Corpos em trânsito: os deslocamentos das personagens femininas de Buchi Emecheta

Abstract

This research investigates how and why displacement manifests itself in the lives of the protagonists of four novels by the Nigerian author Buchi Emecheta: As alegrias da maternidade (2017), Cidadã de segunda classe (2018), No fundo do poço (2019) e Preço de noiva (2020). These displacements assume two forms: internally, within Nigerian territory (rural-urban and vice versa); and externally, through migration to London. Against this backdrop, the study examines the protagonists’ sense of (in)adequacy in new environments, their search for a home, and the impacts of these experiences on the construction of their subjectivities. This investigation is grounded in the complex relationship between literature and society, bringing the novels into dialogue with Literary Criticism and the Social Sciences. As an analytical framework, the notion of corpos em trânsito serves as a guiding thread through which to understand the processes of displacement, estrangement, negotiation, and adaptation that shape the protagonists’ experiences. The study demonstrates that colonization and capitalism restructure Nigerian society in significant ways: Nnu Ego witnesses her traditional conception of wealth (based on prestige and motherhood) being undermined by the economic rationality of urban life; Aku-nna has her education transformed into a commodity to increase her bride price; and Adah confronts exhausting labor conditions, precarious housing, and racism in England. Across these trajectories, both convergences and divergences emerge, particularly regarding motherhood, which oscillates between punitive obligation, an expression of individual affection, and a strategy for survival, and Western education, which proves ambivalent by enabling social mobility and a degree of autonomy while simultaneously generating new tensions. Within this intricate interplay of colonization, cultural practices, space, gender, and identity, the critical gesture of Emecheta’s fiction emerges: even under adverse circumstances, these female bodies become sites of daily struggles, challenging traditions and colonial and racial oppressions. The search for a home –physical, affective, or symbolic – thus emerges as a reorganizing axis for fragmented subjectivities, but, rather than constituting a stable refuge, home emerges as an ambiguous and never fully consolidated construct. Based on this finding, the notion of heroínas desterradas, formulated here to designate postcolonial protagonists whose journeys culminate not in reconciliation but in fracture, shaped by tensions among tradition, coloniality, and autonomy. Finally, it was established that Nnu Ego, Aku-nna, and Adah share a form of quiet, daily resistance, exposing the intersection between tradition, colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy, which produce precarity but also open up spaces for female (r)existence in deeply adverse contexts.