Title: Purple Hibiscus

Author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Review by: Samantha Teta

With Purple Hibiscus, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie illustrates yet again her mastery of narrative composition detailing a heart breaking story of domestic violence and religious fundamentalism.

Set in post-colonial Nigeria characterised by political instability and economic difficulties, Purple Hibiscus is a story about fifteen-year-old Kambili’s world beset with rigid religious upbringing and a Catholic father under whose shadow her family lives.

Eugene, her father, a religious zealot, is generous and politically active in the community but is repressive and a violent figure at home who subjects his wife and children to both physical and psychological cruelty which he justifies as ridding them of sin.

The theme of religion is lies heavily in the interactions between the characters. A call back to colonial times, Eugene rejects his father for his heathen ways forbidding his children from more than 15 minutes of time with him. Kambili’s family lives in abject fear of sinning for punishment from her father includes burning and having a table broken over her mother’s pregnant body.

The story winds masterfully into the disintegration of her family unit and her struggle to grow into maturity. A key period in the story is the when Kambili and her brother are sent to live with their aunt following a militarily coup that threatens her politically active father.

Living with their Aunt Ifeoma and her three children who practice a more liberal form of Catholicism, Kambili and Jaja experience, for the first time, genuine happiness and freedom in the strangeness of being allowed to speak their minds.

There Kambili falls in love for the first time and begins to nurture a personality of her own. Ultimately, a critical mass is reached in terms of the lives of Kambili and the existence of her family when unable to cope with Eugene’s continued violence, his wife poisons him.

Having repeatedly taken blame for his sister’s wrong doings in the past, Jaja blames himself for having not protected his mother and sister from their abusive father and takes the blame for his father’s death.

Jaja ends up in prison. The novel winds up on a cautiously optimistic note highlighting three years later, Kambili a confidents and dependable young woman of eighteen, her brother Jaja hardened but not broken by his experience in prison and their mother in fragile psychological state.

Purple Hibiscus is a sensitive and intimate story that brings a reader the innocence and delicacy of childhood, the struggle of maturing into adulthood and the blurred lines between love and hatred.

Chimamanda Adichie uses her captivating and mature style of writing to artfully endear character to readers in the intimacy of her plot twists and experiences. Her sense of irony is impeccable as she strays lightly into political waters, post-colonial rule and religions.

Purple Hibiscus is a masterpiece of narrative writing punctuated with wisdom pertaining to society and private demons of a family unit. It is a must read.