Growing up within the walls of a luxurious compound in the city of Enugu, fifteen-year-old Kambili Achike knows little of the life of the average Nigerian.
Yet her classmates at the exclusive Catholic academy she attends are mistaken in branding her a “backyard snob” when she fails to chat with them after school. What no one outside her family knows is that the father she adores turns to brutal punishments when she, her brother, Jaja, or their mother depart ever so slightly from the strict household regimen of study and prayer. She may be beaten or worse if she is even a few minutes late when Kevin, the family\’s chauffer, arrives to collect her after school. As her disappointed father, Eugene, puts it when Kambili, who typically earns the highest marks, earns only the second highest marks in her class one term, “God has given you much, he expects much from you. He expects perfection.” Like many victims of domestic violence, Kambili tells no one of her troubles.
Despite his strong sense of the importance of family, Eugene, has dismissed his own father, Kambili\’s Papa-Nnukwu, as a “heathen” for following Igbo cultural and religious practices. Excessively pious and is hostile toward those who don\’t embrace his brand of Catholicism, he forbids Kambili and her brother from visiting their Papa-Nnukwu. Even when the local council diplomatically intervenes on the elderly man\’s behalf, Eugene relents only so far as to allow a fifteen-minute visit at Christmas. The children must promise to decline any food and drink offered to the ancestors or, as the family\’s white British priest, Father Benedict, describes it, “native foods sacrificed to idols.”
As intolerant and inflexible as he is at home, the same sense of duty that misguides him into terrible acts of domestic violence (which he views as a form of love and missionary discipline) also compels him to fight selflessly for the freedom and dignity of his people. A wealthy factory owner, Eugene commands respect as the heroic publisher of The Standard, the one newspaper that continues to unmask the corruption and violence of the country\’s military regime, despite the considerable risk that opposition to the government entails. He dispenses money to poor local villagers, and the people of his hometown of Abba press him to accept the title Omelora, “The One Who Does for the Community.” He is genuinely humble in his charity work, and he is too modest to mention to others the human rights award he has received from Amnesty World.
As we witness in this novel the effects of a despotic government — the poverty, the rioting, the fear — in the background of one young girl\’s story, and as we hear of Kambili\’s own domestic troubles, we also hear a hopeful coming-of-age story. Kambili gains support from her widowed Aunty Ifeoma, Eugene\’s sister, a strong and lively university professor in Nsukka. Kambili and her brother pay her an extended visit, where Kambili meets and develops romantic feelings toward a young Nigerian priest, Father Amadi, whose humane Catholicism allows him to appreciate Igbo traditions and to support the local community. Unlike her brother, Aunty Ifeoma regards Papa-Nnukwu as a “traditionalist.” Through her new friendships with Father Amadi, Aunty Ifeoma and her three children, and the dying Papa-Nnukwu, Kambili begins to blossom, against all odds, like the rare purple hibiscus in Ifeoma\’s garden. The novel is absorbing and elegantly written, and its surprise ending shows that Kambili\’s gentle and long-suffering mother carries a sense of determination that is scarcely evident earlier in the book.
Born in Enugu, Nigeria in 1977, the novelist and short story writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie studied medicine at the University of Nigeria before coming to the United States, where she first attended DrexelUniversity in Philadelphia. In 2001, she earned her bachelor\’s degree with highest honors from EasternConnecticutStateUniversity, having studied communications and political science. In her senior year in college, she began writing Purple Hibiscus, which won the 2004 Commonwealth Writers\’ Prize for Best First Book, was shortlisted for the Orange Prize, and longlisted for the prestigious Booker Prize. It is a remarkable novel by any standard, but it is an astonishing feat for a writer in her early twenties. Adichie has completed a master\’s degree in creative writing at the JohnsHopkinsUniversity and has recently been in residence as a Hodder Fellow at PrincetonUniversity. Her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, is due out this fall.
Like her fictional Aunty Ifeoma, who lives in the university town of Nsukka where the writer herself grew up, Adichie is deeply concerned about Nigeria\’s social, economic, and political problems. Issues that concern her range from the lack of funding for local libraries to the massive international debt incurred under the military regime of General Abacha in the mid-1990s, which continues to make it difficult for the country to develop economically. Despite her support for policy initiatives that could improve the situation, Adichie understandably left Nigeria during the hardest times of the mid-1990s to finish her education and to establish herself professionally in the United States.
Adichie is part of the “third generation” of Nigerian writers, who emerged in the mid-1980s. The scholar Wendy Griswold has dubbed these writers the “strugglers,” in that they began writing during an especially difficult period of political upheaval and economic collapse. The political and economic disaster of the country\’s oil crisis, which Adichie and her generation were living through, is represented in the novel when Aunty Ifeoma parks her station wagon in line at the gas station over night, only to find the next morning that no new shipment of fuel has arrived. The oil crisis is also clearly linked to the military checkpoints and university riots that form a backdrop to the Achike family chronicle.
If Adichie\’s novel of modern Nigerian family life seems saturated with politics, it is worth remembering that Adichie and other young Nigerian writers and intellectuals could not afford to ignore politics, certainly not after 1995, when Abacha executed the prominent writer Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other human rights activists. These human rights violations drew international censure and led to Nigeria\’s suspension from the Commonwealth of Nations until President Obasanjo\’s election in 1999.
In terms of literary history, the third generation of writers followed the second-generation “oil boomers” from the period between 1970, the year that ended the Nigeria-Biafra civil war, to the early 1980s. Before this generation were the “pioneers,” including the distinguished Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe, whose classic 1958 novel Things Fall Apart is widely regarded as the great African novel of the postcolonial era. Adichie echoes Achebe\’s title (which is itself deliberately borrowed from the Irish poet William Butler Yeats) in the opening line of Purple Hibiscus: “Things started to fall apart at home when my brother, Jaja, did not go to communion‚Ķ.”
In revisiting Achebe\’s major work, Adichie chooses to shift the emphasis to issues of domestic violence and the role of women in the traditional Nigerian family. These issues are present, yet marginal, in Achebe\’s work, which centers instead on the tragedy that follows when Igbo culture meets European colonialism. In bringing women\’s issues to the fore, and in telling the story from the perspective of the teenage Kambili Achike, Adichie follows a line of modern women writers such as Buchi Emecheta, probably the most internationally famous woman writer of Nigeria, whose novels since the early 1970s have traced the struggles of women in the movement from traditional to modern society. For Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and her generation, colonialism has ended, but it has left in its wake a legacy of distinctly modern troubles and a new set of things falling apart. At the same time, Adichie\’s rich novel offers a firm belief in the strength of communities and a cautious hope for the future of her society.
____________________
Carol Howard is a professor of English at WarrenWilsonCollege.
