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Chapter 5: An Expensive Lesson
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
Francis walks into the apartment one morning carrying a letter and tells Adah there’s terrible news. Adah grabs the letter and reads it: their landlord’s lawyer is ordering them to leave their room within a month. Adah is upset but not surprised; she believes her landlord and neighbors hate her for having a “white” job, living with her children, and being Ibo. Vicky surviving his illness was the last straw for them. Francis is surprised, however. He thought that by adopting his neighbors’ culture he could get along with them, not realizing that they resented him for his wife’s well-paying job and for his children.
Earlier passages have suggested that while Adah and Francis’s neighbors are also Nigerian immigrants, they are mostly ethnically Yoruba and come from a working-class background in Nigeria, whereas Adah and Francis are ethnically Ibo/Igbo and attained middle-class status in Nigeria. This passage emphasizes that the neighbors envy and dislike Francis and Adah because Adah is striving—and partially succeeding—at living a “first class” or “white” life in England despite the racism that all the Nigerian immigrants face.
Themes
Adah looks for new housing but keeps encountering the phrase “sorry, no coloureds” in rental advertisements. She feels that racism is warping her psyche: she begins gravitating toward lower-quality items when she buys clothes to avoid commentary from the clerks, for example. Yet she believes this is a stop-gap measure: once she is more settled in the UK, she will “regard herself as the equal of any white.”
In this context, “coloured” is a catch-all term for non-white people. The housing discrimination that Adah suffers as a Black person does affect her psyche, but she still resolves to be “the equal of any white”—whereas Francis and her neighbors seem to have accepted English culture’s racism and resent Adah for trying to fight and subvert it.
Themes
When Adah and Francis can’t find new housing, Adah’s landlord and landlady are happy to have humbled them. They start complaining about everything Adah, Francis, Titi, and Vicky do. In Nigeria, it is not uncommon to invent songs to insult people you dislike, and the neighbors start singing that Adah will be homeless. In response, Adah starts acting showily happy, laughing at nothing—which makes her feel like her neighbors’ insane behavior is driving her insane in a kind of “adaptation.”
After two weeks, Adah spots an ad for vacant rooms that doesn’t specifically refuse Black tenants. Adah calls the landlady from work—pinching her nose to sound “white”—and learns that the rooms are still available. When she gets home, she tells Francis the good news. She likes his way of “looking pleased at [her] achievements,” even if he doesn’t love her, and she hopes that she keeps experiencing success. She doesn’t mention that she chose 9 p.m. to visit the rooms in hopes that the landlady won’t notice “in time” that she and Francis are Black.
Once again, Adah attempts to subvert the cultural norms that discriminate against her—in this case, racist housing discrimination in England—by outwardly conforming to others’ biases: she tries to sound “white” and visits the rooms when it will be harder to see that she and Francis are Black, rather than overtly protesting the racism she’s encountering. Adah’s reaction to Francis in this passage shows that she has resigned herself to a loveless marriage but still wants Francis to be “pleased” with her—one of her motives for trying to succeed even in hostile, prejudiced cultural contexts.
Themes
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While Janet babysits Titi and Vicky, Adah and Francis walk to the rooms’ address. The neighborhood looks demolished, like it was blitzed during World War II. Adah takes this as a good sign, believing that a landlady in a bad neighborhood will be more likely to accept Black tenants. Yet when they reach the right building, the landlady sees them, looks horrified, and then tells them the rooms have just been rented out. Adah is shocked to be spurned by this unkempt woman in a terrible neighborhood. Francis stares at the woman with loathing. He suggests they leave.
In one sense, Adah and Francis seem to be of a higher socioeconomic class than the unkempt white woman in a bad neighborhood who refuses to rent to them: after all, Adah is a university graduate with a white-collar job. Yet when the white woman’s rejects them as tenants, it emphasizes that in England, even educated Black people with good jobs may be considered “lower class” than poor, uneducated white people.
Themes
As Francis and Adah walk away, Adah starts babbling the story of Jesus’ Nativity. When Francis responds contemptuously, Adah points out that Jesus was “an Arab” and wonders how the white English can worship him but discriminate against “coloured” people. Francis ignores her. As they return to their apartments, Adah thinks that they need a miracle—and then something “just like a miracle” occurs.
In the Nativity story, Jesus’ mother Mary has to give birth in a manger because innkeepers refuse to give her a room. In talking about the Nativity story, Adah is implicitly comparing herself to Mary, her children to Jesus, and the racist white landlady to the Biblical innkeepers. Throughout the novel, characters manipulate, subvert, or ignore cultural norms to achieve their goals. Here, Adah points out that English racism ignores the fact that the historical Jesus, who was born in the Middle East, could be considered “coloured” (i.e. non-white) by the standards of 1960s England.
Themes
