The Cry Of Emecheta’s Ojebeta

Literature has reflected various lives and paved way for the betterment of numerous dying creatures. Writers of ages, different culture, class, religion and country reciprocate the day to day happenings and events to record in the history. The lives of the dark skinned people also find a place in the literature. The blacks are referred as the dark skinned people as the author finds it derogatory to address them based on the tone of their skin. The writers who wrote about the dark skinned people and the writers who emerged from that race have exemplified their life incidents in the record to reveal to the world about their struggles and sufferings. The dark skinned writers have mainly focused on the oppressions and subjugations of their people as they are never given an opportunity to celebrate their existence in this world. Once they are under the colonizers who suppressed and oppressed them as blacks, as slaves and considered them as mere humans. They are enslaved in their own countries and also sold to other regions to acquire their maximum labour. After the long struggle and with the emergence of great leaders thereby, the dark skinned people gained independence. The freedom which the dark skinned people have acquired does not exist long as they are again chained by their own people. Especially, women are treated with least care and often subjugated in the domestic and social level. The dark skinned women are doubly marginalized as they are once the victims of the colonizers and forever the victims of their patriarchal society. Not only as women but as girl children right from their birth, women are oppressed and are forced under the masculine power. The demeaning attitude of men towards women makes women feel inferior and the meanest sex. Buchi Emecheta a Nigerian novelist portrays the painful experiences of girl children and women of the Igbo community in her novels. Emecheta faces inequality right from her childhood as she is denied of education unlike her younger brother. Due to her continuous persuasion, she is able to attend the All Girls Missionary School, and then to the Methodist Girl’s School in Yaba, Lagos. Her marriage to Sylvester Onwardi interrupts her education and moves to London in 1962. By the age of twenty two, she had five children- Florence, Sylvester, Jake, Christy and Alice. Emecheta’s initial life is an apt example of how women are considered as unequal human beings to share the equal rights. She has to undergo various forms of struggle and oppression to make a better life for her and her children. However she manages to work as a librarian in the British Museum from 1965 to 1969. Emecheta carries the burden of her family as she is denied of any assistance form her husband.