Purple Hibiscus Review
How’s that Bustle Reading Challenge going I hear you cry? Well, I’m two books down and a review behind and so far so good.
I’ll be honest, there are a bunch of books on my other reading lists so I keep getting distracted by excellent books that aren’t part of the challenge. But we’ll get there, slowly but surely.
But I started off with a winner. So much so that it made the obsessive part of my brain kick in and I ended up buying a load more books by the same author and will probably now be distracted by those. I don’t really mind though because Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is an author whose work I’ve been meaning to read for a long time.
I started my Bustle Reading Challenge with Purple Hibiscus (2003), a beautiful novel written by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. I am embarrassed to say that I first became aware of Adichie’s work through her TEDx talk “We should all be feminists” which was famously sampled for the Beyonce Flawless.
I became even more embarrassed about this latter fact when reading up about Adichie I found an interview in which she stated, ‘Another thing I hated was that I read everywhere: now people finally know her, thanks to Beyonce, or: she must be very grateful. I found that disappointing. I thought: I am a writer and I have been for some time and I refuse to perform in this charade that is now apparently expected of me: ‘Thanks to Beyonce, my life will never be the same again’. That’s why I didn’t speak about it much.’
She’s right, she’s a writer and as a writer has a huge amount to say, stories to tell and characters for us to fall in love with. She is more than a Ted Talk speech and Purple Hibiscus demonstrates this to me. The fact that she was around the same age as me when she wrote it astounds me. She has a talent that is deserving of the fame she has gained.
The book focuses on the adolescence of fifteen-year-old Kambili Achike. She lives in a household filled with rules, privilege and abuse. Her father, Eugene, is an Amnesty hero, a religious zealot, arguably racist towards his own people and a domestic abuser. Beatrice, his wife, receives the brunt of his brutality with beatings that cause her miscarriages and result in her repeated hospitalisation. Throughout this Kambili finds solace in her close connection with her older brother, Jaja.
There were huge sections of this book that were entirely foreign to me. They spoke of Nigeria, of religion, of conflict with race and privilege that I myself have never experienced and would never claim to have done. But that is exactly why I took on the challenge, to read about worlds I can never experience. She melds the greater socio-economic climate with her characters and their lives in such a way that one can gain a sense of the political climate without really ever straying from Kambili and her own story. I found the tension between Christianity and traditional Nigerian religious practices particularly fascinating.
There were, however, more universal themes explored such as the public and private face of a family. Eugene is a man of great wealth, importance and success who has been awarded prizes and recognition from human rights charities such as Amnesty International. He stands against the military and is a strict man of God and yet he beats and torments his wife.
But, at its core, Purple Hibiscus is a story of growing up and of change. Both Kambili and Jaja undergrow major transformations, as they are exposed more and more to the world outside of their home. So many of Kambili’s feelings and thoughts are knowable to me despite our vastly different backgrounds. She is an incredibly lovable and sympathetic character and she will probably stay with me for a long time to come. Adichie’s writing is raw and tender allowing the reader to throw themselves headfirst into the narrative and come out the other end crying.
It was a pleasure to read this book, as tough as it was, and I would thoroughly recommend it to anyone. Now on to the next one…
- Tessa Ani
