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Goodrich Scholarship Faculty Publications Goodrich Scholarship Program

1995

In the Ditch
Pamela J. Olúbùnmi Smith
University of Nebraska at Omaha, [email protected]

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Smith, Pamela J. Olúbùnmi, "In the Ditch" (1995). Goodrich Scholarship Faculty Publications. 23.
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 IN THE DITCH
Author: Buchi Emecheta (1944- )
Type of work: Novel
Type of plot: Bildungsroman Time of
plot: The late 1960's
Locale: The slums of North London
First published: 1972

Principal characters:
ADAH, a young Nigerian sociology student rearing five small
children by herself
THE LAND LORD, a mean-spirited and hostile man
MRS. DEVLIN, a kindly Irish woman who lives above the
landlord's flat
WHOOPEY, a lonely, dependent, single mother of two children
MRS. Cox, Whoopey's mother
MRS. CooK, a Jamaican mother of five children who chooses to live
without welfare assistance
THE SMALLS, a quarrelsome family consisting of Mr. Small, his wife,
and his mother, Granny
CAROL, a lonely, overweight, patronizing officer employed by the
Welfare Council
MR. PERSIAL, a patronizing, middle-class council clerk

Form and Content

Originally written as a collection of "observations" and published serially in The New
Statesman, In the Ditch, Buchi Emecheta's first novel, is discussed almost always only in relation
to Second Class Citizen (1974), its rightful chronological predecessor. Like its companion piece,
In the Ditch is heavily autobiographical, following Eme- cheta's own descent into the "ditch" of
welfare living and enforced dysfunctionality.
Adah, the protagonist of the novel, is an intelligent, hardworking woman who has to fight
against considerable odds to keep from being driven insane by the degrading welfare system. The
story chronicles her struggle to maintain her pride and dignity as a welfare recipient and her keen
desire for independence for herself and her children. The novel begins at the point when Adah is
newly separated from her husband. Alone and vulnerable, she battles the squalid conditions of the
rat- and cockroach-infested room that she is forced to rent from an unethical landlord who uses his
"juju" wiles to terrorize her and her children. Faced with a choice between one of two evils-
enslavement and exploitation by the landlord on the one hand or a prisonlike existence of welfare
living at the Pussy Cat Mansions-Adah opts for the latter, which she argues offers a qualified
independence. The story concentrates on Adah's indoctrination to the slum life of the welfare
system and chronicles her struggle to support and rear her children alone. Despite her desperation
at the beginning of the novel, Adah is introduced as an ambitious evening-school student of
sociology and a civil service librarian at the British Museum with middle-class and creative
aspirations.
The burdens of an obviously stressful financial situation, parenting five small children
between the ages of eight years and four months old, and the wiles of an unsympathetic and
exploitative landlord set up a predictably negative framework for the novel. The novel's
gloominess is evident in the constraining alternatives open to Adah and the desperate choices that
she must make. Adah is inexorably pauperized as she must give up her job at the British Museum
to qualify for the dole and membership in the ditch-dwellers' community. Consequently, the focus
of Adah's story becomes the inevitable acceptance and rejection of the welfare system and its
devastating psychological effect, which ironically is to dominate Adah's life and education literally
and figuratively as a sociology student. The welfare system of council housing comes under
scrutiny in a love-hate relationship. Adah's indoctrination into the slum life of the Pussy Cat
Mansions estate chronicles the descent of bright, able-bodied, capable, and otherwise productive
people such as Adah into the inevitable dependency inherent in the welfare system.
Officialdom defines the Mansions by dysfunctionality, by "problem families" who are
characteristically large, possibly belonging to a minority group, and often headed by single parents,
usually by "failed and rejected women" living on the dole and belonging to no particular class. It
is to the oppressive hierarchy of this cult of ditch-dwellers that Adah mu t learn to yield and play
dumb in spite of her pride. Survivor that she is, she learn to play the game just well and long
enough to emerge from the experience more admirable, dignified respectable and wholesome than
any of the other ditch-dweller.

Analysis
Three central issues pervade Emecheta's writing: the oppression of women (especially
African women), education as the means of their emancipation, and the effects of the conflict
between tradition and Western influences on their development. Her central intention is to explore
and protest the roots of women's oppression. This is a personal crusade. What she has uncovered
and relentlessly critiqued in all of her novels is the enslavement of women by institutions in the
private and public spheres: from welfare states that pauperize and deskill women to the insidious
institution of slavery, the oppressive institution of marriage, and the martyrdom of motherhood. In
the Ditch chronicles a series of journey-flights that the protagonist makes from one form of
bondage to another, from a failed marriage to the den of an exploitative landlord to the demeaning
snare of a welfare system.
In the Ditch illustrates the enslaving power of poverty, the symbolic embodiment of a caste
system based on race, sex, class, and property. The society depicted is menacing to the poor, the
economically deprived, and the uneducated, particularly women-the single, unsupported "mums."
Emecheta's purpose is to present the hierarchy of the Pussy Cat Mansion as a microcosm of the
oppressive hierarchies of society at large. The culture of poverty has its own hierarchy, its own
protocol for socialization, and its own value system. If the blows of the treacherous Nigerian
landlord's terro1ism and exploitation have merely bruised Adah's self-esteem, then the verbal
lashing with which the Mansions' white plumber, Mr. Small, indoctrinate s Adah to Mansions
living puts black, African, and female Adah in her place.
The hierarchy plays out entrenched attitudes and expectations. Adah quickly learns the
characteristics of the culture of ditch-dwelling: forced unemployment, dependency, lack of
initiative, dole lines, hopelessness, and overbreeding in an unhealthy community of unloved,
neglected single mums. Although a camaraderie develops-a collective of sorts- among the women
which allow them to cope with the bleakness of their situation and perhaps win some
improvements here and there, the fragile basis of such group solidarity is ineffectual in the face of
an indifferent, powerful welfare system. It is precisely for tJ11s reason that Adah feels compassion
for the ditch-dweller mums but cannot bring hers elf to identify fully with them or their lot.
Steeling herself against the destructive ness of institutionalized dependency, with its
inherent self-defeating inclinations of alcohol, overbreeding, and overeating, Adah reminds herself
that her superior education, her goal to be a writer, her previous experience as a one-time wage
earner, and her current status as a sociology student are her only guarantees to escaping the ditch-
hence Emecheta's realism, her contention that the potential for choice rests ultimately with women.
Where the ditch- dwellers such as Whoopey and Mrs. Cox continue to look to the system for their
emancipation, Adah and perhaps the Jamaican Mrs. Cook entertain no delusions or faith in the
welfare system to bring about equality or social change. Emecheta's vision of women's
emancipation is fairly clear: Individual initiative, determination, and education are the liberating
forces for transcending oppression and enslavement.
Adah's move to a new matchbox maisonette flat across from the famous Regent's Park,
where "her own working-class council estate was cheek by jowl with expensive houses and flats
belonging to successful writers and actors," symbolizes the triumph of the artistic and creative
resourcefulness, empowering Adah to resist appropriating the ditch-dweller status of the welfare
system. This final journey, though underscored by procrastination, chronicles Adah' emergence
from the psychological ditch of dependence. Thu, despite the pervasive pessimism of Emecheta '
prose, delineated by the ditch metaphor the work offer crucial hope in it simple philosophy of
indestructible strength of will. Although criticized for its thinness of style and simple language,
and therefore rarely discussed, In the Ditch and its companion piece, Second Class Citizen, are
important because they constitute the first Bildungsroman by a woman writer in African literature.

Context
Along with fellow second-gene ration African woman writer Mariam Ba, from Senegal,
Buchi Emecheta has been described as a sustained and vigorous voice of feminist protest.
Emecheta had dramatized in eight novels the entire realm of African women's experience:
childhood, family, marriage and arranged marriages, perpetual pregnancy, childbirth, motherhood,
widowhood, and polygamy. While she has pointedly disclaimed any feminist consciousness in her
writing, many critics have avowed that her novels teem with a feminism more poignantly
articulated than many avowed Western feminist novelists. Unlike first-generation writers of the
1960's-Flora Nwapa, Grace Ogot, and Rebeka Njau-Emecheta departed from the common themes
of childlessness and marriage to the more complex issues of racism and sexism in a modem society
in which tradition and modernization are at a crossroads. Her denial of conscious feminist writing
not only has raised the issue of the genesis of African feminism but also has brought into focus the
dire need for an African women's history, one which will historicize the important events in the
lives of African women that colonialism has conveniently omitted .
Like her subsequent novels, In the Ditch provides a feminine perspective on the social
issues of racism, injustice, the welfare state, and women and the culture of poverty. Compared to
her predecessors' portrayal of African women, Emecheta's women characters are more profoundly
sketched and better articulated. While her African women may still be marginalized by gender
realities, they certainly are not depicted as the stock, stereotypic characters often found in
portrayals by African male writers or the first-generation women writers. With Emecheta,
characterization means not only recognizing the female stereotypes but also revealing sensitively
and clear- sightedly how her female characters are both living out and transcending these
stereotypes. Characteristic of her portraiture is a sense of identification with her characters-an
identification nurtured by her personal experience of marginality- which enables her to articulate
Nigerian women's reality both objectively and in the context of an ever-evolving culture.
In this regard, the immediacy of her women characters' existence and the articulation of
their oppression challenge the masculinist practice of dismissing women in Nigerian and other
African literatures as a monolithic unit. Also, all of her novels add a holistic and humanized (as
opposed to a simply feminized) dimension to Nigerian • and African literatures. While Emecheta
demonstrates unequivocally women's ability to choose and to execute their choices, she is aware
through her own marginalization of her strong, independent characters that social changes to a
patriarchal mind-set provoke a backlash. In the Ditch began a tradition of the female
Bildungsroman and unapologetic protest in African literature.

Sources for Further Study

Brown, Lloyd W. Women Writers in Black Africa. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981. A
compilation of essays on the contribution of African women writers-the "other voices, the
unheard voices"-to African literature. The introductory chapter gives a broad survey of African
women writers and their articulation of the female experience. Chapter 2 offers an excellent
introduction to the curious indifference to female voices of protest. Chapter 3 provides criticism
of Emecheta's first five novels.
Frank, Katherine. "The Death of the Slave Girl: African Womanhood in the Novels of Buchi
Emecheta." World Literature Written in English 21 (Fall, 1982): 476-497. An extensive critical
examination of the protest tradition of Emecheta's novels, with particular attention to her fourth
novel The Slave Girl (1977). Frank tends to argue for a strictly feminist reading of Emecheta'
account of African womanhood.
Katrak, Ketu H. " Womanhood/Motherhood: Variation on a Theme in Selected Novels of Buchi
Emecheta." The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 22, no. 1 (1987): 159-170. Discusses the
major theme of Emecheta's concern in her major novel especially The Joys of Motherhood.
Porter Abio eh M. ' Second Class Citizen: The Point of Departure for Understanding Buchi
Emecheta' Major Fiction." The lnternational Fiction Review 15, no. 2 (Summer, 1988): 123-129.
Argues against the persistent attempt by some Western scholars to read many of Emecheta's
novels only within the feminist tradition. Demonstrate the dar1ger of focusing almost exclusively
on her feminist themes at the expense of the universality of her novel. Discusses Second Class
Citizen the companion piece to ln the Ditch, as a powerful example of the Bildungsroman in
Africa.

Pamela J. Olubunmi Smith