Review of Purple Hibiscus- Anthony Chennells

Purple Hibiscus
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
2006: 125 x 188 pp
ISBN 13:978-1-77922-059-2
ISBN 10: 1 77922-059-6


Mukai Jesuit Journal for Zimbabwe
No. 39, May 2007

Reviewer: Anthony Chennells

Growing up as a Catholic in Nigeria

During the two decades when most African colonies achieved independence, African novels were often committed to projects of retrieval. Young men and women were shown to be discovering within their traditional cultures depths of wisdom that colonial education had ignored and which they had been denied. Mongo Beti’s Mission to Kala and Shimmer Chinodya’s first novel Dew in the Morning are examples from Cameroon and Zimbabwe respectively. Chimamanda Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus which Weaver Press has made available to us in a Zimbabwean edition echoes this earlier preoccupation but at the same time modifies it. Kambili and her brother Jaja have been raised in a Catholic family where no ‘worshipper of idols’ as their father describes traditionalists is allowed to enter the home. The British may have departed from Nigeria but the church has all the trappings of the imperial institution.

Traditional religion is dismissed with contempt and price generic viagra the use of Igbo hymns or prayers during Mass is frowned upon. The missionary ethos to which this generation of Christians was exposed made the father intolerant of anything that deviates from the values and practices of a largely imagined European bourgeoisie.

When Kambili admits in confessions that she enjoys watching the masked spirits at the local festival, she is given a massive penance for ‘taking joy in pagan rituals’ which are ‘the gateway to hell’. The children are cut off from their grandfather because he does not become a Catholic and on the rare occasions that they visit the old man they are forbidden to eat any food since it may have been tainted by paganism and indeed the grandfather begins the meal with an invocation inviting Ani, the god of the land, to share his fufu with him. When Kambili secretly observes her grandfather at prayer, however, she is surprised to find that his moral life informed by his sense of the sacred contains nothing to shock her Christian sensibilities. After examining his conscience the old man concludes ‘I have killed no-one, taken no-one’s land … have wished other’ well [and] … have helped those with nothing with the little that my hands can spare.’ His only request is that the curse be lifted from his son for only a curse can account for a son who refuses to allow his father into his house.

What distinguishes a scene like this from similar scenes in older novels of cultural retrieval is that Adichie’s novel refuses to see virtue exclusively in tradition and ignorant intolerance in contemporary Catholicism. Instead the novel shows the diversity of catholic practices and attitudes within the Nigerian church and the most sympathetic characters in the novel are Kambili and Jaja’s aunt whose Catholicism shapes her daily life but welcomes everyone regardless of creed to her flat and order au lasix online a young Catholic priest with whom Kambili falls in love. The aunt nurses her dying father and reprimands Kambili for calling him a pagan and the priest treats her infatuation with gentle sensitivity so that Kambili realizes that since he has given himself to God, she cannot be God’s rival. At Aokpe, where a Marian vision is claimed to occur, the young priest refuses to condemn what may be popular hysteria and contents himself by noting the faith of the people shows ‘something from God was happening there’. The novel is presenting the masked dancers and implies that something from God is also present in the masked dancers and the grandfather’s prayers.

The novel’s strength lies in its refusal to deal in simple oppositions. For all his piety and his imitation of the domestic habits of the European middle classes, Kambili’s father is physically abusive both to his wife and children and when he is poisoned at the end of the novel both his wife and son claim to have killed him. In older novels, only men and women who have not been corrupted by the new religion are concerned with the welfare of the community. In Purple Hibiscus although the father is intolerant and sometimes brutal in his personal relationships, many needy people are helped by his secret generosity and he is a Nigerian patriot whose Christian morality inspires him to use his newspaper fearlessly to confront the excesses of the latest military dictatorship in Abuja. Government hit-squads murder his editor and are probably responsible for his own death.

None of this constitutes an attack on Catholicism but rather in a strain within the local church that has unthinkingly characterised traditional religion as being in the same league with the devil and which, in its complacent exclusively, has denied generations of Nigerians a chance to engage as Christians with their cultural heritage. The new generation wants an inculturated church. Kambili’s cousin refuses to be confirmed when the bishop insists she takes as her confirmation name the name of a European saint instead of Igbo names that proclaim that ‘God is beautiful’ or ‘God knows best’. Jaja refuses to go to communion because he is unable to reconcile a sacrament of love that expresses itself only through authority and exclusion. Nigerians constitute a huge majority in the new African diaspora and it is a depressing comment on the Nigeria that Adichie describes that there is no place for Kambili’s aunt – a high-powered academic – and her children. At the end of the novel, they have moved to the United States. But their status as migrants is balanced by the young priest. He is a missionary to Germany where perhaps the real contemporary heathens are to be found.

*Professor Anthony Chennells teaches African Literature at Arrupe College.

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