Review of Purple Hibiscus - Sandip Roy

Purple Hibiscus
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
2006: (pp: 312) 125 x 188 mm
ISBN 13: 9781779220592
ISBN 10: 1779220596


Times Literary Supplement Online
14 September 2003

Reviewer: Sandip Roy

Wriggling in the grips of father, god and country

In the very first page of Purple Hibiscus the reader encounters 'Communion', 'missal,' 'palm fronds' and 'Ash Wednesday', and you know that religion will hang like a miasma over Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's first novel. Adichie, 25, who divides her time between her native Nigeria and the United States, has already been compared to Arundhati Roy, whose own first novel, The God of Small Things, stunned the sale cialis online usa literary world by snapping up the Booker Prize. While Roy seemingly came out of nowhere like a comet, Adichie has been short-listed for the 2002 Caine Prize for African Writing and nominated by the PEN Center USA for the David T.K. Wong Short Story Award.

At the core of Purple Hibiscus are a brother and sister who seem to have a perfect life, but in reality it is slowly suffocating them. Fifteen-year-old Kambili adores her father, who is much respected for his commitment to democracy and the free press as well as his generosity to the church. But she also knows he is tyrant and price comparison viagra a religious fanatic who visits every harsh punishment on his family for all manner of infractions, imagined or real. When Kambili comes second in her class, she is terrified of the disappointment she will cause her father, who often told her that he did not spend so much money on her school to have her let other children rank first.

She witnesses first-hand the power of his rage. 'Mama was at the door when we drove into our compound. Her face was swollen and the area around her right eye was the black-purple shade of an overripe avocado.' But what makes Purple Hibiscus compelling is that her father is not just a simple wife-bashing hypocritical brute. He also has morals. In fact, his morals are so inflexible he has abandoned his own father for still worshipping the old gods. His love for his family is as overwhelming as his remorse for the pain he visits on them. And Kambili needs his love, his smiles, his hugs even as it sucks all the life out of her. His wealth and love are the shield against the world outside and she clings to it at all cost.

But when the tyrannical bonds that glued the family together start breaking, it is like watching a traffic accident in slow motion.

The book opens with an act of defiance when Kambili's brother, Jaja, refuses to go to Communion, and then it moves into a flashback. The implosion of the family starts when the children visit their father's estranged and much poorer sister, Ifeoma. Suddenly they are in a world where when beef turns mottled brown, her aunt just boils it well with spices and cooks away the spoilage.

With the rough and tumble love of her aunt and buy cheap propecia cousins, both Kambili and Jaja start to bloom and realize how airless their life has been. They suddenly learn to relate to their godless grandfather, at whose home they had always been forbidden to eat or drink water. Kambili even timidly falls in love with a charismatic young priest who takes her to football games. Sometimes the 'poor but happy' relations seem too cliched, gamely laughing through water shortages, sharing their meager rations but keeping their apartment sparkling clean. On the other hand, Kambili's mother as the battered wife hanging on to her marriage because she has nowhere else to go seems a rather familiar character.

What redeems Purple Hibiscus is the complexity and tenderness with which Kambili is sketched. She is an unlikely heroine, painfully shy, with few friends. Out of place with her cousin who teases her because, as the rich man's daughter, she doesn't know how to peel yams, and always wishes she could say the smart things her brother says that impress their father, Kambili's entire identity is tied to her father's approval. 'Then he reached out and held my hand, and I felt as though my mouth were full of melting sugar.'

Setting her story against an ever-worsening security climate in Nigeria, where democracy is slowly being snuffed out and press crackdowns are worsening, Adichie paints a society that is slowly collapsing in on itself. For many Nigerians trapped in a harsh and unforgiving system, the only desperate way out is to think about starting afresh in a place like the United States. But just as Kambili's love for her father makes it excruciatingly hard for her to leave, people like her aunt must make the terrible decision of whether it's worth leaving all that's familiar, even if it's painful, for a fresh start in an unknown country.

Purple Hibiscus is at once the portrait of a country and a family, of terrible choices and australia online amoxil the tremulous pleasure of an odd, rare Purple Hibiscus blooming amid a conforming sea of red ones.

(Sandip Roy hosts 'UpFront,' New California Media's show about California's ethnic communities on KALW 91.7-FM.)

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