In the Ditch was published by Barrie & Jenkins in 1972, Emecheta’s first published novel. It grew out of a series of columns she wrote for the New Statesman about life on a council estate in north London, and it retains the episodic structure of its origins — each chapter is a vignette, a snapshot of daily life in the Pussy Cat Mansions (Emecheta’s name for the estate, barely disguising its real identity).
Adah, a Nigerian woman separated from her husband (the events that led to the separation are told in Second-Class Citizen, which was actually written first but published second), is raising five children alone on welfare. The “ditch” of the title is the welfare system itself — a bureaucratic apparatus that provides survival but not dignity, that keeps people alive but trapped. Adah’s encounters with social workers, housing officers, and benefit administrators are rendered with a comedy that is always close to fury.
The novel is slight by comparison with Emecheta’s later work, but it established her voice — direct, unillusioned, capable of finding humor in humiliation — and her central subject: the experience of African women caught between cultures, between tradition and modernity, between the expectations placed on them and the resources available to meet those expectations.
Collecting In the Ditch
First edition (Barrie & Jenkins, London, 1972): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $300–$700
- Very good/very good: $100–$300