Purple Hibiscus
by Chimamanda Adichie
An Igbo patriarch
A review by Ranti Williams
Post-colonial Nigeria has produced a notable tradition of prose writing from which
comes Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's first novel, Purple Hibiscus, which tells
of a teenager watching her family break down in a country that is doing the same.
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.
Adichie builds a complex picture of a man struggling with his own demons, taking
out his struggles on those he loves: his wife, Beatrice, son, Jaja, and Kambili
herself. 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
for coming second in class. 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 picture of modern Nigeria is an authentic one; it depicts a land
full of potential and with an educated middle class, a country in which a coup
can suddenly erupt and a local newspaper editor can be killed for what he writes;
a place whose inhabitants are aware of their nation's flaws and yet are fiercely
patriotic, loath to emigrate until things get truly desperate. This is the fate
of Eugene's sister, Ifeoma, a widowed university professor. Her household is
the opposite of Eugene's; she allows her children relative freedom of expression
and thus introduces Kambili and Jaja to a world beyond their strictly regimented
home, with the result that they cannot return without the unravelling of their
tightly wound family life.
Chimamanda Adichie's main strength is dialogue: as her characters speak, one
hears the voices of modern Nigeria. Her descriptions, however, sometimes lack
subtlety, and she has a tendency to overdo the symbolism: objects break as the
family falls apart; the purple hibiscus runs rampant over the tidy garden as
the children and their mother test their freedom. The narrative voice mostly
convinces as the naive tone of a sheltered child facing the adult world, although,
at times, Kambili can sound simply disingenuous. This is particularly true of
the treatment of her schoolgirl crush on the impossibly virtuous young Catholic
curate, who is the book's only really unconvincing character. Overall, Purple
Hibiscus, which has been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize,
is a compelling tale told well by a confident voice with much potential for
the future.
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