Motherhood through imagery
Motherhood is depicted through imagery when various characters endure the pain of childbirth to give life to new children. This is depicted as a method for continuing the family with heirs, so the women are asked to participate in cultural ideas about motherhood that frame motherhood as a kind of obligation or social service to the men. It is their sacred duty, one might say. The novel illustrates these assumptions about motherhood in order to scrutinize them and question them.
Death and barrenness
There are two central kinds of death depicted in the story—miscarriage and barrenness. The death of barrenness is that a woman feels socially dead if she cannot bring forth life, and miscarrying a child is a literal depiction of that feeling. So when Nnu Ego struggles to conceive and then miscarries, the story is pointing to her as the focal point of this imagery. Her experience of motherhood is the most thematic one. Death is also the final conclusion of the story, and from death, she is said to bless women with barrenness.
Masculinity and dilemma
Masculinity appears in the story through the imagery of dilemma. The women struggle to live up to their societal views of their role, which is an instance of patriarchy, but also the men struggle to become the patriarchal father their community demands them to be. The men are allowed to have more than one wife which leads to the dilemma of competition, and the dilemma of competition shapes the emotional lives of many men in the village.
Natural imagery
The phenomenology of their environment is explored as the characters go about their lives. During times of extreme duress, many characters flee into nature to live life apart from their community for a time. This signals the abandonment of social constructs, and so it is unsurprising when these characters pass through nature and into lifestyles that their communities would disapprove of, like Nnu Ego's prostitution.
