INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ENGLISH, LITERATURE AND CULTURAL STUDIES

Abstract

This study explores the complexities of mother–daughter relationships in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s short story Zikora (2020), focusing on the interplay of generational tensions, maternal silence, and diasporic identity. Drawing on African feminist theory, feminist maternal studies, and diaspora scholarship, the research interrogates how Adichie dramatizes the ambivalence of maternal bonds, revealing both conflict and continuity across generations. The analysis demonstrates that Zikora’s strained relationship with her mother embodies the silences and emotional distances characteristic of earlier generations of African women, whose endurance in patriarchal contexts often necessitated stoicism and self-silencing. Through the lens of childbirth a rare and strikingly vivid subject in African literature Adichie portrays a moment of embodied recognition in which Zikora comes to appreciate her mother’s resilience, even as she struggles with her own feelings of abandonment and anger. The study further reveals how male absence, represented by Zikora’s partner’s desertion, reproduces intergenerational patterns of betrayal, thereby intensifying women’s reliance on maternal bonds, however fractured. By situating Zikora within a wider literary and theoretical tradition including the works of Flora Nwapa, Buchi Emecheta, and Tsitsi Dangarembga the study highlights Adichie’s contribution to African feminist discourse, particularly in her portrayal of maternal ambivalence, intergenerational inheritance, and diasporic continuity. Ultimately, the research argues that Adichie reimagines motherhood not as a sentimentalized ideal but as a dynamic and contested space where silence, confrontation, and reconciliation coexist. The study concludes that Zikora provides valuable insights into African women’s lived realities, while also offering fertile ground for further comparative studies of motherhood, migration, and generational bonds in African and diasporic literature.