The rare first edition of the Nigerian writer Buchi Emecheta’s (1944-2017) celebrated second novel.
“Buchi Emecheta’s quasi-autobiographical Second-Class Citizen charts the trajectory of Adah, an Igbo girl, from her childhood in Lagos through to her marriage, her subsequent immigration into England, her experiences of motherhood, and her desires to be an author. Emecheta’s novel portrays the racism that Adah experiences as a Nigerian immigrant in London, but it is no less attentive to how the patriarchal constraints of Igbo culture are redeployed and exacerbated in a Western city where the traditional structures of kinship support are no longer present. Adah’s second-class citizenship is produced not just by the barriers of race but also of gender and the intersections between the two. Her aspirations to authorship as a means of emancipation, of coming into her own voice, reflect her response to what has frequently been called the ‘double subjugation’ of the colonized woman” (Janice Ho, Nation and Citizenship in the Twentieth-Century British Novel).
