Rethinking Motherhood through Afrofeminism: Reading Jennifer Makumbi's The First Woman

ABSTRACT

In this article, I read Jennifer Makumbi's novel The First Woman (2020), which I argue combines African feminism and indigenous knowledge to generate alternative narratives of motherhood in the absence of the main character's biological mother. I argue that Makumbi rethinks motherhood through an afrofeminist lens to complicate the idea of the ideal mother as self-sacrificing and sacred. In the novel, Makumbi intentionally re-engages the myth of origin to figure women as fluid and complex people who do not always subscribe to ideal notions of motherhood and womanhood. The novel, therefore, opens up the possibility of competing notions of motherhood that embrace indigenous conceptions and philosophies of communal care as practised in most rural economies in Africa. Such interventions allow Makumbi to interrogate and suggest possibilities for re-reading gendered roles of motherhood, as well as African womanhood, while at the same time dealing with issues of class as defined through colonial modernity.

KEYWORDS:

• Maternal absence
• motherhood
• afrofeminism
• community
• myth

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The American publication of the book appears under the title A Girl Is a Body of Water (Tin House Publications, 2020).

2 In this article, I use TFW in citations referring to The First Woman.