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Chapter 8: Role Acceptance
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 wakes up in a hospital ward. A tube traveling down her throat prevents her from talking. Despite her pain and doubt about whether life is worth living, the other women on the ward seem like exemplars of life’s happiness. One woman finally got pregnant after 17 years of marriage and can’t stop showing her son to the others. Adah tries to imagine what her life would have been like if Francis couldn’t impregnate her for 17 years. She imagines he would have taken a second wife and converted to Islam, as his religion changes to suit his desires: when he didn’t want her using contraception, he was Catholic, and when he was feeling depressed, he was a Jehovah’s Witness.
Once again Adah wonders whether life is worth living: her occasional passively suicidal thoughts show the toll her difficult economic situation and Francis’s abuse are taking on her. Meanwhile, her thoughts about Francis show that she is aware of how he uses religion to justify doing what he wants to do anyway, rather than genuinely following any one religious doctrine. Despite all this, the other mothers seem like figures of joy to Adah, which illustrates how much she values and respects motherhood.
Themes
The young, “sleek” woman in the bed next to Adah’s, who has a handsome, much older husband, chats to Adah constantly. She is very overdue, but the doctors haven’t decided yet whether to operate. Meanwhile, the surgeon keeps announcing in Adah’s hearing that almost none of his patients have died and his incisions always heal nicely. His self-assuredness buoys Adah. Though she thought she might die, she’s alive. The other women nickname her Caesar, and the doctors nickname her “cord presentation.” The nurses nickname her new son Bubu “Muhammad Ali” because of his unruly yelling. Eventually, he is given a private nursery so he doesn’t wake other babies.
The sleek woman’s difficult pregnancy, like Adah’s emergency Caesarian section, reminds readers that while Adah values motherhood highly, it can also be physically dangerous to women. The nicknames that the other women, doctors, and nurses give to Adah and Bubu are ambiguous. On the one hand, they could be affectionate or professional (“cord presentation” refers to an irregular placement of the umbilical cord in the uterus, which might have been the reason Adah required a C-section). On the other hand, they might be somewhat dehumanizing and racist, a “second class” way of referring to someone in place of using their actual name.
Themes
After four days, the tube is removed from Adah’s nose and mouth. Able to talk again, she asks the sleek woman about her life—about the experience of being married to such a handsome man, about him visiting her and giving her so many expensive presents. The sleek woman explains that she was her husband’s secretary and married him after his first wife died. Their marriage was the best event in her life. She’s adopted, and while she claims that her adoptive parents did love her, she also admits that she wanted to be “really” loved and to really love—a dream that she feels is “finally coming true.” Adah, feeling tearful, tells the sleek woman that it’s already true.
Adah’s wonder at the affectionate treatment the sleek woman receives from her husband underscores the lovelessness of her marriage to Francis. The sleek woman admits that she was looking for a romantic partner to “really” love her as compensation for the love she never received from her biological parents (or perhaps her adoptive parents either). This admission suggests that adults’ romantic choices and desires are heavily conditioned by their early childhood environment, which sheds light on Adah’s desire to love and be loved: she learned how to love from her affectionate Pa and wants to exercise her capacity to love, while her loveless childhood after Pa died leads her to seek love in unhealthy places, e.g. from the abusive Francis. The sleek woman’s belief that her dream of being loved is only “finally coming true”—after she has already been married and gotten pregnant—suggests that her life may not be as rosy as Adah supposes it is.
Themes
The sleek woman’s husband arrives, and the surgical team comes to examine Adah. They bring a privacy screen, which disappoints Adah: it steals her opportunity to observe the sleek woman with her husband, who interact like lovers in a film, something Adah has never seen in real life. When the surgeon starts showing Adah to the rest of the team, Adah bursts into tears. The team decides it must be “after-baby blues,” and Adah lets them think so. However, she’s lamenting that no one loves her for herself the way the sleek woman’s husband loves her, and that she doesn’t have a husband like the woman who was barren for 17 years. She doesn’t stop to think about the suffering those women’s lives contained.
Adah treats the sleek woman and her husband like a fictional romantic pairing. This emphasizes Adah’s hunger for love, which Francis isn’t meeting, but it also suggests that Adah is failing to recognize the full, complicated reality of the sleek woman’s life—a failure that the narrator explicitly points out at the passage’s end. Meanwhile, the surgical team’s conclusion that Adah is just crying from “after-baby blues”—a trivializing term for postpartum depression—illustrates how, in the sexist 1960s English culture Adah inhabits, women’s behavior can be stereotyped and their individuality ignored.
Themes
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The surgical team leaves Adah alone, and more visitors arrive for other women on the ward, many with flowers. Adah has no visitors and no flowers. While it isn’t common to bring new mothers flowers back home, Adah thinks she’ll point out to Francis that they do it in England and speculates hopefully that he’ll bring her flowers the next day. Adah has also noticed that she’s the only woman on the ward wearing a hospital nightdress; everyone else has their own. She plans to ask Francis to buy her a nightdress. Though she imagines he’ll complain about cost, she plans to tell him that she has earned a present after giving birth to Bubu via Caesarean. She doesn’t mind that Francis will buy the present with her earnings; she just wants to show the present to the other women.
Adah is analyzing and trying to assimilate to the micro-culture of the English maternity ward: she recognizes cultural customs like receiving flowers and buying private nightdresses and wants to perform them herself to fit in with the other mothers. Sadly, however, Adah still anticipates that she will have to argue that she has “earned” loving behavior from Francis by surviving a difficult childbirth and producing another son. This shows that her marriage still suffers from Francis’s sexist cultural assumptions, abusiveness, and cruelty.
Themes
Regular visiting hours begin. Francis rarely arrives on time because of Titi and Vicky. Adah doesn’t care. She and Francis have little to say to each other: Francis assumes that Adah, as his possession, must survive, so he never asks about her health. A nurse, looking uncomfortable, approaches Adah and requests that she ask her husband to bring her a nightdress: patients aren’t supposed to wear the hospital’s nightdresses after labor. Though Adah planned to ask Francis to buy her a nightdress anyway, this incident makes having her own nightdress seem much less appealing. Suddenly, Adah imagines that other people on the ward are insulting her, using racial slurs and gossiping about her lack of presents and visitors. She hides under her sheets.
Adah knows that Francis thinks of her as a thing that he owns rather than as a human being in her own right—yet another indication of Francis’s misogyny, his sexist cultural beliefs, and his lack of love for Adah. When Adah realizes that others have noticed her failure to conform to an English cultural practice (wearing her own nightdress in the maternity ward), she becomes paranoid that they are calling her racial slurs behind her back—showing her awareness that many English people consider her a “second class citizen” due to her race and that any failure to assimilate to English cultural norms may inflame that racism.
Themes
Francis arrives and says he has good news. Adah wants him to say he’s gotten a job, but she’s sure he won’t. Having realized that men in the UK do things for their wives, she resolves to ask for several nightdresses and for Francis to take them home and wash them when they get dirty. Francis shows Adah a letter from her boss, which says the library plans to pay her for unused vacation time and that her coworkers have bought her a cardigan. Adah thinks that the nightdress will be affordable now. Then Francis announces that he plans to use the money from the library to pay for a course on his accountancy exam. Adah, too outraged to reply to that, asks after Titi and Vicky instead.
Whereas Adah’s coworkers at the library appreciate her and want to give her a gift after her difficult childbirth, Adah’s own husband never thinks of doing such a thing. Moreover, he assumes he can take the money Adah has earned from unused vacation days and spend it on himself, without thinking about Adah’s needs or his children’s. Yet again, the novel is emphasizing Francis’s selfishness, thoughtlessness, and lack of love for his wife, as well as his misogynistic cultural assumptions about women and wives.
Themes
Francis tells Adah that her absence has not bothered Titi or Vicky. Adah asks what would have happened to them if she’d died and demands that Francis act like “a husband and father […] now” instead of focusing on his future career or religious paradise. Francis stutters that if Adah had died, his mother could have raised the children. Adah tells Francis that she loathes him. She won’t let his illiterate mother raise her children: she left Nigeria to save Vicky from becoming a misogynist and Titi from being sold for a “bleeding price” or marrying just to secure “a home.”
This is one of very few times that Adah openly criticizes Francis’s sexist, demeaning views about women or his failures as “a husband and father” to his face, the other being when she told him she would kill him and Trudy if Trudy’s negligence led to Vicky’s death. In both cases, Adah fights her husband’s sexism head-on for her children’s sake—whereas in cases where Francis’s sexism hurts primarily Adah, she often lets it slide or addresses it indirectly. This shows Adah’s protectiveness and love for her children: she wants a better cultural environment for her children, especially Titi. Adah doesn’t want Titi to be sold for a “bleeding price” (as Adah’s family tried to do to her) or married to secure “a home” (as Adah herself ended up doing).
Themes
Adah bursts into tears, wishing that her Pa had not died, that she had not needed to marry as a teenager to secure a home, and that her relatives had understood her educational aspirations better. Thinking of Titi and Vicky as her only friends, she resolves to focus her love on them and to leave Francis as soon as she reasonably can. She thinks that she chose a home “among the wrong people,” but she can start a new one with Titi and Vicky. She resolves not to let Francis mistreat her. Then she dries her eyes and tells him the hospital says she needs a nightdress.
Adah’s wish that she had not married Francis as a teenager marks a turning point for her character. Prior to this point, she has justified this decision to herself because it helped her achieve her educational goals and gave her her beloved children. Now, however, she realizes that Francis and her in-laws were “the wrong people” to be her new family: they cannot love her or respect her as a woman, so she needs to extricate herself from them to protect her children from their damaging behaviors and cultural attitudes.
Themes
Adah receives a plain, functional nightdress two days later. She decides to keep to herself, so no one can ask her about her family. The women she has met on the ward start leaving. The sleek woman transfers elsewhere; shortly thereafter, Adah hears that she has died. Adah wants to leave the ward too. She asks Francis to bring her a lappa with “Nigerian Independence, 1960” printed on it to wear when she leaves, just to remind the others that Nigeria is an independent country. She frets that Bubu will have to be wrapped in a hand-me-down shawl from Titi when they leave. She begins wishing she were dead. When they leave, she is convinced people on the ward are judging her, laughing and using racial slurs.
Adah romanticized the loving relationship between the sleek woman and her husband due to her own loveless marriage. When the sleek woman dies, presumably due to complications of her pregnancy, the novel emphasizes that maternity can still be dangerous even to well-treated women in loving relationships. A lappa is a West African wrap garment. When Adah requests that Francis bring her one with a print reading “Nigerian Independence 1960,” it shows that she wants to assert racial and national pride in the face of Nigeria’s former colonizers, emphasizing that she is still worried that they look down on her as a “second-class citizen” due to her race, national origin, and lack of money.
Themes
During the taxi ride home, Adah wonders whether the people on the ward were genuinely friendly and truly admired Bubu, after all. She questions why she’s become so “suspicious” of people and concludes that it’s because Francis and her in-laws don’t love her. They just use her to fund Francis’s education. She doesn’t judge them for the initial decision to use her, but she feels hurt that Francis failed to reciprocate her growing love for him and so killed it. She wishes she had said a kind goodbye to the people on the ward and decides to reciprocate other people’s kindness in the future. Adah also resolves to “love and protect” Titi and Vicky, who greet her happily at home.
Adah is likely “suspicious” of the English due to the overt anti-Black racism she has experienced, as well as due to her negative experiences with Francis and his family. Yet when she consciously admits how their exploiting her to support Francis’s “elite” education has negatively affected her psyche, it’s another turning point for her character: she resolves to “protect” Titi and Vicky, implicitly from the unloving family life and cultural sexism that she herself has experienced.
Themes
