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Chapter 8: Role Acceptance
Themes
and Colors
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.”
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.
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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.
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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.
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