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Barbara Christian's "Angle of Seeing Motherhood"

© Dorothy Harris

Of many images that are conveyed in literature about and literature by and about African American women, the image of African American mothers is one whose evolution is contingent upon African American women writers and African American mothers themselves. I have been researching the construction of motherhood by African American women for several years. It is evident, as I examine the development of the images of African American women in literature over the last two hundred years, that as African American women become more self identified and as African American women become the architects of our own images that the images of African American mothers changes to reflect a more realistic image as well.

In 1983 Barbara Christian published a collection of essays entitled Black Feminist Criticism. Even though Christian's text was published 16 years ago, I still use the text in my African American women's literature courses. Her analysis still offers students a way of critically interpreting African American women's literature while offering students models for writing womanist literary analysis.

In Black Feminist criticism, Christian analyzes writings of several African American women writers, with a special concentration on 20th century novelists. Many of the essays focus on the development of various images of African American women in African American women's literature. One of her essays, "An Angle of Seeing Motherhood" gives a womanist centered interpretation of the images of motherhood in Buchi Emecheta's The Joys of Motherhood and Alice Walker's Meridian.

Christian compares the perceptions of motherhood in African and African American cultures. She gives background information of the perceptions of motherhood in both cultures as a foundation for her discussion of the novels. She examines contemporary and post-colonial Africa while making important links of existing perceptions of motherhood to those of pre-colonial Africa. While African communities have the reputation, or even accusation by some, of being matriarchal, Christian indicates that Africa, especially after colonialism, is not necessarily matriarchal. She asserts that it is heavily male dominated and that as a result, the experiences of African women as mothers is dictated by male defined structures. African women continue, according to christian, to be perceived as property of their husbands and elderly women as property of their sons. Certainly they are valued as mothers, yet their motherhood does not put them in special esteem when they are elderly. Their value as mothers is largely because they can potentially have sons and subsequently that they allow men's names to have a continued link to the next generations. African women who do not have children, however, are mistreated, are disrespected and are not valued in the same way as those who have children, and especially sons, are treated. According to Christian, the insistence that African women have children causes conflict with the women themselves, who find themselves products of a society that values reproduction but does not value mothers. African women, then, are expected to contribute to the society's longevity, yet they are continually percieved as second class citizens. As is evident in Emecheta's novel, African women have conflict about the contradictory concepts of mothering, especially in societies in which mothering is to be a woman's sole role in life.

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