Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Purple Hibiscus won the 2005 Commonwealth Writers Best First Book Prize and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for 2004. Set in a sweltering and politically explosive Nigeria, the novel exposes the cold, calculated domestic violence of a patriarchal father towards his wife, his son, and the main character of the novel, his fifteen-year-old daughter Kambili. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie delivers a tremendously confident narrative drive by revealing the extent of everyday brutality bit-by-bit, violent act after violent act, until it is unbearable. The writing is at times almost clinical in description of barbaric, heartbreaking acts, and rich in its use of Nigerian words peppered through the English. The perpetrator is complex – like many perpetrators he has a shining public persona that hides a penchant for domestic tyranny. Papa Eugene is a fundamentalist Catholic, admired for his unstinting faith, adoring of God the father and Jesus the son, while he ostracises his own earthly father, Papa-Nnukwu, for holding on to traditional spiritual beliefs, and physically abuses his earthly son, Jaja, leaving permanent impairments. He makes ostentatious charitable donations, but allows his father and sister to live in poverty. Through the passage of the novel, with the help of her Aunty Ifeoma, Kambili awakens to the extent of her own terror, to the ways in which her every action, every spoken word, are measured against her father’s judgements, to the absence of happiness and laughter in her life. It’s a brilliant rendering of the magnetism of abusive power. Even when she is released from the overbearing oppression of her father, she wants to see him in her dreams, longs to hug him again. This enduring, irresistible, commonplace attraction victims feels for perpetrators is always a conundrum for me – why do these women keep looking for the approval of men who batter them? Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie doesn’t offer any simplistic, binary models to explain domestic violence, fundamentalist religion or the struggle of post-colonial societies, just insight into their complexity. More power to her. This is a stunning novel.

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