let [her children] down”—shows her commitment to motherhood and her own creative potential in the face of great personal and economic adversity.
Themes
Adah leaves the courtroom and walks aimlessly, crying. While she stands in front of a butcher’s shop in Camden Town, a voice suddenly calls out to her, “Nne nna,” pronouncing the old nickname as her Pa used to. She turns and recognizes the man who called out: he’s a friend from high school. The man, noticing her ring, asks whether she married Francis. When she says she did, the man pays for Adah’s taxi because he thinks she’s still married.
The sudden appearance, at the novel’s end, of Adah’s old school friend who calls her “nne nna,” a nickname her Pa gave her, suggests Adah’s inability to shed either her culture of origin or her formative childhood experiences. Yet at the same time, this old friend who represents her childhood and her culture of origin fundamentally misunderstands Adah’s situation, believing that she is still married to her abusive husband. The friend’s misunderstanding suggests that Adah, as a person, is separating herself from her past and her culture even as they remain relevant to her personality, psychology, and life overall.
Themes
