'Please get up and find me something to eat.'
'Can't you get yourself something to eat? Is that why you wake me up at this time of the night--to find you something to eat?' ...
'If only you had taken the trouble to look ... you would have found some food in the pot on the cooker. But you wouldn't, would you? You have a willing slave who would do that and had always done...'
'Am I your wife or your slave in this house?' ...
Life is so unfair to women, she thought bitterly. They give so much and receive so little. And whatever they give is taken for granted and more is demanded of them. Women are forever confronted with their duties as daughters, sisters, wives, and mothers. These roles are in themselves noble, valuable and thoroughly natural. But they have come to be interpreted as forms of slavery in most places, and women have over the years accepted this interpretation. And so, women have to slave from girlhood to old age--giving, serving, rearing, nurturing and slaving--with hardly any help from the opposite sex. What about men? They are forever taking, grabbing, mauling, swallowing. ...
The relationship between a man and a women, she rationalized, must be one of symbiosis--woman giving and receiving, man receiving and giving. The giving must be reciprocal as well as the taking. Awa ought to learn to give."
Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo, 1996, 20-24
"The Departure," in Rituals and Departures
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