Purple Hibiscus

Information and Book Review

Current TurboBookSnob Ranking: 7

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Ms. Adichie was born in Nigeria.  Purple Hibiscus is her first novel, however her writing has won several awards including the 2002 Caine Prize for African Writing.

Purple Hibiscus is the beautiful story of a young woman's coming-of-age, rendered all the more tragic because it is set against the backdrop of a Nigeria violently torn apart by military coups.

Kambili is fifteen years old, the daughter of a wealthy businessman who owns both factories and a newspaper that is sometimes bold enough to tell the truth about the country's political events.

Kambili's Papa is the perfect image of "successful" missionary work, an African Christian who has forsaken the spiritual traditions of his ancestors.   Papa is a devout man, and holds both his family and community to his own fanatical ideals.

Kambili's world slowly starts to unravel from the inside on a pivotal Palm Sunday when her brother Jaja refuses to take communion.  Papa has mapped out Kambili and Jaja's lives in a series of weekly schedules, crammed with studies and worship sessions, and governed by his iron fist of love.  Jaja's unthinkable act of independence and defiance does not fit in with Papa's schedules and prescribed code of conduct, and Papa is furious.

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Things started to fall apart at home when my brother, Jaja, did not go to communion and Papa flung his heavy missal across the room and broke the figurines on the etagere.  We had just returned from church.  Mama placed the fresh palm fronds, which were wet with holy water, on the dining table and then went upstairs to change.  Later, she would knot the palm fronds into sagging cross shapes and hang them on the wall beside our gold-framed family photo.  They would stay there until next Ash Wednesday, when we would take the fronds to church, to have them burned for ash.  Papa, wearing a long, gray robe like the rest of the oblates, helped distribute ash every year.  His line moved the slowest because he pressed hard on each forehead to make a perfect cross with his ash-covered thumb and slowly, meaningfully enunciated every word of "dust and unto dust you shall return."

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