A Study Guide for Buchi Emecheta's "The Wrestling Match"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Buchi Emecheta's "The Wrestling Match," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Jun 27, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535840705

Book preview

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The Wrestling Match

Buchi Emecheta

1983

Introduction

Buchi Emecheta's The Wrestling Match was first published in 1983 in Great Britain by Oxford University Press, in conjunction with University Press Ltd. of Nigeria. The story is a deceptively simple tale of a boy coming of age in a Nigerian village, but Emecheta uses the tale as a commentary on war, as well as on relationships between generations and the need for everyone to have productive work.

Emecheta retains the strong storytelling tradition of her Nigerian homeland; The Wrestling Match is told in simple yet vivid language, and makes readers feel as if they're in an open clearing in which children and old people sat, telling stories and singing by the moonlight, as the narrator of the book notes.

Many of Emecheta's works deal with poverty and the oppression of women, both in Nigeria and in England; in this sense, The Wrestling Match is a departure, as it tells the story of a young man and his uncle, and the women in it are marginal characters who retain their traditional roles as wives or wives-to-be.

In an interview with Julie Holmes in The Voice, Emecheta told Holmes that writing is the release for all my anger, all my bitterness, my disappointments, my questions and my joy.

Author Biography

Buchi Emecheta was born as Florence Onye Buchi Emecheta on July 21, 1944, near Lagos, Nigeria. Her parents were from the Igbo village of Ibuza in southeastern Nigeria, and although they were nominally Christian, they also retained traditional Igbo beliefs, so that Emecheta grew up with a multiplicity of cultures. Her parents made sure that she spent time in their village so that she would know her original culture, but she grew up in Lagos, where another ethnic group, the Yoruba, was dominant.

Emecheta became aware early that not only was she a member of a minority in Lagos, but also that her own culture, the Igbo, valued boys more than girls. These experiences gave her a feeling of being an outsider that continued throughout her life, and was often expressed in her