A short poem of only 21 lines, Micere Mugo’s Wife of the Husband is a subtle lament about the hard labor and long hours that a woman must spend doing the work necessary to stay in her husband’s and her village’s good graces.

The poem lists the work that a woman does: she must care for her children, clean her home, care for the animals and keep them safe, cook, keep the household fires burning, and safeguard the embers. But the only job the speaker credits her husband with is humorously expressed in the first two lines: “His snores / protect the sleeping hut.” Meanwhile, “the stooping mother” continues her labors at night as the rest of her family sleeps.

The poem’s last stanza emphasizes the complaint by repeating the poem’s first two words twice: “His snores / welcome her to bed / four hours to sunrise” and “His snores rouse her from bed / six sharp. . . .”

Although the poem is deceptively simple, a good deal is conveyed through understatement. Her husband expresses no gratitude for her exertions, and the only kindness alluded to is the one conveyed by the word welcome in the last stanza, used ironically to express the husband’s unconsciousness, snoring at the moment the wife finally gets to go to bed.

The husband’s snores are not useless, however, for they do the work of waking her up to another day’s round of chores. Mugo’s speaker preserves a wry sense of humor about her husband despite her travails.

The feminism and Marxism that Mugo has elsewhere embraced more overtly is here evident, but the message (an advocacy for women’s liberation through incitement to revolution) is couched in a subtle double entendre, as the last two lines can be read two ways—literally and figuratively: “Arise / O, wife of the husband!”

Bibliography
Mugo, Micere Githae. “Wife of the Husband.” In The Penguin Book of Modern African Poetry. 4th ed., edited by Gerald Moore and Ulli Beier, 153–154. London: Penguin Books, 1998.

Categories: Literature

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