English Academy Review | 2021
Zikora: A Short Story
Abstract
The theme of motherhood and childbearing is not new in African women’s literature. In fact, it is one of the recurrent subjects in most first-generation and second-generation African women’s writing, including Flora Nwapa’s Efuru (1966) and One Is Enough (1981), Mariama Bâ’s So Long a Letter (1981), Buchi Emecheta’s Second Class Citizen (1974) and The Joys of Motherhood (1979), to mention a few. These women writers focus so much on marriage, motherhood, and family matters that some critics have described their works as “domestic literature” or simply “motherhood literature” (Nnaemeka 1994; Ogundipe-Leslie 1987).