Purple Hibiscus, Chimanda Ngozi Adichie

So, my Victober read has turned into something else. It's turned into a pile of possibilities including, T.S. Eliot Wasteland, Bonjour Tristesse, Mice and Men, Ghana Must Go and Purple Hibiscus by my favorite African feminist Chimanda Ngozi Adichie. I also have two Victorian novels North and South by Gaskell and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë also waiting and while I'm trying to muster the enthusiasm to Victorian literature I've had to make a SOS dive into African literature for personal reasons. 

I couldn't put away Chimanda's debut novel once I started. It's about Eugene, a hyper Catholic philanthropist who is also a wife beater. The storyteller is the adolescent Kambili who skillfully narrates the horrible story of her family without really understanding how wrong her father is. Eugene subtly calls his wife to their bedroom where he beats her unconscious to the point of blood gushing, the wife loses two unborn children like this. I know of an old man in a land far away in real life, who is, or was much like Eugene Achike, Kambilis father. Men like that are not much of a fascination, I don't seek to understand but to overcome, thinking and praying for women and children who endure similar childhoods and families as those who fall into households like his.

The story doesn't really focus on the explanation as to why generations of men by violence become traumatized, actually Eugene has no reason to become as he does, both his sister and his own father where peaceful and normal while Eugene turned his home into an abnormal hell with a Christian perquisite. 

The title Purple Hibiscus brings to mind the 1983 Pulitzer Price winner, Alice Walkers The Color Purple (I've neither seen nor read it) but it's apparently about Afro American repression, female suffering and a coming to age story of a young girl in twentieth century Georgia. Chimanda's book is about the young girl Kambilis coming of age in the last years of 20th century Nigeria. In many aspects her book is a statement against domestic violence unleashed and what it means to be a young girl in Nigeria today (over 20 years since the book first was published). Female rights haven't advanced so much after all.

Quite recently a person commented on a book post in a forum that Atwood's Handmaids Tale, according to that person, is a criticism on Christianity. That could not be further from the truth, I say. A bit of smart inquiry and an enlarged view is required. As in Purple Hibiscus, not everything termed "Christian" is a representation of Christ, far from it! Chimanda shows in her debut novel that God is bigger, that God is good and God is love. We come to know this by aunty Ifeoma's and Grandfather Nukwus love of God (despite the fact that Papa Nukwu is a Igbo traditionalist with his own religion). Eugene (Kambili's father) is unable to love, no matter his religiosity, he doesn't know what love is. 

Writers such as Charlotte Brontë, Margaret Atwood and in this recent example, Chimanda Ngozi Adichie describe an Orthodox Christian worldview. It's pragmatic, all encompassing yet specific: "We have known and believed the love God hath to us. God is love, and whoever abides in love, abides in God and God in him" (1 John 4:16, Holy Bible) What is love? - Love can be a lot of things, but the same Good Book defines it well in 1 Corinthians 13:4-8 in essence love is not seeking the best for one-self, love is sacrificial, love is wanting the best for others and not only wanting but also doing the best for others before thinking of one self, love is, like Christ, Christlike. Now, unlike in many eastern world religions, such as Hinduism and Buddhism, the Christian doesn't mistake in thinking that he or she is God. God is in us, but we are not God. Therefore the Christian must have a sense of also seeing his or her shortcomings. In Purple Hibiscus the perpetrator, big man Eugene Achike, both believes and behaves like he is a god, and this is also the feeling that Kambili describes, everything revolves around him. He, the big Oga, is the sun and the moon, around which the family rotates in fear of his violence.

Finally after many beatings, the mother, Beatrice, has had enough and with the help of the servant girl, she poisons and kills Eugene, her feared and beloved husband. It was an interesting plot twist. I return to Jezebel's Daughter that I read before this book, and reflect. Who is the true true femme fatale, literally French for deadly woman or lethal woman. On second thought, it's not the angry woman who shakes her fist at patriarchy, but the silent sufferer, the mother of sorrows who one day, just like Jael in the Bible, drives a nail though the enemy's temple. Perhaps the idea of the ever conforming and service minded, enduring wife, turning on her own tyrannical husband is so terrifying a representation for many men, that it hasn't gained as much lasting popularity as the caricature drawn of Jezebel. However I'm glad that Chimanda gave her a voice trough Kambili's story. 

In the end nobody believed that Mama Beatrice killed her husband, and she is then considered a mad (but rich) woman. The madness being that a woman so long oppressed should find it in her to arise. At the end Mama Beatrice says "Thank you" to Kambili. The reader is left wondering, what is she thanking her for? -My thought is that she thanks her daughter for not judging her, not deeming her impossible. 

The story is essentially a sad one, and in the genre of literature by female African authors who again and again repeat how violent and patriarchal the society is, how women and children suffer. How egotistical men are in their societies, professing Christ yet acting anti-Christ (against Christ). Yes, not a very uplifting read, but a necessary one. It's a five out of five read. Chimanda Adichie has all the elements of a great story, yet she maintains a unique voice.