Re-Fashioning Femininity and Motherhood in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “Zikora: A Short Story”

Abstract

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is one of the postcolonial writers who has made her literary contribution by introducing Nigerian culture to her readers in English. This paper aims to present a re-fashioned postcolonial perspective on the understanding of femininity and motherhood in Nigerian culture and to demonstrate how the perception of these concepts has evolved over generations as illustrated by the mother-daughter relationship in Adichie’s “Zikora: A Short Story” (2020). “Zikora” deals with various issues directly related to the situation of Nigerian women, such as single motherhood, polygamy, sexism and the preference for male children. The article draws on African feminism to explore womanhood as an identity and to emphasise the role that contact with a foreign culture plays in women's self-determination and development as individuals. In the story, the eponymous character is a single woman whose expected child is not wanted by her father. In the final stages of labour, Zikora reflects on her mother's relationship with her father and how she had to stay in the polygamous marriage just because she did not bear her husband a son. This study also shows that “Zikora: A Short Story” is a boldly written story that draws attention to the many injustices faced by Nigerian women in a patriarchal society.