World Lit Wednesday: PURPLE HIBISCUS by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

ISBN: 9780007189885 [UK]

Continent: Africa

Country: Nigeria

Title: Purple Hibiscus

Author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

First published in: 2003

Awards: Commonwealth Writers' Prize—Best First Book 2005

"Nsukka started it all; Aunty Ifeoma's little garden next to the verandah of her flat in Nsukka began to lift the silence. Jaja's defiance seemed to me now like Aunty Ifeoma's experimental purple hibiscus: rare, fragrant with the undertones of freedom..." (Page 16).

After being blown away by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's historical novel Half of a Yellow Sun a couple of years ago, I was excited to return to this author to read her first novel, Purple Hibiscus. Like Half of a Yellow, sun this book takes place in the author's native Nigeria, during the politically unstable years of post-colonialism.

The novel is told from the perspective of 15-year-old Kambili, who lives with her overbearing, ultra-religious Catholic father, Eugene, her older brother Jaja, and her meek mother, Beatrice. Eugene keeps tight control over his family, rigidly scheduling his children's days and doling out increasingly brutal punishments for any behavior he sees as ungodly. The family live in fear of their patriarch, though Kambili clearly both fears and loves her father. She is so nervous and withdrawn that she hardly speaks to anyone outside her immediate family, and stutters terribly when she tries to do so.

Everything begins to change when Jaja and Kambili's Aunty Ifeoma invites the siblings to visit her and her three children in Nsukka, where Ifeoma is a lecturer at the university. Here Kambili sees a different kind of life: one full of love, laughter, and discussion, as strange to her as the wild and wonderful garden that Aunty Ifeoma tends—a garden with purple hibiscuses.

Like Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions, this novel follows a quiet, pensive teenage girl as she struggles to become her own person. It documents Kambili's sexual awakening as she falls in love with a young priest, Father Amadi, and her search for her own sense of self as she and Jaja begin to separate themselves from their father. Unlike Dangarembga's Tambu, Kambili's struggles involve psychological and physical abuse rather than poverty and ignorance. But the consequences are just as severe; at the end of the novel one of the four family members is dead and the other three are changed forever.

While I found parts of this novel horrific and frightening, it was a book I couldn't put down. I found the relationships between the characters to be complex and realistic. Even the terrifying Eugene, interestingly enough, is illustrated as a sympathetic character. Despite the horrible things he does to punish his wife's  and his children's indiscretions—offenses such as Kambili's coming second in her class instead of first, the children sleeping under the same roof as their pagan grandfather in Nsukka, or Beatrice's being too ill to visit their priest after church—I still came away with the feeling that Eugene has deep and genuine love for his family. And they—particularly Kambili—love him in return.

This is also a book filled with beautiful description. I could almost smell the flowers in Aunty Ifeoma's garden, and feel the warm Harmattan winds coming out of the Sahara. As with Nervous Conditions, there is a real sense of place to the novel, and I found it exciting to learn about a culture I had known only a little about before.

Four stars out of five for a wonderfully written novel about family, religion, secrets, tradition, pain, love and hope.