BOOK REVIEW : Heavy-Handed Lesson on Immigrants’ Pride

The Family by Buchi Emecheta. (George Braziller: $17.95; 240 pages)

Among many other things, Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses” painted a vivid, hallucinatory picture of Muslim East Indian communities in Great Britain. Buchi Emecheta’s “The Family,” a smaller and quieter work, provides a glimpse of another little-known society: that of the hundreds of thousands of Africans and West Indians who settled in London since World War II.

Emecheta, of Nigerian origin, has written principally and gracefully of black African women in flux between tradition and modernity. In “The Family,” her focus is upon a family of immigrants from Jamaica, and particularly upon the growing up and out of Gwendolen, the eldest daughter.

In the early chapters, Gwendolen is a child being raised by her grandmother in a hillside slum outside Kingston. Her parents had moved to London, promising to send for her when they could.

She lives in a constricted, tightknit community. The poverty is acute, and if there is village warmth, there is also village hopelessness. A middle-aged neighbor, Uncle Johnny, is a regular visitor to Gwendolen and her grandmother. He helps them out, and at night he abuses the child sexually. She is too ashamed to protest, she is ashamed of not protesting, and when she finally does protest, she is ashamed of the trouble that follows.

Told in short sentences, flavored with patois, as if spoken in the voice of the 12-year-old Gwendolen, these first chapters are short on character or feeling. They seem designed to set the stage for the contrast of what the child will find in London.

The child’s bewilderment upon arrival in London is nicely done. She is astonished to see a white cabdriver tip his cap to Winston, her father. The cold is like an assault. On the other hand, there is her first experience with an overcoat: “The feeling of privacy--it was like walking about carrying your own house.”

Winston works hard in a construction job and makes good money, but he is illiterate and utterly lost in the big city. Sonia, his wife, works just as hard, keeping her apartment immaculate and decorating every inch of it, but she too hasn’t a clue about how to adapt to British ways.

Emecheta contrasts these West Indians, descendants of slaves, with their Nigerian friends who come from free, complex and traditional societies. Winston’s work mate, Ilopinga, is well educated and skillful at negotiating the bureaucracy of the new country.

On the other hand, he is hampered by the very traditions that give him confidence and pride in himself. His two wives compete for status by producing children. There are 11 of them. Ilopinga knows a man should be proud of such a thing, but it forces him to put off his plans to study law. Winston, ruthless and unlettered, gives him rootless but pragmatic advice: Put the wives to work.

“Dem wan’ be baby machines let them carry on,” he says. “But dem feed their kids.”

“The Family” follows Gwendolen through school, where her teachers, though not ill-intentioned, humiliate her over her difficulties in reading, writing and speaking standard English. She finds some consolations singing in a local black church; she is set back, almost into nightmare, when Winston sleeps with her during a trip by her mother back to Jamaica.

Still traumatized by her earlier experience of abuse, and loving her father--Emecheta oddly succeeds in making him sympathetic, not so much evil as doomed and eventually punished--Gwendolen says nothing. And she becomes pregnant.

It seems to be a trap. But she refuses to be caught, as her parents have been. She becomes a friend and lover of a Greek boy, and she runs away. After the police pick her up and place her briefly in a mental hospital, she gives birth and--helped by the still provident British system of social assistance--sets up on her own as a single mother.

She has discovered pride in herself. She gives her baby an African name. She makes friends and begins to look outward. And suddenly she is speaking English of literary quality instead of patois.

It is too sudden. Through Gwendolen, Emecheta is teaching us a lesson about hope and liberation among the London immigrants. Unfortunately, Gwendolen is virtually all lesson, and person virtually not at all.

The book’s didacticism swallows up its fiction. Only in the portrayal of Ilopinga and the other London Nigerians does Emecheta free herself from her purposes and liberate herself into her art.

Monday: Carolyn See on “Hell-Bent Men & Their Cities.”