Family life in shades of purple
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
2004, Fourth Estate
288 pages
Reviewed by Tony Simoes da Silva
"Things started to fall apart at home when my brother, Jaja, did not go to communion and Papa flung his missal across the room and broke the figurines on the étagčre". Thus begins Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel, Purple Hibiscus, her first work of fiction. Nominated for the prestigious 2004 Orange Prize, it is up against a number of novels by some of the most distinguished names in contemporary writing by women, such as Canadian Margaret Atwood, British Rose Tremain, South African Gillian Slovo and Australian Shirley Hazzard. The last title on the list is by Andrea Levy, a thought-provoking novel by a British woman born of Jamaican parents.
Purple Hibiscus is not shy of prevarication either, and in its three hundred odd pages the novel packs in a dense and intellectually challenging story that broaches some of the larger themes that preoccupy people anywhere in the world - life and death, the ambivalent meaning of familial love, domestic violence, religion, histor
| "The casual manner in which the visible signs of violence are introduced is one of the ways in which Adichie challenges her readers to read on before passing judgement" |
Adichie’s novel tells the story of Kambili and Jaja, and of their parents, referred throughout as Papa and Mama. In the world Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie creates in Purple Hibiscus Papa is a wealthy and influential businessman, the publisher of Nigeria’s most reputable newspapers, the Standard. A respected community leader, known to his people through a range of activities and roles and his generous philanthropy, Papa looms large as one of the central figures in the narrative. He is a devout Catholic, a man whose unwavering faith determines everything he does in life. The words ‘Thanks be to God’ characterise much of his dealings with his family and the community at large; indeed, outside his obsessive biblical readings and quotations, and the frequent prayer sessions the whole family is compelled to attend, Papa mostly is a silent man. Rather than words, it is through actions that he lives his life. He gives generously to the local Catholic parish, supports myriad social organisations and is responsible for educating vast numbers of children in the parish. His own family are afforded the very best in material and intellectual comfort, surrounded by the material trappings of extreme wealth and attending top schools run by the Catholic Church, naturally. Everything in Papa’s world is dictated by his Catholic beliefs. His daily routine constitutes of an endless round of masses, novenas and sundry religious rituals that he packs into a fairly busy public life. His wife and children live his Catholicism almost by osmosis.
Not surprisingly, then, when things begin to fall apart, it is essentially as a result of Papa’s actions and of his zealous faith in a demanding and cruel God whom he worships with fanatic devotion. That the novel should open with a missal being used in such a sacrilegious manner, and that the consequences of that action should lead to so much damage, epitomises one of the ideas at the heart of this novel. The clash between the religious and the idolatrous frames much of Papa’s behaviour. In Papa’s world there is little time for "gods of wood and stone" (47), and the shattering of the glass figurines Mama kept on the étagčre is unlikely to have caused him much distress. Besides, they can easily be replaced, for there is always plenty of money. Significantly, the novel seems to set out a distinction between religious fanaticism and religious faith; as such Papa’s actions cannot be attributed to Catholicism, rather to his myopic interpretation of the Bible.
Mama, by contrast, is a quiet woman, concerned with the wellbeing of her family and most of all, of her husband. In a recent interview on Radio 4, Adichie suggested that while she had ‘intended’ some thematic concerns in the novel, she was very conscious of the risk of producing a didactic narrative. Mama’s shadowy presence, her pathetic forbearance in the face of daily physical and psychological abuse by her husband and the novel’s ambivalent treatment of this issue demonstrate her success; for while it is possible to point out Papa’s obvious patriarchal authoritarianism, and to identify Mama as a victim because of her gender, it is also pretty simplistic. Indeed, the way both Mama and Kambili insist in loving Papa despite the constant ill treatment, often bordering on torture, illustrates the way Purple Hibiscus ‘teaches’ by allusion rather than by direct instruction. In matters of love, familial or matrimonial, too often little is ever black and white.
The novel takes its title from the flowers that grow on the hibiscus shrubs in the family’s compound, in the town of Enugu. The shrubs were taken from Aunt Ifeoma’s garden as cuttings, planted in Enugu by Kambili and Jaja. In the course of the novel they will have taken root in Enugu, and began to add to the riot of colour and scent that characterises the family’s vast property. At one level they symbolise the energy and joie de vivre associated with Aunt Ifeoma and her family, her strength and passion for learning and loving. But they also stand as a crucial marker of the momentous shift in the family’s fortunes. It is at Aunt Ifeoma’s that both Kambili and Jaja undergo some of the profound transformations that will see them go back to Enugu and, in Jaja’s case, refuse to take communion upon his return to the family home. His decision drives Papa to throw the missal, and then things begin to fall apart. Incidentally, echoing as they do the title of one of the best-known works of Nigerian literature, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958), the opening lines of Purple Hibiscus at once pay homage to one of Nigeria’s literary giants while self-consciously signalling its ‘Nigerianness’. Not unlike Achebe’s work, Purple Hibiscus is written primarily in standard English, liberally interspersed with Igbo words, and, on a couple of occasions, uses Nigerian English.
The colour purple plays a number of important functions throughout the narrative. Most of all, it is the colour of bruised blood, of which there is much here. If I had to identify one single theme above all others in Purple Hibiscus it is that of domestic violence. Mama’s frequent ‘black eyes’, along the brutal beatings and acts of torture she and her children endure at the hands of Papa must certainly stand as the key memory in any reader’s mind once we turn the last page. Purplish in colour, too, is the foetus, and in the course of the story Mama loses not one but two babies, both as a direct consequence of Papa’s unspeakably brutal beatings. Throughout it all, the family remains together, doing all they can to hide the true nature of their various abrasions and lesions; pretending that their family life is no different from that of their friends and neighbours. Indeed, the first overt sign of the violence Papa regularly inflects on his wife does not occur until page 32, and on the whole family on page 102. That said, the novel’s opening lines already hint at some of the simmering tensions at the heart of this seemingly perfect family. Nevertheless, the casual manner in which the visible signs of this violence are introduced is one of the ways in which Adichie challenges her readers to read on before passing judgement. This is a deeply disturbing narrative, telling a story while posing some very serious questions about human behaviour.
Most controversially, then, the novel never actually attacks domestic violence as such; although it becomes increasingly clear that it is critical of it, this is conveyed through a complex and often contradictory number of narrative threads. Partly, the difficulties the reader is faced with stem from the fact that the story is told through the eyes of Kambili, a young teenage girl whose unquestioning love for her father prevents her from seeking to understand his behaviour. Because we see the world through Kambili’s eyes, we, like her, are left in a difficult position about what to make of Papa’s cruelty, or of the way the family seems to nurture it by refusing to name the evil within their midst. At times her devotion to Papa almost makes her appear intellectually stunted. This becomes especially obvious when we are eventually introduced to her cousin, Amaka, the daughter of Aunt Ifeoma, Papa’s sister, a university teacher. Unlike Kambili, Amaka is well spoken, confident, often irreverent and mature beyond her age. She speaks to adults on the same level, and repeatedly challenges much of what Kambili takes for granted as the norm. Proud of her Nigerian heritage yet totally at ease with its modern elements, Amaka represents hope and possibility, and perhaps even the ‘Nigerian woman’, if such a category could be made to convey anything worthwhile.
By telling the story through Kambili’s voice - insecure, fearful, and lacking in maturity - Adichie draws the reader ever closer to adopting the same position as Mama, Kambili and Jaja. Aware of their suffering we are seduced by Kambili’s constant mentioning of Papa’s limitless generosity, and of what she sees as his compassionate love, into believing him to be a much more complex man than he really is. Indeed, although he objects to what he sees as their heathen ways, Papa even supports his sister and, if with greater reservations, their father, Papa-Nnukwu. Adichie’s narrative frame ensures that readers too are forced to acquiesce in their complicity. Soon we know as much about the family’s horrific domestic life as they do - about Mama’s abortions; of Jaja’s deformed little finger, on which Papa slammed a door shut as punishment for ‘second-best’ school results; of Jaja’s and Kambili’s scalded feet for associating with their paternal grandfather - but with them we, too, condone Papa’s sadistic brutalisation of his family through the simple act of continuing to read. Like Kambili we are forced to juxtapose Papa’s evil side to his loving alter ego. It is a measure of the complexity of the novel, however, that by remaining with the novel we could be seen to lend our support to the family’s increasingly beleaguered existence. By the time Papa dies, in a shocking twist that keeps the plot ticking until the very end, we are made to feel that our persistence has paid off: Mama, Kambili and Jaja will undergo one more experience of brutalisation but they are finally allowed to live their lives fully and freely. Out of the destructive love that assails Kambili, Jaja, Papa and Mama’s lives, emerges a dénouement that speaks a better and a happier future.
Purple Hibiscus has as its background stage the fratricidal world of Nigerian politics, with coups and counter-coups, and the violence endured by ordinary Nigerians as they are forced to make sense of complex political conditions. While focusing with microscopic detail on the story of one single family and their existence in contemporary Nigeria, the novel sets the stage for a broader examination of the political and historical worlds within which they live. It contrasts the loud and visibly dangerous world of public politics and the apparently peaceful world of domestic politics, which turns out to be equally menacing and destructive. In part the novel could be said to offer a eulogy to those whom the world of postcolonial Nigerian politics has failed, symbolised perhaps most clearly by Aunt Ifeoma and her children. Highly educated, conversant in the ways both of traditional and modern Nigeria, able to live in the present without letting go of the importance of cultural rituals, Aunt Ifeoma and her children offer a direct contrast to Papa’s paranoid predilection for the foreign, his pathological rejection of the local and his children’s awkward behaviour.
Aunt Ifeoma comes to symbolise the strength of Nigerian women, the resilience of the Nigerian people, and their indomitable ability to fight on in spite of the endless hurdles thrown in their paths. At the end of the novel, fired from her post because of her outspoken views on the corrupt ways of the un-elected government led by the military, she opts for leaving the country, to settle in the USA. By having Aunt Ifeoma join the ‘brain drain’ that has seen thousands of the most capable Nigerians settle elsewhere in the world, Adichie voices her anger about the current state of affairs in Nigeria, but perhaps more generally in postcolonial Africa. Indeed, as I read her attack on the tradition of revolving-door dictatorships that has characterised Nigerian politics over the past 20 odd years especially, I was reminded of another recent text that addresses similar issues in the broader setting of Africa as a whole. Purple Hibiscus adopts a milder tone than Ahmadou Kourouma’s Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote (2003), but they share in the sense of angry frustration at the way African politicians are failing the people, failing especially to provide them with the barest of necessities: education, electricity, running water, healthcare.
In Kambili Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has created a fascinating voice. A thoughtful but extremely naive individual, Kambili takes us into the intimate life experiences of her family, Papa, Mama and Jaja, her brother. Through a meticulous attention to detail and controlled use of language, Adichie conveys at once the broad picture of the family and through it of the nation’s horror, as well as their most tender moments of love, of beauty, of intimacy, of pain. Rather than a ‘large canvas’ novel, Purple Hibiscus focuses on the small things in everyday life, the banality of living and loving, of dreaming a better tomorrow and of daring to ask the big questions. This is literature at its best: creating a world of fiction into which we are irresistibly drawn whilst lifting up a mirror to the society on which it feeds.
Tony Simoes da Silva teaches at James Cook University in Australia
