Book Review

Oseloka Obaze*

selonnes@aol.com

 Thursday 4 December 2003

Purple Hibiscus

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

(ISBN: 1-56512-387-5; Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2003; pp. 307; Price, $23.95)

(Available at Barnes & Nobles or: Algonquin Books, at: www.algonquin.com)

“Two thumbs up.  Purple Hibiscus enchants despite being a tragic riddle of a life devoted simultaneously to altruism and mayhem.  Very well rendered!”

“Roses are red.  Violets are blue.  Nigeria’s gold is black and Purple Hibiscus her most enchanting flower.”  Had Nigerian-born Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie started her debut novel, Purple Hibiscus with those lines, it would have been no less enchanting, than her universally recognizable “things started to fall apart at home…..” .  I am still uncertain as to whether her opener was coincidental or the brilliant ploy by a first timer, to borrow a line and leaf from a compatriot, master, and perhaps an idol – the great novelist Chinua Achebe.

Purple Hibiscus is set in contemporary Nigeria. The book mirrors the enchanting beauty and richness of the country without shying away from also capturing its trauma, tragedy, desperation, resignation, and political tribulations.  Purple Hibiscus, like Nigeria, is a paradox.  To read Purple Hibiscus 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 Ms. Adichie.  This is a book about Nigeria, its culture, extended family system, human desires, more so those of adolescents, and the clash of African and Western norms.  It has been rightly dubbed “a subtle study of family life and political complexity in Nigeria.”  Adichie’s choice of Purple Hibiscus as the title of this emotive book remains a curious one.  Perhaps, given the tension in the book, the title is meant to seduce, encrust and serve as embrocation for the difficult subjects, tough love, turmoil, alienation, miasma and death-by-poisoning that engulfs the well to do Igbo family of the fifteen-year old protagonist, Kambili Achike.

Kambili sets the stage for this consequently elegiac book.  “I lay in bed after mama left and let my mind rake through the past, through the years when Jaja and Mama and I spoke more with our spirits than with our lips.  Until Nsukka. Nsukka started it all….”   Nsukka might have started it, but this is a story set in Enugu, a beautiful city nestled in the valleys of the Milliken Hills in Eastern Nigeria.  It is also a story of modern Nigeria, which one of its leaders once averred to its only problem being how to manage it prosperity.  It is also the story of a nation that has fallen on hard times, bad governance and pervasive corruption - all of which are craftily and effortlessly captured in this book.

Eugene Achike, Kambili’s father is a driven and complex man, who trashes and put to lie, the conventional wisdom that charity begins at home.  A very well to do, pious, and devout, if not fanatical Christian, he shows more care, love and compassion to outsiders than to his own family, which must exist under his draconian religious dictates.  For Kambili and Jaja, her seventeen-year old brother, it is clearly uncertain and worrisome, as to which aspect of life was worse – living under the suffocating atmosphere of a brutal military junta and their anti-politics or under an ultraistic and unbending father.  Nothing Kambili did was a reasonable response to her father’s unreasonable expectations.  But a visit to her Aunty Ifeoma’s house in Nsukka changed it all for Kambili, who until then battered into the gray realm between stuttering and being catatonic by her father’s despotic tendencies.  Such despotism came in different flavors and colors, including purple, the metaphoric color that bred the spirit of freedom and rebellion.

In the opening chapter of Purple Hibiscus, all hell broke loose when Jaja fails to go to communion on the lame excuse that “the wafer gives me bad breath”.  An irate Papa flung his heavy missal at him wrecking the family étagère.  His holy anger, as it turns out, was directed at Jaja’s near heresy of calling the sacred communion a wafer and his gull to answer back so irreverently.  Before then and from thereon, everyday life for Kambili, Jaja, and their mom was a nightmare.  When the stage is set for all sorts of extreme confrontation and agonizing reprisals, none of which makes Kambili’s life nor that of her brother and mother any easier, enter an angel – Aunty Ifeoma – a cosmopolitan and the only one capable of standing up to Eugene.  But the more the Aunty Ifeoma tried to protect Kambili, the more the poor girl drew the ennui of her mindlessly despotic father.  At one low point, he gives her the shock treatment of scalding her feet with hot water – an obvious but wicked attempt to acquaint her with an earthly sense of hell fire.  Her crime – visiting with a heathen, who was also her paternal grandfather.  Such corporal punishment that bordered on child abuse neither fazed nor elicited any form of contrition from Papa.  

Purple Hibiscus is a metaphor of sorts.  This riveting tale of a near dysfunctional family, which ends in a tragedy, puts your emotions on the edge.  Metaphorically, “the missal flung at the étagère, the shattered figurines and brittle air” in time, became reality and represented a dissembling and shattered family and things falling apart.  It is a 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 was a prayerful churchgoer who believed in confessions and penance, but was fanatically unforgiving in his belief, that it was “sinful for a woman to wear trousers”.  He also had 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.

Purple Hibiscus elicits anger, sympathy, and curiosity at the same time.  Kambili’s father, Eugene was the quintessential man of the people – who his Igbo tribe readily recognized by dubbing him Omelora – one who fends for the public.  Ironically, for a man of unquestionable generosity, the people closest to him, including his aged an ailing father are all alienated, if not abandoned.  Here was man so self-effacing, that when his publicly acknowledged humanitarian disposition won him an international human rights award, he refused for his photo to be carried on the front page of the newspaper he owned.  Not one for self-adulation, he ensured that the same paper, The Standard, despite the obvious losses it would incur, was the only paper that was able to stand up to a corrupt Nigerian government.  For such courage, its fearless editor, Ade Coker was murdered with a parcel bomb allegedly sent to him by the military Head of State.  What was most inconceivable of Eugene Achike, was how a man whose life was so devoutly religious and altruistic, would in private prove a monster.  Such a rogue and schizophrenic disposition beggars conventional wisdom – but in actuality, is not totally rare most societies, nor in contemporary Nigeria, or for that matter, in Kambili’s Igbo tribe.

There is also a historical angle to this book.  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 lampoons a nation that wallows in 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.”  Purple Hibiscus pokes funs at contemporary Nigeria, its corruption, and egregious complicity through the code of silence, when it delves into the many things no one talks about.  “Huge checks we have written to judges, policemen and prison guards” and “anonymous donations to disabled veterans from the civil war” (presumably by rich but circumspect Igbo men).  There was clash of civilization too, about the conflict between traditional and imported Western religions, as personified by Papa-Nnukwu and his son Eugene.  Whereas both parted ways on matters of native customs and religion, they ironically both prayed to the same Chineke-God, in their different ways, with each using different symbols as means for intercession.

Amidst these dichotomies, there were pockets of hope and redeeming characters.  There was Aunty Ifeoma the gregarious single parent and lecturer, who stood up to Eugene and to her university’s malleable authorities.  And Ade Coker, the incorruptible and fearless editor of The Standard, whose scathing editorials caused the military government great discomfiture, and Fr. Amadi, who went beyond the call of his pastoral duties to offer succor and friendship to those around him.  There were also, Kimbili’s teenage cousins, Amaka, Obiora, and Chima, unspoiled, grounded, precocious, but always unassuming and loving.  And hope, about “ people who think we cannot rule ourselves because a few times we tried, we failed, as if the others who rule themselves today got it right the first time”.

Apart from delving into the mores of the Nigerian society, Purple Hibiscus joins the fray of the topical but controversial debate about celibacy within the Catholic Church.  Deftly, Adichie leads the reader on and into the presumptuous belief that the relation between Kambili and Fr. Amadi was more than a platonic.  Even Kambili herself, who obviously has a crush on Fr. Amadi, shared the same belief until she uttered those irreligious but memorable, words “I love you.”  In return, she elicits not even a secondary romantic interest, but a dismissive understanding from the priest, which changed everything but was compassionate enough not to vilify her love.  But then, the celibacy debate peaks, when Amaka reveals to Kambili, that “Obiora say you must be having sex, or something close to sex, with Fr. Amadi.”  Nonplussed, Kambili did not react or dwell on the subject, thus leading Amaka to suggest, “Maybe when we are in the university you will join me in agitating for optional celibacy in the priesthood?”  “Or maybe fornication should be permitted all priest once in a while, say once a month.”  The celibacy debate is inconclusive, quite unlike the cause of the death of Eugene Achike.  Of both, Kambili had her views.

In Purple Hibiscus Adichie does immense honor to the Igbo language by her deft and unapologetic usage of translated and untranslated idioms (no glossary).  Her direct Igbo words and translations where used, are well laid out for emphasis, in a way that only an Igbo speaking person will fully appreciate.  But above and beyond this, Adichie writes with the prodigious ease of a veteran, that belies her twenty-six years of age.  Her flowing prose style is smooth, elegant, endlessly seamless, and like her characters, solidly crafted.  This splendid debut earns Adichie my two thumbs up.  Purple Hibiscus enchants despite being a tragic riddle of a life devoted simultaneously to altruism and mayhem.  It is very well rendered!”