Purple Hibiscus

CC0 Creative Commons

Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Set in a restive Nigeria, where a coup is first impending and then happening, where gas and electricity outages are commonplace, where the students at universities begin to gather themselves into protest marches and riots, fifteen-year-old Kambili lives in her family’s well-appointed compound. There, while sheltered from the unpredictability of the landscape writ large, she, her brother Jaja, and her mother are subject instead to the volatility of Eugene, Kambili’s Papa, who controls the lives of his family with rod, ritual, and unbending religiosity.

Papa is beloved and respected by the entire community. Unfailingly generous with his wealth, he also publishes the country’s last newspaper that is willing to risk telling the truth, taking it underground when it is no longer safe to publish openly. He is also a rigid and dogmatic Catholic, and enforces his strict, anglicized, anti-African brand of religion upon his family through any type of control he deems necessary. While published prior to the birth of the organized #MeToo Movement, Purple Hibiscus is nonetheless in this movement’s orbit, a portrait from the inside out of the ways in which a man can maintain public support and respect even while abusing and controlling those he’s with behind closed doors.

Adichie constructs a novel that is tautly woven, each word and phrase situated just so to simultaneously communicate Kambili’s anxiety-ridden inner world while also showcasing her external, day-to-day life, from her daily schedule, set for her by Papa, to school, church, and the family’s yearly visit to Papa’s ancestral village, Abba, at Christmastime. In Abba they visit Papa’s demonized, “pagan” father, who still worships in the old ways, and see their vibrant Aunty Ifeoma, who invites Kambili and Jaja to visit her and their cousins in nearby Nsukka for a few days.

It is in Nsukka where windows into the lives of others begin to crack open for Kambili and Jaja, showing them concretely that there are other ways for families to operate beyond schedules, dominance, abuse, and control; that there are other ways of experiencing spirituality and the divine beyond the oppressive form of Catholicism they practice at home. A gorgeously constructed novel that somehow invites reflection even while being impossible to put down, Purple Hibiscus masterfully represents the forces of oppression and rebellion, rigidity and transformation on scales both intimate and national.

Subjects this book contains which some readers may be sensitive to: child abuse, spousal abuse, death, imprisonment.