conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know a plot for a book about Ego, Agbadi, Nnu entitled The Joys of Motherhood?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Joys of Motherhood: Nwokocha Agbadi is a proud, handsome and wealthy local chief.\nAlthough he has many wives, he finds a woman named Ona more attractive.\nOna (or a priceless jewel) is the name he has given her.\nOna is the daughter of a fellow chief.\nWhen she was young, her father took her everywhere he went, saying she was his ornament, and Nwokocha Agbadi would say jokingly in response, "Why don\'t you wear her around your neck like an Ona.\n" It never occurred to him that he would be one of the men to later ask for her when she grew up.\nDuring one rainy season Chief Agbadi and his friends have gone elephant hunting and having come too near the heavy creature, is thrown with a mighty tusk into a nearby sugar-cane bush and is pinned to the floor.\nHe aims his spear at the belly of the mighty animal and kills it but not until it has wounded him badly.\nAgbadi passes out and it seems to all he has died.\nHe wakes up after several days to find Ona beside him.\nDuring this period, he sleeps with her, and after eighteen days he finds out that his eldest wife Agunwa is very ill and died later.\nIt is thought that perhaps she became ill as a result of seeing her husband on his apparent deathbed.\nThe funeral festivities continue through the day.\nWhen it is time to put Agunwa in her grave, everything she will need in her afterlife having been placed in her coffin, her personal slave is called.\nAccording to custom, a good slave is supposed to jump into the grave willingly to accompany her mistress but this young and beautiful slave begs for her life, much to the annoyance of the men.\nThe hapless slave is pushed into the shallow grave but struggles out, appealing to her owner Agbadi, whose eldest son cries angrily: "So my mother does not deserve a decent burial.\n" So saying, he gives her a sharp blow with the head of the cutlass.\nAnother relative gives her a final blow to the head and she falls into the grave, silenced forever.\nThe burial is completed.\nOna becomes pregnant from sleeping with Agbadi and delivers a baby girl named Nnu Ego ("twenty bags of cowries").\nThe baby is born with a mark on her head resembling that made by the cutlass used on the head of the slave woman.\nOna gives birth to another son but she dies in premature labour and her son also dies a week afterwards.\nNnu Ego becomes a woman but is barren.\nAfter several months with no sign of fruitfulness, she consults several herbalists and is told that the slave woman who is her Chi (goddess) will not give her a child.\nHer husband Amatokwu takes another wife who before long conceives.\nNnu Ego returns to her father\'s house.\nShe is married, sight unseen, to a new husband who lives in Lagos; so she journeys from her village to the city where she meets her new husband, Nnaife, whom she does not like but prays that if she can have a child with him, she will love him.\nShe does give birth to a baby boy, whom she later finds dead.\nShocked, she is on the verge of jumping into the river when a villager draws her back and comforts her.\nOver the course of her life, she gives birth to nine surviving children.\nHer husband, a laundryman for a white man, is drafted into the army during wartime, but on her own Nnu Ego can barely manage to feed them.\nWhen her husband\'s brother dies, he inherits his four wives and moves the youngest and prettiest, into the home.\nNnu Ego enjoys a bitter rivalry with this new wife.\nIn the midst of the war, the new wife leaves to become a prostitute while Nnu Ego devotes her life to providing for her children.\nShe scrimps and saves to provide a secondary school education for her oldest son, in the hope that he will help support the rest of the family.\nAfter he graduates, he expects more support so he can study abroad.\nHer second son wants the same thing.\nHer third child, a girls, runs off with a Yoruba butcher\'s son.\nWhen Nnaife gives chase, he injures a man and is taken to court where he is put in jail.\nNnu Ego\'s fourth child marries the lawyer who pleaded Nnaife\'s case, and offers to rear the fifth child.\nNnu Ego returns to the village, where she is feted as a great woman because with two married daughters, and two sons abroad (the second son emigrates to Canada), she is expected to be filled with the joys of motherhood.\nIt is suggested that her children\'s success should be enough for her.\nShe dies a lonely death in the village, and is regarded as a mad woman.\nOnly after her death do her children arrive to throw a lavish funeral for her; they spend time and money on her funeral which they did not spend in her life.\nIt is noted that Chi never gives children to women who pray to her for them.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know the first five paragraphs for this book?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Joys of Motherhood
  The opening scene in Buchi Emecheta's plunges us into the confusion and despair of a mother stunned by the sudden death of her firstborn son. This distressing scene and others that follow throw into sharp relief the novel's bitingly ironic title. Emecheta's classic novel, originally published in 1979, charts the tumultuous life of a young Igbo woman, Nnu Ego, in colonial Nigeria across the early- to mid-twentieth century. In this time and place, Nnu Ego's devotion to her children's and husband's wellbeing yields lamentably few and fleeting joys. Her quest for validation through motherhood is thwarted at every turn, tragically undermined by a complex set of contradictions she finds herself unable to negotiate.
  Emecheta based her first two novels on her own experiences, as an immigrant in London, but turned to more historical periods in subsequent works. She has frequently drawn on Igbo and colonial Nigerian pasts, situating several stories in "the Africa [her] mother knew."1 In the case of , her fifth novel, Emecheta creates a symbolic back-story set in the Delta State village of Ibuza to introduce the novel's central thematic link between slavery and womanhood (including motherhood). Nnu Ego is the love child of a proud, unorthodox woman, Ona, and a well-established pillar of Ibuza, Nwokocha Agbadi. Prior to Nnu Ego's birth, a slave girl killed by Agbadi's family vows to return and resurfaces as Nnu Ego's chi (spirit-guide). Her chi wholly frustrates Nnu Ego's designs by initially denying her fertility and later intensifying it to the point of exhaustion.
  The explicit association of women's status and enslavement runs throughout Emecheta's substantial oeuvre. This linkage stresses the oppressive domestic and social conditions that force African women into lives of self-abnegating servitude. In particularly, a woman's worth rests on, first, her ability to bear children and, second, her willinguess to meet the desires and needs of others. While in Ibuza, a young Nnu Ego struggles mightily with infertility, convinced that motherhood would bring her the contented, celebrated life other women seemingly enjoy. Eagerly subscribing to patriarchal values upheld in agrarian Igbo society, Nnu Ego believes motherhood to be the ideal state of womanhood but cannot achieve it.
  Nnu Ego becomes pregnant only in her second marriage (the first, childless one deteriorates)—an arrangement requiring her to relocate to urban Lagos, where her new husband, Nnaife Owulum, lives. Following her firstborn's death, she has eight more children, seven of whom survive. But the terms of motherhood in colonial Lagos, where the bulk of the story takes place, are vastly more complicated. Woefully, Nnu Ego can bear children only when and where she can least support them. Outside her customary home where they would sigual abundance, her sons and daughters ultimately deplete her resources. The burden of caretaking, compounded by poverty and a difficult marriage with Nnaife, increasingly sinks Nnu Ego into the state of captive servant drained of all vitality. In this light, the novel's repeating rhetorical question—three slight variations of "What else could a woman want?"—resonates more chillingly with each iteration.
  In contrast to the relative stability of Ibuza village life, Emecheta's Lagos of the 1930s, '40s, and '50s is a restless, dynamic cityscape undergoing unprecedented urbanization. Fueled by British commercial exploits, the bustling port city becomes what Mary Louise Pratt has called a "colonial contact zone."2 It is the locale where subjects of the colonial Nigerian state encounter their British rulers, but lagos is also where aspiring Yorubas, Hausas, Fulanis, and Igbos from discrete areas across the region begin coexisting with one another. For Nnu Ego and Nnaife, the allure of the city gives way to meager job prospects, limited resources, racism, and exploitation. The resulting strains and discombobulating experiences throw cultural traditions—familiar ways of thinking, being, and making sense of the world—into disarray, forcing newcomers to forge new ground in order to gain their footing.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know three more paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Nnu Ego was beginning to realise something else. Since he had come back, Nnaife had suddenly assumed the role of the lord and master. He had now such confidence in himself that many a time he would not even bother to answer her questions. Going to Fernando Po had made him grow away from her. She did not know whether to approve of this change or to hate it. True, he had given her enough housekeeping money, and enough capital in the form of the things he brought from Fernando Po, but still she did not like men who stayed at home all day.
  If Nnu Ego went further than that he would either go out for the rest of the day or resort to his new-found hobby, the twanging of Dr Meers's old guitar. She decided to let him be for a while. After all, they still had enough money to pay for the rent. She also made sure of another term's fees for Oshia. She was now able to have a modest permanent stall of her own, at the railway yard, instead of spreading her wares on the pavement outside the yard. Oshia was helping, too. After school, he would sit by his mother's stand in front of the house, selling cigarettes, paraffin, chopped wood, and clothes blue. His mother would let him off to go and play with his friends as soon as she had finished washing and clearing the day's cooking things from the kitchen.
  On one such evening, she sat with her neighbours in front of the house by the electric pole which provided light for yards around the house. Adim, Oshia's little brother, was now four months old, and he was propped up with sand around him to support his back, so he would learn how to sit up straight. He kept flopping on the sand like a bundle of loosely tied rags, much to the amusement of all. Nnu Ego had her stand by her, with her wares displayed, and Iyawo Itsekiri had started selling pork meat in a glass showcase. Another woman from the next yard had a large tray full of bread, so in the evenings the front of the house at Adam Street looked like a little market.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know the last four paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: She used to go to the sandy square called Otinkpu, near where she lived, and tell people there that her son was in "Emelika", and that she had another one also in the land of the white men—she could never manage the name Canada. After such wandering on one night. Nnu Ego lay down by the roadside, thinking that she had arrived home. She died quietly there, with no child to hold her hand and no friend to talk to her. She had never really made many friends, so busy had she been building up her joys as a mother.
  When her children heard of her sudden death they all, even Oshia, came home. They were all sorry she had died before they were in a position to give their mother a good life. She had the noisiest and most costly second burial Ibuza had ever seen, and a shrine was made in her name, so that her grandchildren could appeal to her should they be barren.
  Stories afterwards, however, said that Nnu Ego was a wicked woman even in death because, however many people appealed to her to make women fertile, she never did. Poor Nnu Ego, even in death she had no peace! Still, many agreed that she had given all to her children. The joy of being a mother was the joy of giving all to your children, they said.
  And her reward? Did she not have the greatest funeral Ibuza had ever seen? It took Oshia three years to pay off the money he had borrowed to show the world what a good son he was. That was why people failed to understand why she did not answer their prayers, for what else could a woman want but to have sons who would give her a decent burial?