A review of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus; Farafina Publishers
The Rainbow Book Club’s choice for its September (2014) special reading is a work that has attained legendary status in a very short time. ‘Purple Hibiscus’, first published less than a decade ago, has been praised by literary scholars all over the world as being one of the most mature and effective debut novels ever to emerge from Africa, or anywhere else for that matter. Not surprisingly the young author’s work has been compared to that of the late Chinua Achebe with whom she shares her ethnic origin of being Igbo from Nigeria’s south-eastern geo-political zone.
Interestingly the first words of the narrative echo the title of one of Achebe’s masterpieces ‘Things Fall Apart’, which might just be a facile and clever nod to his influence in her own reading experience. However her writing does share much more profound echoes of the Achebe oeuvre both stylistically and in the moral concerns of its content. The conflict of cultures that lay at the heart of Achebe’s most enduring works is present in even more profound and devastating ways in this work.
The most profound elements of the tale focus on the impact of Christianity (specifically Roman Catholicism) on the social perceptions of a growing child caught in the throes of modernisation and the virtual canonisation of a new middle class society being promoted by a strong and tyrannical father. These themes are encapsulated in a well-established literary format, that of awakening adolescent consciousness. In some ways this is a young people’s novel.
The language is elegant but highly accessible and the relationships among the characters are explicitly emotional. Kambili, the narrator and central protagonist, is a teenage high school student whose life has been shaped by the cold-blooded though well-meaning, severity of her father’s strict regime of conduct. He lays down authoritarian rules and codes of conduct for herself and her brother Jaja that he claims are dictated by his godliness. However as the tale unfolds it gradually emerges that the father’s highly commendable values are inspired by fanaticism rather than by compassion. This is a difficult theme for any author to handle and it is a measure of Adichie’s mastery that she carries it off with extraordinary credibility and aplomb.
This work is filled with sharply drawn but economically outlined character sketches of both important as well as incidental characters. Key figures such as the central paternal figure Eugene and the tragic maternal figure Beatrice are defined by the close and deeply psychological observation of the central narrator Kambili. In fact the precocious abilities of the central protagonist are rendered credible by the way in which she explains each character’s impact on her own perceptions in a manner that suggests that she is truly a child who would attract empathy and concern from strangers. Her father’s hidden brutality is exposed by her even as she retains her deep attachment to, and love for, him in spite of clear evidence of his obsessive fanaticism.
This provides some of the most dramatic moments in the tale but in a manner that is neither sensational nor melodramatic. In her ability to render the profound distress generated by good intentions misplaced as the source of human desire Adichie proves to be an original thinker as well as an observer of social mores who is acutely aware of the dysfunctional elements in modern African communal living.
Among the most attractive of many attractive characterisations her portraits of Aunty Ifeoma, her father’s rebellious academic sister, and Father Amadi the young Catholic priest who seeks to liberalise the practice of the religion, stand out as individuals who help to enhance the experience of growing up for all the younger people with whom they interact. These form a counterweight to the overbearing and inflexible authoritarianism of the father and provide an opportunity for Kambili to imagine an alternative way of upbringing.
Ironically, even as she is experiencing this encounter with new values she cannot imagine being disobedient but uses the responses of her brother Jaja as the template for change. In a very subtle and profoundly believable way she signals this relationship right from the start of the work. Jaja’s rebellion becomes a leitmotif for adolescent rebellion while her own timidity is subverted by the emotional awakening and adolescent romanticism illustrated by her development of a crush on Father Amadi.
This is a work about relationships as much as it is a narrative of discovery. Among the most touching of the connective tales related here the spiritual break between tradition and modernity is encapsulated in the petty disenchantment with his own father, Papa Nnukwu, exhibited by Eugene. Against this conduct Adichie sets the contrasting love and respect for the old traditionalist exhibited not only by Aunty Ifeoma, but also by Father Amadi whose denominational missionary blandishments Papa Nnukwu resisted to the very end. Within this sub-plot Adichie has located the most profound echo of the Achebe-tinted moral tale, but she never loses sight of the challenge of the over-protective obsessiveness of her father as being the central dilemma of her own and her siblings’ and cousins’ adolescent years.
In handling this profound duality with maturity and delicacy she raises her debut novel above being simply a young person’s reflections and turns it into a meditation on contemporary events in post-civil war Nigeria. In fact an underlying theme echoed in the plight of a minor but profoundly integral character named Ade Coker, the editor of her father’s outspoken newspaper The Standard, helps to situate this tale in a particular era of Nigerian history. However this is not the element that raises the tale to its tragic relevance.
The final chapters of this work are unique in Nigerian literature so far both in their formal style and their prospective intent. It would be a betrayal of the author’s purpose if we gave away the details of this section of the novel in this review because it contains a fictional surprise so devastating and unexpected that to tell it would be to undermine the author’s intention.
Suffice it to say that it makes the experience of reading this novel extremely fulfilling and strengthens the central thematic purpose of the work as a revelatory exercise in adolescent tragedy totally believable. This is an important achievement for the author coming as we now know it did at the start of a prolific and fundamentally strong professional writing career.
Since the publication of ‘Purple Hibiscus’ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has lived up the promise that it showed, but its own importance has not diminished in comparison with her subsequent novels because it was an effective and fully realised masterpiece produced by a precocious talent that has matured. For this reason if for no other the Rainbow Book Club’s decision to revive interest in it nearly a decade after its publication is a welcome and highly relevant decision.
