Why You Need To Read Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Adichie
Hi there! First of all, as always, thank you for liking, reading, and sharing. This is Retro Sunday, the Sunday edition of my Intellectual Sunglasses Newsletter when I select a book that has been published before 2005 - don’t ask me why - and explain as lovingly as I can why these books are worth reading or rereading. For copyright reasons, I refrain from featuring long chunks of the text. This has the added bonus of making this a distraction-free conversation between you all and I. Retro Sunday is very different from what I do on the weekdays when this newsletter is much more about the world on Monday, and about Africa on Wednesday and Friday. So, relax, uncork some wine, find somewhere comfortable, and read.
We did that often, asking each other questions whose answers we already knew. Perhaps it was so that we would not ask the other questions, the ones whose answers we did not want to know.
— Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Adichie.
'Adichie came almost fully made,' Chinua Achebe informs us in a fitting piece of praise that adorned the blurb of Half Of A Yellow Sun. But we can dispense with the almost. To read Purple Hibiscus is to sense without reservation literary talent operating at a high degree of skill. None of this, even for debut novels, is particularly new. None of it, even for young authors, is particularly rare. What sets Purple Hibiscus apart is a balancing dose of restraint, a refreshing absence of any eagerness to impress.
The sentences in Purple Hibiscus are basic, repetitive, and concise; they constitute a lyricism of exacting simplicity. For Adichie in Purple Hibiscus, the story is enough. There is no need to smother it with precision.
The events of the story take place at an unspecified period in Nigeria's history. We know only from the giveaway of martial music on the radioset that this is the military era. There are other hints in the novel which can be employed by the historically aware to provide the story with a more specific context, but they are irrelevant. Adichie's concerns in her debut do not have the sociopolitical scope she will lend them in Half of A Yellow Sun. The success of Purple Hibiscus illustrates that in many cases, by isolating a story out of its social and political environment, you bequeath it a wider, more important necessity.
Kambili is the book's alert narrator. A bookish, closeted, young girl who takes in everything around her with a fine eye for detail but cannot or, more likely, will not comprehend what they all truly mean. This refusal to extend to the reader anything more than the facts make Kambili a rather frustrating window through which to view this tiny world.
Kambili tells us mainly about her father, one of the great characters of postcolonial African fiction. It is not difficult to perceive, early on, the fanatic perfectionism of Eugene Achike, his strict division of the world into clean and tidy absolutes. Eugene, at these times, resembles Archdeacon Frollo of the Hunchback of the Notre Dame, men whose rigid loyalties to their own principles blind them to the hypocrisy of their actions.
To fixate on this, however, is to miss the larger essence of his character and fail to notice that his perfectionism can also conduct itself with grace. When his kidnapped editor's wife visits to lament her husband's condition, Eugene transforms into an effective consoler. Perhaps, the ownership of a newspaper highly critical of a despotic government is to reenact, in the public arena this time, a similar Good v. Evil dichotomy and set yourself up as the good guy. These parallels are not hard to draw.
On the other hand, Adichie realizes that Eugene does not and cannot see himself as a villain. The greatness of her writing is in also realizing that in certain ways, he's justified in avoiding those conclusions. His is merely a morality with no space for ambiguities, with no margins for error, and so with no concessions for humanity. It is a deontology stretched to its extremes.
The bulk of the novel is really how these characters react to and are reacted to by this implacable problem in the centre. All of the other major characters, mostly Eugene's immediate relatives, are counterpoints to his persona. Aunty Ifeoma's relaxed discipline is a contrast to Eugene's inflexible approach. His father's polytheism parallels Eugene's fanatic christianity. Father Amadi's willingness to listen and understand is set unfavourably against Eugene's inability to do any of these things with his family.
Kambili grasps all these. Still, we are in doubts over where her true feelings lie. She does not rebel or speak out or fight back. Even paternal abuse is reported without any commentary, as a fact of her life. The blandness of her reportage inspires to memory Kazuo Ishiguro's own ploys with the technique. The distinction is while Ishiguro's characters telegraph in euphemisms such that the attentive reader infers the existence of problems underneath, Kambili's blandness has nothing behind it - it is merely the result of embracing the truth and releasing it before its full implications become uncomfortable.
Nowhere is this better seen than the scene in which Eugene soaks her feet in scalding water as punishment for being aware of her grandfather's planned visit. There is dark humour here in the asymmetry between the 'crime' and the consequence, a humour whose absurdity recalls the Pentateuch and Roald Dahl's delightfully macabre stories. But the scene's true power arises from the elegance of its restraint: nothing more is said, nothing additional is added. We are unsure of how Kambili fully feels afterwards. We know only that she made efforts to remember the experience in its entirety. We must guess the rest.
This reluctance stands in full contrast to Half of A Yellow Sun, and especially to Americanah, where the female protagonists bare their entire selves open to us like washing spread out in the sun. With these characters, we see too much, we know too much.
In Americanah, Ifemelu tells us everything, down to her preferences for hair. Eventually, we do not even like Ifemelu. She strikes us as someone living life in search of the next reasonable complaint; we tire at her inability to let a thing pass in silence. Where is some 'Kambilian' restraint, you want to ask.
There are only a handful of exceptions where Kambili exceeds the restraint we have to come to expect of her. The most poignant occurs during a conversation with Father Amadi where she expresses her desire to fuse with him like the rivulets of water running down his legs. It's an irresistible metaphor made all the more irresistible because of the impossibility of its realization: He is a celibate priest, and she is a young girl. Nothing will come of this desire.
Why then is it there? What will be Kambili's respite? Her solace? There is maturity here in resisting romantic love as the answer, in insisting that it will not dignify the problems Adichie has so effectively conjured.
When Kambili and her brother return home, it is with increased courage. All that is required for people to stand up is to experience how pleasant it is to be able to sit down on one's own terms. It is Jaja, Kambili's brother, who stands up first, and it is he who consciously, courageously, takes the blame for their mother's poisoning of their father. It is here where one of the few weaknesses of Purple Hibiscus reveals itself: the criminal absence of exploring Jaja's character to any depths.
Adichie, by electing for the intimacy of first-person narration has sometimes reduced the rest of her cast to furniture for her story. The trade-off is we simultaneously know so much and so little at the same time.
It is the same trade-off that persists till the end of the novel. When Kambili and her mother visit a changed Jaja near the end of his prison term, Kambili allows herself a little hope. The new rains will come down soon, she tells us. The sentence ranks among the best closing lines in modern literature. It says there is hope. But there is also reticence. Optimism, but also caution.
Some novels dazzle with light. Adichie, in purple hibiscus, took the harder route: she made it sparkle in the darkness. Purple Hibiscus is the subtle masterpiece of a prodigy. The misfortune of prodigies is to arrive much earlier than everyone and find that they are unable to progress, not only because adulation has a way of lowering the demands they make of themselves, but also because there is in some fundamental sense nowhere else left to go. After all, to come almost fully made is to leave no possibility of growth.
The richly deserved success of Adichie's later fiction is proof that she has evaded these pitfalls. And yet, in Purple Hibiscus, you find a wondrous atrribute in more generous quantities than you would find elsewhere in her oeuvre: a story compellingly told, without diversions or digressions, from commencement to conclusion.
Purple Hibiscus has none of Half of A Yellow Sun's sprawl, none of Americanah's contempt, and none of The Things Around Your Neck's cowardice. It is simply a microscope of human emotion. Nineteen years since, it still does that job perfectly.