Purple Hibiscus

Shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2004, Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's first novel, Purple Hibiscus, brings to mind the writings of that other Nigerian writer, Chinua Achebe. But while Achebe's themes may be more explicitly political (think of him as the African Ernest Hemingway), the writers both share an affinity for evoking the oppression and turmoil of their novels' characters experienced at the time of political turmoil.
As in many post-colonial societies, the personal and political are inseparable, although here the disintegration of the Nigerian state (a military coup takes place early on in the story) is as nothing compared to the fracturing family at the centre of the novel. The events take place in Igboland in Eastern Nigeria, and the narrator, fourteen-year-old Kambili, is the obedient only daughter of a harsh Roman Catholic patriarch, Eugene, a big man and wealthy local manufacturer in the city of Enugu. Eugene is the proprietor of a newspaper in which, at considerable personal cost, he bravely champions freedom of speech against military tyranny at the same time as he rules his home with the most tyrannical of iron grips. It is difficult to describe the oppression that haunts every page of this brilliant novel. Sure, it could be the oppressive heat described so well by our young author brought about by the harsh African harmattan winds. Or it could be the force of an unquestioned faith in religion. But in Purple Hibiscus, the worst kind of oppression is the stifling power of abuse — verbal, mental, and physical abuse wrought by Kambili’s father. Eugene is an interesting character study — a person so completely sold on the superiority of the Western mode of thought and action, especially through religion, that he will stop at nothing to see it enforced in his own house. He is at once consumed by raw extremes of passion—extreme love and, worse, extreme anger. His family, including the protagonist, Kambili and her brother Jaja, live every minute in sheer terror, looking upon Papa, as he affectionately called, for constant approval. Adichie’s descriptions of Papa’s stifling presence are extremely well done—one’s heart bleeds for the family. During one particularly telling episode, Kambili Achike has stood second in her class at school and the sheer terror in her voice is scary — one waits with bated breath for the nasty consequences that are sure to follow:

“The Reverend Sisters gave us our cards unsealed. I came second in my class. It was written in figures: “2/25.” My form mistress, Sister Clara, had written, “Kambili is intelligent beyond her years, quiet and responsible.” The principal, Mother Lucy, wrote, “A brilliant, obedient student and a daughter to be proud of.” But I knew Papa would not be proud. He had often told Jaja and me that he did not spend so much money on Daughters of the Immaculate Heart and St. Nicholas to have us let other children come first…I wanted to make Papa proud, to do as well as he had done. I needed him to touch the back of my neck and tell me I was fulfilling God’s purpose. I needed him to hug me close and say that to whom much is given, much is also expected. I needed him to smile at me, in that way that lit up his face, that warmed something inside me. But I had come second. I was stained by failure.”

It should be hard to sympathize with a man who beats his pregnant wife, and who, after deploring the soldiers' torture of his editor with lighted cigarettes, pours boiling water over the bare feet of his adored daughter as a punishment. And yet Eugene, self-made and ultimately self-hating, is the book's loneliest character; his misunderstanding of Christianity has led him to reject the animist beliefs of his own ageing father and to repudiate the old man himself, perversely hating the "sinner" more than the "sin". Kambili writes of her father at one point: "It was... as if something weighed him down, something he could not throw off".
The novel's tone is quite unique, as it mirrors the mood of the present location of our protagonist. When Kambili is at her father's house, the tone is tense, eliciting anger and extreme sympathy. When she is at her aunt Ifeoma's, it is flippant, eliciting curiosity and growth. Purple hibiscus is a metaphor of sorts. Metaphorically, “the missal flung at the étagère, the shattered figurines and brittle air” in time, becoming reality. representing a dissembling and shattered family; things falling apart. It is an allegory for Jaja’s defiance, “rare, undertones of freedom, freedom to be, to do” for which, in the long run, he does end up in prison for voluntarily taking ownership of a crime he did not commit. It is also a metaphor for an atrophied and suffocating society, in which bad and evil men overwhelm the good in the society. The hibiscus flower, which is usually red, by its transmutation to purple, represents both abnormality and unending hope. Eugene Achike was an eager-to-please man who believed in conventions and prayed incessantly for Nigeria in distress. A rebel with a cause against animism and traditional rituals, his personality and disposition was a testimony that despots, like criminals, follow a predictable pattern. Here is a prayerful churchgoer who believes in confessions and penance, but is fanatically unforgiving in his belief, that it is “sinful for a woman to wear trousers”. He also has no qualms about physically abusing his children, and his wife to the point of inducing a miscarriage, and forsaking his father for being a heathen – all in the name of God.
The novel is admittedly plot-less, but what enfolds in its pages is none-the-less engaging and enthralling, with much of its memorable action occuring when their aunt Ifeoma takes both Kambili and her brother away for a vacation to her country home. The two get a taste of freedom, but still live in perpetual fear of their father, with Kambili quaking in fear every time the phone rings. Adichie does immense honor to the Igbo language by deftly and unapologetically interweaving translated and untranslated idioms (no glossary). Her direct Igbo words and translations where used, are well laid out for emphasis, in a way that probably only a multi-lingual person would fully appreciate. But above and beyond this, Adichie writes with the prodigious ease of a veteran, that belies her twenty-five years of age at the time of the novel's publication. Her flowing prose style is smooth, elegant, endlessly seamless, and like her characters, solidly crafted.
All around them, Nigeria is slowly disintegrating just as the family slowly does. A violent coup causes Aunt Ifeoma to leave the country for America. Adichie makes some political statements here, “these are the people who think that we cannot rule ourselves because the few times that we tried, we failed, as if all the others who rule themselves today got it right the first time. It is like telling a crawling baby who tries to walk, and then falls on his buttocks, to stay there. As if the adults walking past him did not all crawl, once.” Purple Hibiscus reduces and personifies the fate of a disenfranchised nation to the microcosm that is its dysfunctional academic institutions as well as individuals. It subtly lampoons a nation that wallows in its own self-doubt and pity, where “the educated ones leave, the ones with the potential to right the wrongs. They leave the weak behind. The tyrants continue to reign because the weak cannot resist.” It is equally an insightful commentary and inquiry into Igbo lifestyles, like “why many Igbo people built huge houses in their hometowns, where they spent only a week or two in December, yet were content to live in cramped quarters in the city.” There is also a clash of civilizations, about the conflict between traditional and imported gods, as personified by the relationship between Eugene and his father. Whereas both parted ways on matters of native customs and religion, they ironically both prayto the same God, in their different ways, with each using different symbols as means for intercession.
Amidst these dichotomies, there are pockets of hope and redeeming characters. Aunty Ifeoma, the gregarious single parent and lecturer, stands up to Eugene and to her university’s malleable authorities. Ade Coker, the incorruptible and fearless editor of The Standard, causes the military government great discomfiture with his scathing editorials, and Father Amadi, who goes beyond the call of his pastoral duties to offer succor and friendship to those around him, chief of these being Kambili. There are also, Kimbili’s teenage cousins, Amaka, Obiora, and Chima, unspoiled, grounded, precocious, but always unassuming and loving.
Kambili and Jaja along with their long-suffering mother eventually liberate themselves from the tyranny of their father. It is a questionable freedom, though. Like any survivor of abuse, Kambili finds that release without closure is small success. “Silence hangs over us [now],” she says toward the end of Purple Hibiscus, “but it is a different kind of silence. One that lets me breathe. I have nightmares about the other kind, the silence of when Papa was alive. In my nightmares, it mixes with shame and grief and so many other things that I cannot name, and forms blue tongues of fire that rest above my head, like Pentecost, until I wake up screaming and sweating.”
Adichie’s choice of "purple hibiscus" as the title of this emotive book remains a curious one. Perhaps, given the tension in its pages, the title is meant to seduce, encrust and serve as embrocation for the difficult subjects, tough love, turmoil, alienation, miasma and death that engulfs the well-to-do Igbo family. Set in contemporary Nigeria, Purple Hibiscus mirrors the enchanting beauty and richness of the country without shying away from also capturing its trauma, tragedy, desperation, resignation, and political tribulations. To read the novel is to relive life in Nigeria for those who know it and a shock therapy education in the vagaries of everyday life for those who perchance, might have just been insinuated into Nigeria by Adichie. It is also a bildungsroman; a story of one child's progress from shyness to love, with all the nuances, growing pains and heartbreak in between. Like the flower of the same name it is named after, it is a work of peculiar beauty, a poetic rarity and a glimmer of hope for our times.