This is a staggeringly good novel. It is a vividly imagined, adult, clearly written, extraordinarily powerful, tremendously moving but – be warned! – deeply harrowing read.
Kambili Achike
Purple Hibiscus is narrated by Kambili Achike (with the emphasis on the first syllable, KAMbili). She is the chronically shy, sensitive 15-year-old daughter of a father who is a tyrannical wife beater, control freak, Catholic zealot and bully, a terrifying domestic tyrant named Eugene Achike (we only learn the family surname on page 48).
The book immerses us straightaway into a household admired for its cleanliness and godliness by the Eugene’s colleagues at the factories he owns and the newspaper he’s proprietor of (the Standard) – and by his co-religionists at the Church of Saint Agnes (not least Father Benedict, who lets him be senior celebrant and singles him out for mention in virtually every sermon). Everyone looks up to the public man, employer, philanthropist and pillar of the church.
But behind closed doors, Papa runs every detail of his household with obsessive strictness, timetabling every minute of his children’s, wife’s and servants’ time, expecting strict adherence to precise daily routines such as the 20-minute-long grace before meals, the prayers after meals, and a whole lot more.
Anybody who infringes any of the household’s countless regulations incurs, first the frosty silence of the father, then the ominously soft voice, and then the sudden outburst of violence, slappings, beatings and whippings. The result is that Kambili grows up in an atmosphere of strained tension you can cut like a knife and which Adichie depicts with asphyxiating power.
Silence hung over the table like the blue-black clouds in the middle of rainy season. (p.32)
She sat still for a long, tense moment, as still as Papa was, as still as we all were. (p.98)
For her entire young life Kambili has watched her mother, Beatrice, small and slight and totally cowed, quietly obey the master, gently limping around. Quite regularly he gives her a black eye, leaving it ‘the black-purple shade of an overripe avocado’ (p.190). From time to time her husband, much bigger and stronger than her, beats her unconscious. Then the two children know without needing to be told that it is their job to fetch cloths and water and clean up any bloodstains left on the bedroom or hall.
To say that Kambili and her brother, Jaja (that’s his nickname, his real name’s Chukwuka, p.143), are continually walk on eggshells is an radical understatement. Every memory, scene and dialogue is fraught with menace which grips the reader by the throat.
Love-fear
What gives the novel its twisted power is the way Kambili is both terrified of, but also absolutely in love with, her terrifying father. She wants to make her Papa proud, she wants it to be her who comes up with just the right religious reference, or pious platitude (‘I wished I had thought to say that’), and so earns the tyrant’s momentary ‘love.’ Desperate for his approval.
I wanted to make Papa proud, to do as well as he’d done. I needed him to touch the back of my neck and tell me that I was fulfilling God’s purpose. I needed him to hug me close and say that to whom much is given, much is also expected. I needed him to smile at me, in that way that lit up his face, that warmed something inside me. (p.39)
When Papa hands her the cup of tea Mama has just made for him, so Kambili can take a love sip, she does so even though the hot tea burns her tongue.
I held it with both hands, took a sip of the Lipton tea with sugar and milk, and placed it back on the saucer. ‘Thank you, Papa,’ I said, feeling the love burn my tongue.
So there is a very powerful conflict, not so much love-hate because she never hates her father; she reveres him. It’s more a case of love-fear. Fearful adoration. Here’s the adoration:
It sounded important, the way he said it, but then most of what Papa said sounded important. He liked to lean back and look upwards when he talked, as though he were searching for something in the air. I would focus on his lips, the movement, and sometimes I forgot myself, sometimes I wanted to stay like that forever, listening to his voice, to the important things he said.
And here’s the fear:
He knew. I wanted to shift and rearrange myself on the bed, as if that would hide what I had just done. I wanted to search his eyes to know what he knew, how he had found out about the painting. But I did not, could not. Fear. I was familiar with fear, yet each time I felt it, it was never the same as the other times, as though it came in different flavours and colours. (p.196)
Maybe as a result of the oppressive atmosphere Kambili reveals, from time to time, that she has a nervous stutter.
- I stopped to take a breath because I knew I would stutter even more if I didn’t.
- I looked away and inhaled deeply so that I would not start to stutter. (p.72)
- I went over to join them, starting to pace my breathing so that I would not stutter. (p.141)
- I took a deep breath and prayed I would not stutter. (p.239)
And she gives a description of what a stutter feels like:
How did Jaja do it? How could he speak so easily? Didn’t he have the same bubbles of air in his throat, keeping the words back, letting out only a stutter at best? (p.145)
The bond with her brother and fellow victim, Jaja, runs very deep:
It was only when I was alone with Jaja that the bubbles in my throat let my words come out. (p.155)
And gives a name to the way she and her brother communicate through looks, too terrified to verbalise anything in front of their father, or even if he’s not in the room in case he’s hovering nearby. She calls it their ‘eye language’ (p.108) which is later called, in Igbo, an asusu anya (p.305).
And it’s only puzzled feedback from her cousin Amaka that makes her realise that she whispers. She has been brought up so that everything she says, she says in a whisper (p.117).
Examples of Papa’s brutal corporal punishment
One day Kambili is late getting to the schoolgate at the end of the day. When the driver tells her father, he slaps her on both cheeks at the same time, leaving marks on her cheeks and a ringing in her ears which last for days (p.51). She is familiar with the sound her father’s hand makes slapping Jaja’s face, ‘like a heavy book falling from a library shelf in school. And then he would reach across and slap me on the face with the casualness of reaching for the pepper shaker’ (p.69).
When Eugene comes across Kambili eating a little cereal to accompany taking Panadol for stomach cramps of her period, just ten minutes before they are due to attend morning Mass, he undoes his belt and whips not only Kambili but his wife and son for aiding her sin. (p.102)
We learn that when he was ten, Jaja missed two answers in his catechism test and so, when he got home, Papa took him up to his room and deliberately broke the little finger of his left hand (p.145).
When they were small, Papa made them go and choose the stick which he would then beat them with (p.193).
Bastards can be heroes, too
This is compounded by another fairly straightforward duality, which is that her father is, in fact, in public, a brave man. ‘Brave’ because the main narrative gets going just as there is a military coup in Nigeria and Eugene, wealthy from his business interests, also owns what is made out to be more or less the only independent newspaper in Nigeria, the Standard.
The point being that when representatives of the new regime come calling and offer Eugene bribes to come over to their side, he sends them packing. When the editor of the Standard is abducted and held prisoner by the army for a week, undergoing torture, Eugene works behind the scenes to get him released and reinstated, and gives the editor his full support to carry on printing critical articles and exposés of the new rulers.
In other words, he is a genuinely brave and principled man; a man whose devout Catholic faith means that he genuinely believes in God’s Law and an afterlife and so has the courage and convictions to stand up to the military rulers he despises. And his stand offers succour to millions of others who disapprove of the regime. He is, actually, a brave and principled man. And a domestic tyrant.
Advantages of a child narrator
Solving the puzzle
A child overhears things in a house which it doesn’t understand. The adult reader enjoys the pleasure of piecing together what’s happening from the fragments the child observes.
Irony
This is connected to irony, specifically the occasions when the child narrator is still puzzled but the adult knows what’s going on, so the text has two levels of awareness running in parallel.
Wealth and poverty
There’s a sort of irony, or two levels, working in the way that Kambini doesn’t realise how wealthy and privileged she is. How could she? Kambini has been raised in a very wealthy family, her father the owner of numerous factories and a newspaper. They live in a gated compound with servants including a cook (Sisi), a driver (Kevin), a gatekeeper (Adamu) and a gardener. She goes to a very expensive (Catholic) private school (Daughters of the Immaculate Heart) where she is teased by the other girls for being so quiet and meek.
It’s probably not irony at all, I just mean the way we are from time to time reminded that the entire psychodrama of the novel is happening in an extremely wealthy, gated, privileged environment, completely cut off from the everyday realities of Nigerian life as lived by 99% of the population – as on the occasion early in the novel where she goes with her mother to the Enugu market, and a lot later, when Father Amadi takes her to Nsukka market to have her cornrows done.
Innocence
The way the story is narrated by a child can be very moving because the child’s innocence and sweetness keeps breaking through despite the terrible domestic environment she inhabits.
An example is the way that Kambini is rarely allowed out on her own but when she and her mother go shopping to the city’s market, she is always moved by the extreme poverty she sees there. A mad woman is rolling in the mud, her wrap undone to reveal her white underwear, and Kambini has a pure, fairy tale desire to run over and tie up her wrap and wash her muddy face and save her (p.44). She wants to save herself.
Clarity of observation
And the child narrator just notices things, dwells on details which an adult would be in too much of a hurry to observe or would overcharge with meaning.
Mama gave me the Panadol tablets, still in the silver-colored foil, which crinkled as I opened it. (p.101)
This is one of the basic functions of having a child narrator, to achieve a certain artlessness in the narrative style. I noticed how many times the text has sentences starting ‘I watched’, indicating Kambili’s role as acute but naive observer:
I watched Mama as we walked. Till then I had not noticed how drawn she looked. Her skin, usually the smooth brown of groundnut paste, looked like the liquid had been sucked out of it, ashen, like the colour of cracked harmattan soil.
I watched the sisters as we sang. Only the Nigerian Reverend Sisters sang, teeth flashing against their dark skins. The white Reverend Sisters stood with arms folded, or lightly touching the glass rosary beads that dangled at their waists, carefully watching to see that every student’s lips moved.
I watched Mama walk toward the kitchen, in her limping gait. Her braided hair was piled into a net that tapered to a golf-ball-like lump at the end, like a Father Christmas hat. She looked tired.
I watched their lips move as they spoke; Mama’s bare lips were pale compared to Aunty Ifeoma’s, covered in a shiny bronze lipstick. (p.74)
The Achebe influence
Quoting Chinua
The very first sentence contains a reference to the father of Nigerian literature, Chinua Achebe:
Things started to fall apart at home when my brother, Jaja, did not go to communion and my father flung his heavy missal across the room and broke the figurines on the étagère. (Opening sentence, p.3)
The reference being to Achebe’s first and most famous novel, which was titled ‘Things Fall Apart’. In the back of this paperback edition of the novel the publishers have included a profile of Adichie in which she mentions that, when just starting out as a writer, she sent some work to Achebe for his consideration and was amazed and heartened when he bothered to not only reply, but give her heartfelt encouragement.
Living in Chinua’s house
In fact Adichie’s Wikipedia page tells us that, when she was small, Adichie lived in a house on the campus of the University of Nigeria which had previously been occupied by Achebe. From her earliest years she had a kind of physical as well as literary attachment to him.
Obviously the 1990s setting is very unlike the setting of Achebe’s classic novels of Igbo tribal life (Things Fall Apart), or of the years just around independence in the 1960s (A Man of the People). Another obvious difference is that it’s about a schoolgirl not a young man, as most of Achebe’s fictions are.
Useless fathers, angry sons
But more than one scene reminded me very strongly of Achebe’s works. There’s an extended scene where the tyrant father Eugene berates Kambili for not working hard enough, upset that she only came second in her class at school. He proceeds to lecture her about how he had none of her advantages, nobody paid for his schooling, he had to walk 8 miles to school his father, Papa-Nnuku, was a pagan who worshipped fetishes and mocked his son’s Christian faith.
All this reminded me of the central figure of Things Fall Apart, Okonkwo, who also worked his way up to eminence despite being the son of a poor, useless father. Okonkwo, like Eugene, then projected the strict self-discipline which had got him to his place of eminence onto his family, in the form of ferocious bursts of bad temper and the routine beating and whipping of his numerous wives and children.
So both Achebe and Adichie’s novels are about the incandescent anger and domestic violence of a fundamentally angry self-made man, operating on a very tight spring.
Revisiting the ancestral village
A bit later, Eugene takes his family from the city back to the village of his father, where he grew up. Here Eugene, typically, has a grand house and is greeted as a benefactor and patron. But when Kamibili and Jaja visit their grandfather, he is still living in a much more basic hut, still eats yam, still worships the old gods, still speaks in proverbs.
In other words, this grandfather comes over very strongly indeed like a figure from one of Achebe’s tribal-period novels. The whole idea of going back from the metropolitan city to visit parents living in the old way in the old village is also a recurring scene in Achebe’s novels set in contemporary Nigeria, No Longer At Ease and A Man of The People.
Folk stories
Similarly, when he comes to stay with Aunty Ifeola, old Papa-Nnukwu tells old folk stories which have exactly the same flavour as the folk stories which litter Achebe’s novels (pages 157 to 161).
Proverbs
Even small details echo, for example Eugene has an old man thrown out of his compound because he is an infidel, as he’s being bundled out the oldster calls out imprecations and proverbs. One, ‘You are like a fly blindly following a corpse into the grave,’ appears in at least one Achebe novel, Arrow of God (where it takes the form: ‘The fly that has no one to advise him follows the corpse into the ground.’)
Titles
Anthills of the Savannah takes its name from a natural phenomenon, that disastrous fires sometimes sweep across the savannah, destroying all the vegetation but leaving the anthills as striking survivors. Whimsically, Achebe’s character sees them as repositories of history which survive a disastrous fire in order to tell succeeding generations about life in the former times. It is implied that books are like this, novels like Achebe’s, their purpose to survive in the fierce times of Nigeria’s military dictatorship, to preserve history and stories for later generations.
Well, Adichie’s title is also taken from a natural phenomenon which is made to be heavily symbolic. Among her other talents Aunty Ifeoma is a gardener and, being at a university, has gotten friendly botanists to do a bit of experimental horticulture, coming up with new varieties for her, among which are a new strain of purple hibiscus, and this, like Achebe’s anthills, is then laden with symbolic meaning.
Jaja’s defiance seemed to me now like Aunty Ifeoma’s experimental purple hibiscus: rare, fragrant with the undertones of freedom, a different kind of freedom from the one the crowds waving green leaves chanted at Government Square after the coup. A freedom to be, to do.
Plot overview
The text is divided into four parts. Chronologically the central event in the story is the big blow-up on Palm Sunday when the teenage son Jaja abruptly rebelled against his father, breaking all the rules and refusing to go to Church, and on Palm Sunday of all days!
This prompts his father to white-hot rage in which he throws his missal (‘a book containing the texts used in the Catholic Mass throughout the year’) across the living room and demolishes a fragile étagère (‘a set of open shelves for displaying small objects’) on which had been displayed a collection of delicate porcelain miniatures of dancers. These small, delicate objects are precious possessions of the frail wife and mother, Beatrice, so when they’re smashed to pieces by Eugene’s rage, it feels heavily symbolic.
Anyway, in a tried and tested narrative tactic, the brief (14 pages) description of this climactic event is repositioned from the middle of the series of events covered by the narrative, to the beginning of the text in order to provide a dramatic opening scene.
Then, as in a million movies, we flashback in time to understand the context and build-up to the event, in the longest, central, part of the book (235 pages).
Then, having described the climactic event in the history of this horrible family, and provided a detailed background and build-up to it, the final two parts are much shorter: 1) showing the immediate consequences of Jaja’s rebellion (35 pages), with 2) a brief epilogue looking back at it all from the present day (13 pages).
Part 1. Breaking Gods: Palm Sunday (14 pages)
As mentioned, this is the description of the teenage son, Jaja, refusing to go to the Palm Sunday service and his enraged father, Eugene, throwing his missal across the room and shattering his wife’s collection of delicate figurines.
Part 2. Speaking with our Spirits: Before Palm Sunday (235 pages)
Background on the family. We learn that Eugene has an agèd father, Papa-Nnukwu (aged 80, p.82), living in a place called Abba Town. But because he is not a Christian and remains faithful to the old gods, Eugene allows Jaja and Kambili to visit the broken-down old man in his traditional mud-and-thatch-enclosed (p.81) compound for precisely 15 minutes and forbids them to sully their Christian tongues with pagan food or drink.
By contrast Eugene liked his wife, Beatrice’s, father, who died five years ago, because he was a Christian, in fact one of the first to convert under the guidance of the early white missionaries.
But this central section is dominated by Eugene’s sister, Aunty Ifeoma. She is an immense relief to the reader because she is the opposite of her brother: she is fun and carefree and unaffected by religious bigotry and her brother’s insane obsession with discipline and control.
Her whisper was like her – tall, exuberant, fearless, loud, larger than life. (p.95)
She’s a lecturer at the university who wears bright clothes and make-up, laughs and jokes unaffectedly and is a thrilling breath of fresh air whenever she visits the terrified Achike household.
I watched every movement she made; I could not tear my ears away. It was the fearlessness about her, about the way she gestured as she spoke, the way she smiled to show that wide gap. (p.76)
It is only on page 79 that we learn the rather staggering fact that the narrator, Kambili, is 15 years old. The impression everything gave up to that point was of someone much younger, 11 or 12.
Aunty Ifeoma is a widow. Her husband, Ifediora, was killed in a car crash. She has three children, Kambili’s cousins, Amaka (a girl, 15), Obiora (boy, 14), Chima (boy, 7). They all laugh and talk in a free, unconstrained way which Kambili can only wonder at.
Lots more detail on Eugene’s repressive regime: although they have satellite TV the children are never allowed to watch it. They have a record player/stereo but never ever use it. She doesn’t own any trousers as Eugene considers women who wear trousers to be ungodly.
Christmas celebrations which, for Eugene’s family, mean a welter of Masses, penances, confessions and so on. The key event is that Aunty Ifeoma comes to stay and brings a thrilling air of freedom. And then invites Kambili and Jaja to come and stay with her at her home at the university where she teaches, to get to know their cousins. And not just a day visit, but come for a week, some of which they’ll spend on an outing to a village where there’s allegedly been a religious apparition of the Virgin Mary, Aokpe.
Papa very grudgingly allows this visit. It is the first time 15-year-old Kambini has stayed a night away from home in her entire life.
Ifeoma’s flat is in a block. It has low ceilings and concrete floors rather than the high ceilings and marble (!) tiled floors of Eugene’s house. BUT it is liberty, freedom. During these crucial five days Kambili is introduced to an entire new world of freedom and happiness and laughter.
I had felt as if I were not there, that I was just observing a table where you could say anything at any time to anyone, where the air was free for you to breathe as you wished. (p.120)
Not only is Ifeoma’s apartment shabby but everything about the university, and indeed the country, comes over as rundown. There’s a petrol shortage so she can’t run her car. The running water is cut off. The electricity keeps cutting out. The doctors are on strike. And so on. All of this is obviously an eye-opening contrast with Kambili’s household where everything works and there is food galore.
In the relaxed if poor and shabby Ifeoma household Jaja flourishes. Within days he appears to have grown into a confident young man, bigger, broader in the shoulders, offering to do chores like wash the car, relishing the freedom of conversation and laughter.
Kambili struggles much more. She observes the freedom and laughter around her but cannot join in. In particular she is criticised by Ifeoma’s daughter, Amaka, to a level which might qualify as bullying. She speaks in a whisper, she stutters, she often says nothing at all, so Amaka forms the completely incorrect opinion that she is stuck-up and aloof, a ‘backyard snob’ (p.205). the opposite. Kambili is desperate to join in but doesn’t know how.
Stuff happens. A neighbour phones up Aunty Ifeoma to tell her that Papa-Nnukwu is unwell. Petrol is hard to get so she is grateful to the local Catholic priest, Father Amadi, loans her a gallon. She drives off and later that afternoon returns with the grandfather, who the family proceed to fuss and pet. Ifeoma had hoped to get him diagnosed and treated at the campus surgery but it, like all the doctors in the country, are on strike. A family friend, Dr Nduoma, prescribes medication, which Ifeoma rolls up in the cassava flour dumplings for Papa to eat at mealtimes.
Early one morning Kambili watches Papa-Nnukwu says his morning prayers and blessings. It leaves her impressed (me too), and:
He was still smiling as I quietly turned and went back to the bedroom. I never smiled after we said the rosary back home. None of us did. (p.169)
Also, Kambili falls in love, more accurately develops a fierce unspoken crush on the priest Father Amadi. She longs for him to mention her name or look at her, but when she does is rendered speechless, looks down at her feet, feels a wild burning inside. Father Amadi takes her to a football pitch to play with a group of boys. In the event she just watches but with quite a lot of lust in her heart for the nimble, fit, smooth-skinned priest.
After a few days Eugene discovers that his pagan father is staying in the same house and rings up Aunty Ifeoma, furious. Kambili is petrified of what he will do to her and Jaja. But these concerns are trumped when Papa-Nnukwu is found dead in his chair. Much lamenting, everyone is in tears, the family doctor comes and confirms and a few hours later cemetery men come to take away the ozu or corpse.
But then Papa turns up, outraged that neither of his children had told him, in their daily call, that a heathen had moved in with them. He orders them to pack up, say quick goodbyes and drives them off. When they arrive home it’s to find their mother with a purple black eye.
Then comes the most searingly memorable scene in the book. Eugene makes the terrified Kambili stand in their expensive bath tub and holds on to her while he pours scolding water over her feet. This is for wilfully knowing it was a sin to be in the same house as a heathen and yet not tell him. It was for deliberately walking into sin. It is for her own good and he cries, himself, as he explains why he is doing it.
Her mother carries her sobbing to bed, they lay a mix of salt and cold water on the roasted feet, she has to wear oiled socks for days.
But in parallel to this horrifying moment, there’s a political crisis. The editor of the Standard arrives, telling Papa that the new military ruler, Big Oga, has offered an exclusive interview for them if they will spike a story about the disappearance of a noted dissident, Nwankiti Ogechi. Papa insists the paper reject the interview and run the story. Later, soldiers arrive in trucks and their leader offers Papa a large bribe, which he rejects, angrily throwing them out of his house (p.200).
In the following days more and more visitors arrive, members of the opposition, the democratic coalition, warning Papa that he might be assassinated and giving a list of other government critics who had been bumped off.
In fact his editor, Ade Coker, is assassinated, blown up by a parcel bomb he opened at the breakfast table. For the first time Kambila and Jaja see their father crying, small and vulnerable, being consoled by their mother.
And this breaks him. He is slower, heavier. Soldiers close down his factories. He spends all day praying. At night they hear him shouting incoherently from the balcony.
Eugene discovers a watercolour painting Amaka had made of their grandfather and given as a parting gift to Kambila. Predictably infuriated, he grabs it, tears it into pieces but is bewildered when Kambila shrieks ‘No’ and throws herself onto the fragments. And Eugene stars to kick her, losing control of himself and kicking her repeatedly till she passes out.
She wakes up in hospital where she is so seriously injured – broken rib, internal bleeding – that the priest arrives to deliver the last unction. Drifting in and out of consciousness, she wakes to find Aunty Ifeoma at her bedside and telling her Mama that this cannot go on, that she, Ifeoma, will take the children away for their own protection.
Cut to Kambili recuperating at the shabby but happy apartment of Aunty Ifeoma. Snarky Amaka has accepted her now. She also mentions that Father Amadi was especially worried and insisted on driving all the way to Enugu to see her in hospital. Amaka reveals that all the girls in her Catholic school have crushes on the handsome young priest, but that he himself seems to have an extra soft spot for Kambili. He takes her to another evening of football practice with boys and she chokes with adoration.
He picked up the water bottle, drank deeply from it. I watched the ripples in his throat as the water went down. I wished I were the water, going into him, to be with him, one with him. I had never envied water so much before. His eyes caught mine, and I looked away, wondering if he had seen the longing in my eyes. (p.226)
There’s trouble at the university, though. Ifeoma has a visit from a colleague who says she’s on a government blacklist and is likely to get fired or worse. A week or so later, the students riot. It’s a bad one, they burn down the administrator’s house and he only escapes in the boot of a car. (This reminded me very powerfully of the extended student riot scene in William Boyd’s debut novel, A Good Man in Africa, and of the student riots which trigger a murderous response from the police in Achebe’s novel Anthills of the Savannah.)
Soon afterwards, the security police force their way into Ifeoma’s apartment, throw their weight around, empty all the drawers and cupboards, accusing her of helping incite the students to riot, before leaving with a menacing warning – rather like the security police bursting into the rooms of the protagonists of Anthills. In a spectral kind of way the final passages of the two novels overlap in hyperspace.
Father Amadi takes Kambili to have corn rows done by her Aunt’s hairdresser in the market. Poverty and peasant simplicity. She also snails collected by her children. She shrewdly points out that Father Amadi likes her which makes Kambili almost faint with pleasure.
A few evenings later Aunty Ifeoma and a university colleague review the situation: a military dictatorship, galloping inflation, power cuts and no fuel, the university shut down and half the faculty denouncing the other half. Ifeoma has contacted her relative in America to see if she can get a job. But the colleague replies:
‘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. Do you not see that it is a cycle? Who will break that cycle?’ (p.245)
God it keeps on being horrible because out of nowhere Mama arrives in a taxi. She’s come all the way from hospital in Enugu and tells a horrified Ifeoma and the kids that Eugene, in his latest rage, broke a coffee table over her stomach and triggered a miscarriage. She was only 6 weeks or so along and hadn’t told him. She slumps on the floor and cries and cries until she passes out.
And yet the next day, Papa calls and, although Ifeoma puts down the phone on him, Beatrice insists on calling him back and, after a long private conclave, emerges as if in a trance and announces that she and the kids were going home. Eugene will come to collect them tomorrow. Nothing anyone can say can talk her out of her conviction.
Next day the monster arrives to collect them all. Mama sinks into the arms of her beater. Kambili is shocked that her father has lost so much weight. Also that his face is entirely covered in a rash which rises to countless spots with white pussy heads.
In the car the tyrant recites the rosaries he always says when he’s driving and the two children look out of their windows, blank with horror and fear and despair.
Part 3. The Pieces of Gods: After Palm Sunday (35 pages)
The next day is Palm Sunday, the day on which Jaja refuses to go to Mass and Eugene throws his missal across the room, as described in part one. And then this section describes the aftermath.
The whole atmosphere of the house changes. Mama doesn’t sneak about but takes Jaja’s dinner up to him on a tray. Jaja moves his desk against his bedroom door when Papa tries to get in.
Yewande Coker, widow of the editor who was blown up, pays a visit with her daughter who had not spoken since the assassination, and who Eugene had paid to be seen by the best therapists in Nigeria and abroad. She gets down on her knees to thank Eugene but he insists she gets up and says it is all God’s work, everything come from God. He is not corrupt. He doesn’t do things for the power or money or flattery. He does an awful lot of charity because he believes it is right.
Surprisingly, maybe, the whole family goes to Mass on Good Friday. Then Aunty Ifeoma phones. When Kambili answers she tells her she’s been sacked from the university for subversive activities. She’s applied for a visa to travel to America. And Father Amadi is leaving for missionary work in Germany.
Jaja decides on the spot that they are going back to Nsukka, today, right now. He marches into Papa’s bedroom to tell him. Papa is clearly fading. He is a shadow of his former self. He protests but Jaja won’t take no for an answer and tells Kambili to pack her things.
They settle right back into life at Aunty Ifeoma’s apartment. There’s an argument because Amaka is scheduled to be confirmed but refuses to take a British confirmation name such as Mary or Veronica. There are several scenes where Father Amadi really does seem to be falling in love with Kambili, swatting a mosquito on her thigh, easing a flower she’s holding off her finger and onto his. I expected them to kiss at any moment (p.269).
They finally go on the pilgrimage to Aokpe which has been bruited for so long, but only a page is spent describing it. Basically a slight young girl dressed in white appears to a credulous crowd who believe trees start to shake and the face of the Virgin Mary appears in the sun. In fact this is what happens to Kambili but we have seen what a deeply damaged young woman she is.
A day or two later she and Father Amadi are driving round the parish as he says goodbye to his flock. At one point Kambili finally blurts out ‘I love you’. To my slight surprise they don’t kiss, but the Father talks her down and reassures her that she will one day find true love with an eligible man.
In the parallel storyline, Aunty Ifeoma finally gets her American visa after a tense interview in Lagos.
Father Amadi’s last day arrives and she is angry with him, won’t reply. He hugs her and drives away. that’s it.
The university authorities have given her 2 weeks to vacate the apartment, The children help her pack till it’s empty apart from boxes. She says they should all go and stay in Enugu while she asks Eugene for money for the tickets to America, and Father Benedict works on Eugene to let Kambili and Jaja go to boarding school.
But all best are called off when Mama phones up to say Eugene is dead. He was found slumped at his desk at one of his factories. Jaja’s only response is he feels guilty that he didn’t do enough to protect their mother. he should have stood up to the tyrant.
The climax of the plot is very sudden. Jaja and Kamili return to their compound. Mama is taking control for the first time in her life, issuing orders, refusing to let mourners into the compound. At one point she answers the phone, listens, puts it down and very calmly tells her children that the autopsy has found the poison. She has been adding poison to his tea for months.
Shortly afterwards the police arrive to ask questions and Jaja makes a confession, saying it was he who poisoned his father. And they arrest him and take him away (p.291).
Part 4. A Different Silence: The Present (13 pages)
I’m still reeling from this sudden turn of events when we have fast forwarded several years. During that time Jaja was convicted and sent to gaol, despite Mama telling everyone she did it, writing letters to the newspapers, lobbying ministers and so on. Everyone thought she was a grief-stricken widow driven mad by grief over her husband and son, and so they forgave her not attending to the niceties of widowhood etc. Mama has gone downhill. Now she sits rocking backward and forward in a chair, oblivious of most things people say to her.
But now all that is in the past. The military leader of the country has died suddenly and the newly empowered opposition is calling for the release of all political prisoners among whom, rather puzzlingly, Jaja is included.
Now the narrative opens with Kambili and Mama being driven to the prison for their weekly visit (by the new chauffeur, Celestine, Mama having sacked Kevin). Jaja has suffered. Mama and Kambili have spent a lot of Papa’s money bribing guards and warders and the prison authorities but Jaja has still been whipped and forced to stay in a cell so crowded they have to take it in turns to stand or lie down and the floor is covered in human faeces. He’s been in prison for 31 months.
As to Aunty, her whole family write letters to Kambili who now details the kinds of things written to her by Ifeola, feisty Amaka and intellectual Obiora who’s got a scholarship to a private school.
As to her love for Father Amadi, he writes regularly from Germany and Kambili carries his letters around with her. She has found peace. She loves him even if he can’t love her back. For a while she thought she was competing with God for the priest’s affection. Now she knows they are sharing it and that’s fine.
I don’t think the details of any of this are particularly important. it’s a tying up of all the loose ends. But above all it indicates that Kambili is, as Sylvia Plath put it, through. She has come through. She has survived. She is no longer a mute, stuttering, backward girl, but an expressive, fully alive, woman in control of her own life.
Jaja looks awful when he is brought to the meeting room. they have brought freshly cooked jollof rice and meat and he stuffs his face. They tell him the lawyers assure them he will be freed in a week. Then they will take him to Nsukka first and then to America to visit Aunty Ifeoma.
‘We’ll plant new orange trees in Abba when we come back, and Jaja will plant purple hibiscus, too, and I’ll plant ixora so we can suck the juices of the flowers.” I am laughing. I reach out and place my arm around Mama’s shoulder and she leans toward me and smiles.’ (p.307)
And on this bright and happy note the novel ends. Who knows whether any of that came true, whether Jaja was released, whether they went to Nsukka or America – but at this moment, as the image freezes and the credits start to roll, Kambili is hopeful and happy, and so is the reader.
Thoughts
A child’s-eye view
In this kind of fiction the child’s-eye view of things allows for, or requires, a kind of wide-eyed innocence of tone. Part of this is the dwelling on pregnant details. The novel’s packed with them, scores of images described in detail, like the children’s running round catching flying ants in the rain, or the worms they find in Aunty’s bath, or the cricket Obiora holds in his cupped hands or the persistent snail which keeps escaping from the basket of the hairdresser in Nsukka market.
The child’s eye approach allows the prose to operate more closely to poetry than a more adult with its attention to meaningful details.
My critique of this would be that, like all styles which claim to be simple, it is in fact extremely contrived. A superficial reading might be tempted to describe the entire novel as a wonderful recreation of a child’s point of view, but is it? It bears no relation to my own children who I watched growing through the age depicted here (about 15). In my opinion the text conforms to a literary stereotype of how wide-eyed and innocently observant children ought to be. Praise for its creation of a child’s point of view is, in my opinion, praise for its conformity with a widely accepted stereotype of how children ought to see and think.
My own children were much more strange and unpredictable and unexpected, much more savvy, confused, anxious, clever, funny and exasperate, than the smoothly even tenor of Kambili’s consciousness as portrayed in this text. It’s a literary artifice.
Feminism
Obviously the text massively lends itself to feminist interpretation. Papa Eugene embodies The Patriarchy, a big toxic male who has acquired power and money in a man’s world but dominates his family with twisted, righteous sadism. He is at one pole of values, associated with obsessive control, stifled emotions, strict timetabling and physical punishment.
At the other pole is Aunty Ifeola representing freedom, happiness, spontaneity, laissez-fair household management (i.e. once the kids have done their chores, they’re free to watch TV or play), some rules about attitude and behaviour but which mostly involve gentle chiding rather than Eugene’s barbaric corporal punishment.
Man bad, woman good. It’s a striking fact that the symbol of happy domesticity and independent femininity, Ifeoma, has the same name as the author’s own mother, mentioned in the book’s dedication, Mrs. Grace Ifeoma Adichie.
The colonial legacy
Apart from all his other issues, Eugene is in thrall to the British colonial legacy. The Christ on the cross in their church is white. The family priest, Father Benedict, is white. Kambili has grown up watching her father, commanding and dominating in all other areas, submit to priests, especially white priests.
Papa changed his accent when he spoke, sounding British, just as he did when he spoke to Father Benedict. He was gracious, in the eager-to-please way that he always assumed with the religious, especially with the white religious.
In thrall to this whiteness, in a giveaway moment Kambili quite naturally imagines that God is white, that his hands are white. And:
Sometimes I imagined God calling me, his rumbling voice British-accented… (p.179)
It is a measure of her fast-growing maturity that in the final passages of the book she takes part in conversations about the racism of the British rulers, the demeaning attitudes of the American visa people, and understands the bits of Ifeola’s letters which describe how Africans are patronised in America.
When the text begins she thinks God is white and has never heard of these issues. By the end she is reading and processing and discussing them like an adult.
Igbo vocabulary
Adichie has all her characters speak both English and Igbo so the dialogue contains many Igbo terms, casually spoken. Most of them go unexplained and so remain a mystery to the non-Igbo speaker:
- abia
- aja – sand or oracle
- akara
- akwam ozu – funeral?
- aku na-efe – the winged termites (aku) are flying
- amarom
- anam asi
- annara
- atulu
- biko
- chelu nu – wait
- chelukwa
- chi m! – an exclamation
- Chima – name meaning ‘God knows best’
- Chiamaka – name meaning ‘God is beautiful’
- Chiebuka – name meaning ‘God is the greatest’
- chukwu aluka
- ebezi na
- ehye
- ‘Ekene nke udo – ezigbo nwanne m nye m aka gi’ – ‘The greeting of peace – my dear sister, dear brother, give me your hand (song lyric)
- ekwerom – I don’t agree
- ekwuzina
- ezi okwu
- fiam – just like that
- fufu – dumplings made by stirring, pounding, or kneading starchy vegetables like cassava till it has a dough-like consistency
- garri – the flour of the fresh starchy cassava root, in this case moistened and shaped into balls to be dipped in soup
- gbo
- gi – singular ‘you’
- gini?
- gini mezia? – what happened next?
- gwakenem
- icheku – some kind of fruit growing on trees
- igasikwa!
- imana
- inugo
- itu-nzu – morning declaration of innocence to the traditional gods or ancestors
- ka
- ke kwanu? – how are you?
- kpa
- kunie
- kwusia
- maka nnidi
- makana (p.191)
- mechie onu – shut up (p.224)
- mgbalu
- mmuo – traditional masquerades with figures wearing masks and costumes representing gods
- nna anyi
- nna m o – my father (p.183)
- ndi
- nee anya
- neke!
- nekwanu anya
- ngwa
- ngwanu
- ngwanu
- njemanze!
- nna anyi
- nna m – my father
- nne
- nno
- nno nu
- nodu ani – sit down (?)
- nwoke – man of the house (p.184)
- nwanyi oma – pretty woman (p.239)
- nwunye m
- nzu – chalk used for drawing lines on the floor as part of ancestor worship (p.167)
- o bugodi
- o di egwu – an exclamation
- o di mma
- o gini
- o ginidi
- o maka – so beautiful
- o nkem
- o zugo – it is enough
- oburia
- ofe nsala – some kind of dish
- okada – motorcycles
- okpa – foodstuff made from mixing cowpea flour and palm oil and steam cooking
- okwia
- onugbu soup
- orah leaves – prepared as a foodstuff, for soup
- ozu – corpse (p.185)
- oyinbu – white people (p.244)
- sha
- ube
- uchu gba gi! – a curse (p.189)
- umu m – welcome (p.190)
- umunna – local community
- uni – plural ‘you’
- yeye – an adjective
Patriotism and emigration
It amused me that Chinua Achebe is routinely hailed as the father of African literature and the father of Nigerian literature and lauded by Nelson Mandela and numerous other big names, for his depiction of African roots and culture – but that, as soon as the opportunity presented itself, in the 1970s he went to America to teach (at the University of Massachusetts Amherst from 1972 to 1976). And that, after his car crash in 1990, Achebe went back to the States and never returned to Nigeria, dying in Boston in 2013.
His writings praised Africa and lambasted colonialism but Achebe spent the last 23 years of his life in the world’s only superpower and the epicentre of western neo-imperialism, America. Follow the money.
So when I read more about her, I was struck to learn Adichie did the same. It’s worth copying out Wikipedia’s account because it really brings home the American-ness of her education and writing career:
At the age of 19, Adichie left Nigeria for the United States to study communications and political science at Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She transferred to Eastern Connecticut State University (ECSU) to be near her sister Uche, who had a medical practice in Coventry, Connecticut. She received a bachelor’s degree from ECSU, summa cum laude, in 2001. In 2003, Adichie completed a master’s degree in creative writing at Johns Hopkins University.
Adichie was a Hodder fellow at Princeton University during the 2005 to 2006 academic year. In 2008, she received a Master of Arts degree in African studies from Yale University. Also in 2008, she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. She was awarded a 2011 to 2012 fellowship by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University.
Adichie’s story ‘Ceiling’ was included in the 2011 edition of The Best American Short Stories.
Her third novel, Americanah (2013), an exploration of a young Nigerian encountering race in America, was selected by The New York Times as one of ‘The 10 Best Books of 2013’. The book went on to win the National Book Critics Circle Award and was picked as the winner for the 2017 ‘One Book, One New York’ program.
In 2015, she was co-curator of the PEN World Voices festival in New York City. She delivered the festival’s closing address, which she concluded by saying: ‘I will stand and I will speak for the right of everyone, everyone, to tell his or her story.’
Just an observation; that both Achebe and Adichie are lauded as Nigerian and African writers and yet spent a good deal of their adult lives living and working entirely in the USA. Writers write, but money talks.
It’s an dilemma she’s well aware of. In the novel Aunty Ifeoma has a relative who’s gone to teach in America and her children wonder when she, too, will emigrate, a dilemma embodied in more than one exchange with her children.
‘We should leave,’ Obiora said. ‘Mom, we should leave. Have you talked to Aunty Phillipa since the last time?’
Aunty Ifeoma shook her head. She was putting back the books and table mats from the sideboard drawers. Jaja went over to help her.
‘What do you mean, leave? Why do we have to run away from our own country? Why can’t we fix it?’ Amaka asked. (p.232)
And also the exchange I quoted above between Ifeoma and a university colleague. Should you stay and make your minuscule contribution to trying to fix a broken country, or do the best thing for your family and leave?
Enugu
The novel is set in Enugu, the capital city of Enugu State in south-eastern Nigeria, where the family home and the kids’ schools are, with a few outings to a) Abba to see grandpa and b) the trip stay with Aunty Ifeola at Nsukka. I was curious to see how easy it is to get to Enugu from the UK, idly wondered if it would be worth visiting, and thought I’d check advice about travelling there.
‘Widespread terrorist activity, inter-communal violence, and kidnapping’, the ‘heightened risk of kidnapping, violent civil unrest, and armed gangs.’ I can see why Adichie prefers to stay in the safety of New York, building up her collection of honorary degrees.
Commitment
At some level, you have to like an author, you have to get on with the worldview and stories and prose style and the whole Gestalt that they present. As negative examples, I had an allergic reaction to the patronisingly smug tone in Mary Beard’s history of Rome, and went slowly off Giles Foden as his novels became more and more like dramatised versions of Wikipedia articles with increasing amounts of woke virtue signalling chucked in. They’re negative examples.
By contrast, this book made me a huge Adichie fan. When Eugene kicked his daughter almost to death and then she lay semi-delirious slowly recovering in hospital, something inside of me snapped. Tears came to my eyes and I was transported to a whole other level. I became a massive Adichie fan. This is a masterpiece.
Credit
Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was published by Algonquin Books in 2003. References are to the Harper Perennial 2005 paperback edition.
Related link
Surprisingly for a contemporary novel, the entire text is available online:
Books & Boots 