A review of the political and social power structures challenged in Purple Hibiscus
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a Nigerian-born writer who is being called “the most prominent” of a “procession of critically acclaimed young [international] authors [who] is succeeding in attracting a new generation of readers to African literature.” (Wikipedia) She has received numerous awards and accolades for her work.
Author of four books
1. Purple Hibiscus: hailed as “one of the best novels to come out of Africa in years” (Baltimore Sun ), with “prose as lush as the Nigerian landscape that it powerfully evokes” (The Boston Globe), and awarded the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book
2. Half a Yellow Sun: awarded the Orange Prize for Fiction
3. That Thing Around Your Neck: “a book of twelve dazzling stories that explore the ties that bind men and women, parents and children, Africa and the United States.” (Chimamanda.com)
4. Americanah: A personal favorite because of my love for sociology. It was the “winner of the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, one of the New York Times’s Ten Best Books of the Year; winner of the Chicago Tribune 2013 Heartland Prize for Fiction; an NPR “Great Reads” Book, a Washington Post Notable Book, a Seattle Times Best Book, an Entertainment Weekly Top Fiction Book, a Newsday Top 10 Book, and a Goodreads Best of the Year pick.” (Ibid.)
Esteemed TED Talk lecturer
- The Danger of a Single Story in which she says, “Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity....The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.” This lecture gave fuel to my desire to go back to school and pursue opportunities to be an advocate for diverse stories.
- We Should All Be Feminists (published in 2014 as an ebook short): “Adichie offers readers a unique definition of feminism for the twenty-first century—one rooted in inclusion and awareness. She shines a light not only on blatant discrimination, but also the more insidious, institutional behaviors that marginalize women around the world…offering an artfully nuanced explanation of why the gender divide is harmful for women and men, alike.” (Amazon.com)
How Adichie Wrote to Power In Purple Hibiscus
Adichie tells the story of a Nigerian family under the oppression of a fanatically religious father. The story is told through the sensitive eyes of fifteen-year-old Kambili. The wealthy and privileged family consists of father, Eugene; mother, Beatrice; elder son, Jaja; and younger daughter Kambili. They are members of the Igbo tribe and live in Enugu. Despite his tyrannical rule over his family, Eugene is known an upstanding businessman and kind-hearted, generous philanthropist who gives to widows, pays tuition for over one hundred poor children, and funds the efforts of his local Catholic church.
At home, however, he is a strict and abusive disciplinarian insisting on being part of every happening within his compound from the children’s hour-by-hour daily schedule to having the last word on all the home’s décor. His uses his authority to demand what he considers absolute perfection and righteousness from his wife and children. Any questioning or failure to meet up to his standards is met with physical punishment. Therefore, his family lives in silent, joyless fear day after day, until Eugene’s outspoken, larger-than-life sister, Ifeoma, convinces him to allow his children to come stay for a while with her and her children, Amaka, Obiora, and Chima.
In Ifeoma’s humble flat in the university town of Nsukka, Kambili and Jaja encounter love, joy, and freedom they have never seen. And yes, Ifeoma and her family are Catholics as well. Kambili takes in all this with jaw-dropped awe, trying to reconcile the marked differences in the home she is growing up in and the home she is visiting. How can two people from the same family be so different?
I relished in Adichie use of Ifeoma’s character to speak to power. Ifeoma was so deliciously incorrigible! As a type of political power, she was used as a means to belittle and put tyranny in its place. Oh, I just loved the way Ifeoma spoke to Eugene and just blew up his little iron-fisted image. She broke him down in his home at his family’s dinner table, which is where he had such strict expectations for etiquette and decorum. She blew up his judgments against his “heathen” father. She made all of his religious allocations seem so trivial, immature, and inconsequential, right in front of his family. Kambili could hardly believe the tone Ifeoma took with her father, whom she severely feared. I think the juxtaposed dynamic there was my favorite in the book. And Papa Eugene bowed. Every. Time.
Being set in a time of social and political unrest, this book is wrapped in symbolism. Kambili and Jaja represent the country of Nigeria. Father Eugene represents colonization, and Aunty Ifeoma represents democracy. Adichie explores through both Kambili’s and Jaja’s narratives how Nigeria had been rendered fruitless and lacking national identity under colonization, how it has been left to adolescent-like leadership since, and how too idealistic democracy might be for post-colonial Nigeria—they must forge a new and unique national identity. Adichi does not provide a neat ending; instead she leaves it to the reader to draw his or her own conclusions about how Kambili, Jaja, and Nigeria will face the future.
Purple Hibiscus provides is an expansive look at an African, specifically Nigerian, family and the tug of war between tribalism and colonization, Christianity and indigenous faith, old world and new world, oppression and freedom, overbearing patriarchy and the modern African woman, and so much more. It is a book that helps break stereotypes and helps to overcome the danger of a single story. Adichie packs it full of symbolism using intricate family dynamics as a metaphor for Nigeria as it fights its way back from tyranny to positive self-government. It is chock full of audaciously rich and beautiful language as only this author can do. It does get tough in some places, because the father in the story is a strict disciplinarian (abusive, in all truth), but it was not unpalatable. Every scene and every word play are there for a reason.
Yes, you should read this book as well to keep expanding and deepening your view of the world and its people beyond what you're used to. I loved this book.