The unseen labour of mothering: Maternal reproductive work, bodily knowledge, and the violence of the border-state in Faith Ben-Daniels’ Blue Ixora (2018)

Abstract

This study undertakes a Marxist-feminist reading of Faith Ben-Daniels’ Blue Ixora (2018). Existing feminist criticism has tended to read maternal experience in contemporary African women’s fiction as an alternative epistemology, foregrounding women’s intuitive knowledge while leaving its material and economic conditions unexamined. Against this tendency, the study argues that maternal care and knowledge are most adequately understood as forms of devalued labour, and that the destruction of life at the postcolonial border is best read as the destruction of socially reproduced labour-power by a predatory state. The analysis draws on the Marxist theory of labour and value, on social reproduction theory and the feminist scholarship of Silvia Federici, and on Louis Althusser’s account of the repressive state apparatus. Adopting a qualitative, interpretive design, it proceeds through close reading and thematic analysis organised around five concerns: the devaluation of reproductive labour, the silencing of women’s knowledge, the commodification of the body and human mobility, state violence and impunity, and grief as resistance. The study concludes that the work offers not merely a narrative of personal loss but a structural critique of postcolonial capitalist patriarchy, and that a materialist feminist approach yields insights that a purely gynocritical reading cannot.