Kambili's just a fifteen year old girl. Sure, she speaks Igbo in addition to English. She drinks Coke to wash down meals of fufu and onugbu soup. She lives with the daily fear that the government will trick her dissident father by sending him a package that will blow up in his face. Hers is a world of colorful indigenous music, foods with exotic names, and political strife that threads through the fabric of daily routine.
The temptation to view the Nigerian Kambili in a romantically foreign light is great. However, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie author of Purple Hibiscus and a current Writing Seminars graduate student, makes it clear that Kambili is first and foremost an ordinary girl caught up in extraordinary circumstances. With finely tuned insights and soft yet powerful words, Adichie writes of the pains of first love, parental disillusion, and an adolescent soul searching with a grace and maturity that makes her debut novel beautifully affecting and eminently readable.
Kambili, her brother Jaja, and her parents live a life of upper class comfort in Enugu, Nigeria. On the surface, everything is perfect. Her father is a respected and successful businessman, her mother is a paragon of domesticity, and she and her brother are dutiful children and model students. Theirs is a family that attends Mass with strict regularity and lives a pious life that follows the teachings of the Bible to the letter.
However, the gleam of righteousness and wealth hides a situation fraught with abuse, passivity, and restriction. When the hands of Kambili's father aren't raised in praise to the Lord, they are striking his wife and children for perceived moral transgressions, however slight. Kambili's mother, outwardly charming and serene, lives a life of stifled actions and words. As for Kambili and Jaja, they know nothing outside their confined world of family, prayer, and study, neatly structured within the imposing lines and sharply edged blocks of their schedules, drawn and enforced by their father.
Things change when they visit their free-spirited Aunty Ifeoma in the university town of Nsukka. She and her children live a life that is bare of material wealth but rich in ideas and laughter. As Kambili befriends her initially hostile cousin Amaka and falls for the charming and handsome Father Amadi, she must find a way to reconcile her newfound sense of self with her deeply ingrained sense of familial love and loyalty.
The plot moves with a brisk economy that nicely compliments its episodic structure and quick but potent dialogue. Although Kambili is an eminently complex and sympathetic heroine, the other characters in the novel are equally engaging, particularly Amaka, Kambili's activist-in-the-making cousin with a penchant for bright lipstick and "culturally conscious" music, and Papa-Nnukwu, Kambili's easy-going grandfather who practices native forms of worship and finds immense joy in life, despite the hardships it's handed him. Adichie's prose is nothing short of gorgeous, laced with strikingly evocative descriptions that linger in the reader's consciousness.
Purple Hibiscus's weaknesses are few and far between, but for all of its impact, it feels like a wisp of a thing. At times, its deliberateness and delicacy threaten to undermine its keen observations of Nigeria's political system and its uncompromising look at the subjects of faith and religion.
The ending, however, feels a bit discordant, although it befits the novel's stylistic and thematic constructions. Purple Hibiscus's subtlety is one of its strengths, but in the case of the ending, explication would have been quite welcome.
Jason Cowley, a London Times writer and New Statesman literary editor, called Purple Hibiscus "the best debut I have read since Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things." Perhaps such praise is lofty, but Adichie shares Roy's literary gift and deserves her kind of acclaim and success.
The novel is an exquisite piece of writing and an impressive debut from an author of whom the Writing Seminars department ought to proud.
