African Postcolonial Gothic Novels Adichie's Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun

Breaking Gods: An African Postcolonial Gothic Reading of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's
"Purple Hibiscus" and "Half of a Yellow Sun"

Author(s): Lily G. N. Mabura
Source: Research in African Literatures, Vol. 39, No. 1 (Spring, 2008), pp. 203-222
Published by: Indiana University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20109568
Accessed: 02-01-2018 06:23 UTC
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Breaking Gods: An African Postcolonial
Gothic Reading of Chimamanda Ngozi
Adichie's Purple Hibiscus and Half of a
Yellow Sun
LILY G. N. MABURA
University of Missouri-Columbia
ABSTRACT
This article examines Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus (2003)

and Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) through an "African Postcolonial Gothic"
lens. It begins by tracing the historiography and manifestations of Gothic
attributes in precolonial and colonial Africa as exemplified in novels such as
Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart (1959), Mongo Beti's Poor Christ of Bomba
(1971), and Bessie Head's A Question of Power (1974). It then discusses Half
of a Yellow Sun, which explores postindependence ethnic strife in Nigeria,
particularly the Biafra War, and situates it as the historical precedent of
the contemporary haunted setting in Purple Hibiscus. Adichie, I argue, par
ticipates in an ongoing reinvention and complication of Gothic topography
in African literature. She teases out the peculiarities of the genre on the
continent; dissects fraught African psyches; and engages in a Gothic-like
reclamation of her Igbo heritage, including Igbo-Ukwu art, language, and
religion.
Gothic as a literary term emerged in the later eighteenth century and has
been thought by some to have hardly anything to do with the European
Goths who sacked Rome in 410 AD. Some revisionists like Robin Sowerby,
however, note that Edward Gibbon wrote the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
about the time Gothic fiction emerged on the literary scene. Such revisionism links
the word metaphorically to its origins by intimating that Gothic fiction tells tales
of "invasions," which embody transgressions of all sorts, including those across
national, social, sexual, and identity boundaries (Heiland 2-3). Eighteenth-century
Europe evoked the Goths' "fierce avowal of the values of freedom and democracy."
* RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITERATURES, Vol. 39, No. 1 (Winter 2008). ?2008 ?
204 * RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITERATURES
During this time and on to the French Revolution, the Goths were remembered
and admired for their opposition to the tyrannical expansionism of the Roman
Empire, an expansionism that was "subsequently identified with the Catholic
Church" (Botting 5).
Similar opposition to empire and church emerged in twentieth-century
African novels that predate Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus (2003).
In Mongo Beti's The Poor Christ of Bomba (1971), the people of Tala, in colonial
Cameroon, are set in direct contestation with Catholicism much like the Goths
and subsequent eighteenth-century protagonists of Gothic novels. In the novel, Fr.
Drumont-Father Superior of Bomba mission-abandons Tala's residents for three
years for failing to convert to Catholicism or for backsliding to their indigenous
religion and cultural practices, including polygamy. While visiting the village of
Timbo in Tala country, Fr. Drumont asks the local catechist what the people there
think of religion. "Father," the catechist answers, "they say that a priest is no better
than a Greek trader or any other colonialist. [...] They say that you must be hiding
things from them. What about all the whites who live in concubinage with loose
women in the town, do you ever rage against them?" (Beti 20). Fr. Drumont does
not rage about this, not to mention the fact that "he refuses to believe that Zacharia
is really bad" (Beti 10). Already married and with two sons, Zacharia takes sexual
advantage of the sixa girls who live in the mission for "two to four months [doing]
manual work for more than ten hours a day," all in the name of being prepared to
be "mothers of Christian families" (Beti 5). Denis, a fifteen-year-old mission boy
under Fr. Drumont's care, narrates Zacharia's affair with Catherine, one of the
sixa girls. In addition, Denis reveals his own seduction by Catherine and provides
readers with an insight into the eventual collapse of the mission of Bomba, whose
sixa turns into a brothel raging with syphilis.
Seen through a Gothic lens, Denis is reminiscent of the sexually naive priest
Ambrosio who is seduced by Matilda in Mathew G. Lewis's The Monk (1756).
According to Steven Blakemore, "[T]hematically and allusively, Matilda is the
Lovelace-like seducer protesting his innocent intentions, and Ambrosio is like the
damsel whose virtue is threatened" (524). Blakemore argues that "Lewis's point
is that Catholic vows of chastity feminize monks whose sexual ignorance makes
them vulnerable to temptation and hypocrisy" (522). This is the same point that
Beti seems to be making, especially in regard to Denis, whose seduction is filled
with lamentation: "Oh God, what shall I do?"?Denis asks?"I'm so unhappy.
And all because of that cursed girl, that Catherine. Ah! She is Satan herself [...]. I
should have watched out, indeed I should. But how could I have done? How could
I suspect that she wanted to make me do that?" (Beti 81). The parallels between the
initially innocent Ambrosio and Denis and the demonic Matilda and Catherine
enhance the thematic similarity between these two novels and their anti-Catholic
subtexts. Further, Lewis's novel posits that "cloistered 'feminine' virtue is easily
seduced" (Blakemore 524), a point that Beti demonstrates in the seduction of Denis
and the sixa girls. In The Monk and The Poor Christ of Bomba, Catholicism is depicted
as having perverted "pure" religion and produced "deviant sexual practices
originating from 'unnatural' vows of chastity," which violate nature.
Geographic locations aside, novels like Lewis's and Beti's reveal that Gothic
fiction is imbued with "a nostalgic relish for a lost era of romance and adventure,
for a world that, if barbaric, was [...] also ordered [and that in] this respect Gothic
LILY G. N. MABURA M 205
fiction preserves older traditions" (Botting 5). From this it might be argued that
most, if not all, African literature, by virtue of its effort to preserve and reclaim
older traditions and cultures, is imbued with Gothic trappings and demonstrates
varying degrees of commitment to the genre's topography and stock features.
Indeed, such literature in the twentieth century has contributed to the emergence
of the "postcolonial Gothic." As Gina Wisker argues, the "history of postcolo
nial peoples is one that reeks of the elements of horror: silencing, hauntings of
repressed past histories, ghosts, abjection and the split self, [and] colluding with
the ruler" (174). As African novelists like Beti demonstrate, however, "colonized
peoples attempt to maintain and revive indigenous or exiled homeland conditions,
belief, and ways of looking at the world [and] the imaginary" (Wisker 174).
Undoubtedly, the boundaries of the Gothic novel/fiction have widened over
time to include the "Postcolonial Gothic" novel among others. That said, Gothic
fiction has retained certain stock features; it, for example, usually has a castle
setting that is sometimes surrounded by wild and desolate landscapes and dark
forests. Such landscapes, present in early Gothic fiction like Horace Walpole's The
Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story (1764), immediately emerged as well in the mod
ern African novel like Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart (1959). Here the village
of Umuofia stands surrounded by a large forest imbued with both good and evil.
On one hand, the village is host to the sacred python, revered shrines, and sacred
caves like that of Chielo-the priestess of Agbala. And on the other, it is partly the
Evil Forest, a cursed landscape where people who die of evil diseases are buried.
It is also the dumping ground for twins (who are considered evil) and the site for
ritualistic killings such as the oracle-stipulated murder of Okonkwo's adopted
son, Ikemefuna.
Other stock features of Gothic fiction include apparitions, curses, and other
notions of evil; an atmosphere of overwrought emotions, fear, and doom precipi
tated by various notions of evil, ancient prophesies, or the sublime and supernatu
ral; and women in distress?female characters that are often terrified, oppressed,
and driven to psychological disintegration by a powerful tyrannical male who
embodies patriarchal oppression. Indigenous sexism and patriarchy, which were
no strangers to precolonial Africa, were further compounded in the colonial and
postcolonial settings where color and gender served as dual oppressors for women.
This Gothic feature is well exemplified in Bessie Head's A Question of Power (1974).
In this novel, Elizabeth, exiled in Botswana, is driven to a psychological hell by
her abusive lover, Dan. Head's novel can also be read as a tale of a romance gone
bad; indeed, Gothic fiction, from its early beginnings, was a tale of romance. Wal
pole's novel The Castle of Otranto has been described as "a gruesome tale of passion,
bloodshed and villainy" (Cuddon 356). Elements of Gothic romance include a sud
den and passionate love; tension between the female protagonist's true love and
patriarchal control; a painful parting of the lovers; and the threat of illicit love or
lust, usually emanating from some other evil man's desires for the woman or one
of her multiple suitors.
These stock features of Gothic fiction, as already seen, are not a novelty in
African fiction, and writers like Beti, Achebe, and Head are significant when trac
ing the historiography and manifestations of the genre's attributes on the African
continent. That said of Adichie's African literary predecessors, I deem her novel
Purple Hibiscus as encompassing a larger palette of these Gothic stock features than
206 # RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITERATURES
is found in many preceding texts. Hers is, on the whole, a more faithful rendition
of the genre. Further, I argue, Adichie teases out the peculiarities of the "Postco
lonial Gothic" in continental Africa as she dissects fraught African psyches and
engages in a Gothic-like reclamation of her Igbo heritage, including Igbo-Ukwu art,
language, and religion. In the following pages, I flesh out this thought in greater
detail by closely examining Gothic topography and elements in Purple Hibiscus and
their historical roots, which I trace to her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun (2006).
These two novels have been published to wide international acclaim but have so
far generated hardly any significant criticism. By showing Adichie as participating
in an ongoing reinvention and complication of the "African Postcolonial Gothic"
topography, I also hope to attract further scholarly attention to her works.
Purple Hibiscus is set in the South Eastern Nigerian towns of Enugu, Nsukka,
and Abba, which are predominantly Igbo in ethnicity. The main protagonist,
Kambili Achike, almost sixteen, narrates her family's life and history in modern
day Nigeria. She brings the reader into her family's palatial homes in not only
the coal mining town of Enugu, where her father Eugene Achike runs various
businesses, but also in Abba, her paternal ancestral home that the family visits
every Christmas. Kambili is extremely close to her mother, Beatrice, and her older
brother and only sibling, Jaja (possibly named after a historical Nigerian figure,
Jaja of Opobo). A fanatically religious patriarch, Eugene overexerts his children
academically, and his character generally reads like the proverbial oppressive
Gothic patriarch. Kambili and Jaja often seek refuge from him in Nsukka, a uni
versity town, where their paternal aunt, Ifeoma, and her children live. Ifeoma, a
university lecturer, tries to counterbalance Eugene's excesses and often urges an
entrapped and abused Beatrice to leave him. Beatrice, however, is reluctant to do
so, afraid to leave the security Eugene's immense wealth and social status affords
her and the children. In the end, though, Eugene pushes Beatrice to the limit
and she, in turn, poisons him. To protect his mother, Jaja, admits to the crime of
poisoning his father. The novel ends with Jaja in prison, but with the prospect of
freedom in the near future.
This circumvented Igboland setting in modern day Nigeria resounds with
the Gothic subtexts of invasion and trauma, which confine the novel's characters
to this particular region of country. As Adiele Afigbo notes in Ropes of Sand: Stud
ies in Igbo History and Culture, there have been only two times a foreign army has
marched right through all the individually autonomous villages of Igboland: first,
in the late nineteenth century when British imperialism systematically subjugated
the villages by war and gunboat treaty, and, second, in the abortive postindepen
dence Biafra secession war of 1966-67 when Nigerian government forces occupied
the region. Afigbo "contends that colonial rule was a stunning and crucial experi
ence for the Igbo, partly because of its aims and partly because of its methods both
of which occasioned far-reaching changes" in the economic, social, and psycho
logical aspects of Igbo society (283). Adichie's novels Purple Hibiscus and Half of a
Yellow Sun support this claim by Afigbo; however, they also place great emphasis
on the implications of Igbo loss of political, juridical, and sovereign powers under,
first, the colonial government and, second, the Nigerian federal state.
This is the world that Adichie explores in Half of a Yellow Sun. The novel
focuses on the lives of two Igbo adult fraternal twins, Olanna and Kainene, who
have grown up in Lagos where they received an elite private school education
LILY G. N. MABURA * 207
before attending college in England. Their father, Chief Ozobia, "owns half of
Lagos" (HYS 59), but, like his wife, has no formal education. The novel commences
as Olanna, who has just returned from England, is planning to move to Nsukka
to join her Igbo fianc?, Odenigbo, a lecturer at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka.
Olanna, whose name means "Gold's Gold" (58), has smooth skin with "the lush
color of rain-drenched earth" and a "curvy, fleshy body" (23), while Kainene,
whose name means "Let's watch and see what next God will bring" (58), is the
older twin and the complete opposite of Olanna. Richard Churchill, an English
man who falls in love with Kainene, describes her as "almost androgynous" and
with "boyish hips" (60). Kainene plays the role of the son in the family, expanding
the family business in Port Harcourt, brokering military contracts during the
Biafra War, and running an Igbo refugee camp. Chief Ozobia and his wife flee
Nigeria during the war and seek refuge in England while Kainene and Olanna
stay and witness the horror and chaos that ensue. The novel closes at the end of
the war when their parents return to find Olanna alive, but Kainene missing and
her fate unknown.
Half of a Yellow Sun sheds light on postindependence ethnic strife in Nigeria,
which is the historical precedent of Purple Hibiscus. As Olu Oguibe asserts, "The
crisis of the Nigerian state reflected long-standing geographical, religious, and eth
nic divisions [often promoted by the British during the colonial era] between the
predominantly Muslim North and the largely Christian South, as well as between
feudal Yoruba in the West and republican Igbo in the East" (88). There are those,
in Half of a Yellow Sun, for example, who feel that the Igbo people "want to control
everything" in the country and wish that they would "stay in their East" (HYS 227).
Susan, a British expatriate and Richard's former lover, feels that the Igbo are uppity,
clannish, and controlling of markets and describes them, in that regard, as being
"very Jewish" (154). The Igbo, on the other hand, feel discriminated against and
insecure outside Igboland. The largely Islamic Northerners, for example, refuse to
admit Igbo children into Kano schools, forcing the Igbo Union to construct an Igbo
Union Grammar School (38). When the Biafra War erupts, the Igbo lose thousands
of lives and their property and bank accounts are confiscated or destroyed. The
Ozobias, for instance, lose their family house in the predominantly Yoruba capital
city of Lagos, and after the fall of Port Harcourt, Kainene's house. During the war,
the Igbo are beaten back to interior Igbo towns like Abba, Odenigbo's hometown,
where he and Olanna seek refuge from advancing government forces.
It is in towns like Abba, incidentally the Achike family's hometown in Purple
Hibiscus as well, that the Igbo regroup and commence postwar reconstruction.
As such, homes are built in inland towns like Abba, refuges from the haunting
memory of the war and its hurriedly built dirt bunkers. After the war, some Igbo
venture back to larger Igbo towns like Enugu, but the North and Lagos, a histori
cally bloody and haunted landscape for the Igbo, is mostly skirted in Adichie's
Purple Hibiscus. Chinua Achebe's own wartime memories of Lagos reveal that "the
people were jeering and saying, 'Let the Igbo go, food will be cheaper in Lagos.'
That kind of experience"?Achebe says?"is so powerful. It is something I could
not possibly forget. I realized suddenly that I had not been living in my home; I
had been living in a strange place" (225). Thus, in Purple Hibiscus, the harmattan
blows and brings with it the smells of the North and the Sahara, but the Igbo in
this novel do not venture back, due to memories akin to those voiced by Achebe:
gone is the real essence of the North like Olanna in Half of a Yellow Sun experiences
while visiting relatives and her former boyfriend, Mohammed, in Kano. There,
"the sand was fine, gray, and sun-seared, nothing like the clumpy red earth back
home [Igboland]; the trees were tame, unlike the bursting greenness that sprang
up and cast shadows on the road to Umunnachi [her paternal hometown]. Here,
miles of flatland went on and on" (37).
Adichie's literary emphasis of Igbo reluctance to leave the confines of their
ethnic homeland after the Biafra War seems to counter early reports, such as those
by John de St. Jorre, who in his "Nigerian Civil War Notebook," contended that
the Igbo elite, "plumb, even sleek," would "often pitch up in Lagos in their own
cars" and shop at the Kingsway department store "before looking for their old
jobs" (37). In his 1971 article, which appeared in Transition, St. Jorre claimed that
these formerly "fanatical Biafrans" appeared "to have adjusted themselves to the
prewar situation with remarkable speed" (37). The circumscribed world of Purple
Hibiscus, like Achebe's haunted war memories, contests this generalized opinion
of the Igbo elite. Olu Oguibe, an Igbo who was caught in the midst of the war as a
child, speaks of his feelings on the matter in a 1998 article, "Lessons from the Kill
ing Fields," in a manner congruent with both Adichie and Achebe. In retrospect,
Oguibe says that he "was raised under the blanket of silence that Nigeria draped
over Biafra at her defeat," and that he "grew up inside that silence" believing in
the idea of Nigeria that many easterners had originally fought for during inde
pendence from the British until "it became increasingly apparent" that he was
surrounded by people who were not his own, "people who, at a moment's notice,
trade the idea of unity for personal or sectarian gain." It is on this bloody history of
a two-and-a-half-year secession war that is claimed to have caused over a million
deaths from "military action, disease and starvation" (Nixon 473); a suppressed
nostalgia for the North; and the effects of imperial and mission expansionism, that
the Achike family in Purple Hibiscus is psychologically grounded before "things
[start] to fall apart" (PH 3). Eugene and Beatrice, who have most likely experienced
both Nigerian independence from the British and the Biafra War as young adults,
are raising their two children as Oguibe was raised?under "a blanket of silence."
They, as Oguibe, are "Biafra's children."
The setting, Eugene's house, is a crucial Gothic element, and I wish to spend
some time locating it within the Gothic tradition. As in a typical Gothic plot
where the castle serves as the "major locus," the Achike family house in Enugu is
"gloomily predominant" (Botting 2). Kambili describes the house as "spacious" but
"suffocating" (PH 7) in a standard Gothic metonymy of gloom and horror: the yard
is "wide enough to hold a hundred people dancing atilogu, spacious enough for
each dancer to do the usual somersaults and land on the next dancer's shoulder,"
but like the generic Gothic castle it is imbued with a sense of entrapment?"the
compound walls," Kambili notes, are "topped by coiled electric wires" and were
so high she could not see cars driving by on their street (PH 9).
According to Botting, Gothic landscapes are desolate, suggestive of violence
and menacing (2). The labyrinthine nature of these spaces, which are sometimes
occupied and sometimes abandoned, is as well exemplified in the Achike family
house in Abba. This four-story white house, with a "spurting fountain in front"
(PH 55), has wide hotel-like passages, and is riddled with "the impersonal smell
of doors kept locked most of the year, of unused bathrooms and kitchens and
toilets, of uninhabited rooms" and two upper-level floors that have not been used
for years (58).
Alluding to the significance of such Gothic settings to the plot, Botting sees
them as signaling "the spatial and temporal separation of the past and its values
from those of the present," and it is from "the reappearance of figures long gone,"
in these spaces, that the Gothic pleasures of horror and terror emanate (PH 2). Fur
ther, the labyrinthine quality of the Gothic castle is assumed to mirror the fraught
psyches of its inhabitants, and point to the genre's concern with psychological
and social disintegration (Botting 7). Eugene Achike and his family present an
ideal case study for Botting's premise. The family's two castle-like households are
domestic sites of contestation between the past and the present.
As a Gothic setting on the Igbo landscape and much of the rest of Africa, the
Achike castle-like house is a progression from the wild sublime forest setting, like
we find in Achebe's Things Fall Apart. As Kambili describes it, this is a modern
opulent space housing wealthy African elite. Preceding it on this Gothic landscape
was the intermediary middle-class house, a medium-sized stone structure, usu
ally with two or three bedrooms, housing a rising African middleclass mainly
composed of teachers. We see one such setting through Ugwu's perspective in
Half of a Yellow Sun:
Ugwu [Odenigbo's household servant from the village] had never seen a room so
wide. Despite the brown sofas arranged in a semi-circle, the side tables between
them, the shelves crammed with books, and the center table with a vase of red
and white plastic flowers, the room still seemed to have too much space. [...] He
looked up at the ceiling, so high up, so piercingly white. He closed his eyes and
tried to reimagine this spacious room with the alien furniture, but he couldn't.
He opened his eyes, overcome by a new wonder, and looked around to make
sure it was all real. To think that he would sit on these sofas, polish this slippery
smooth floor, wash these gauzy curtains. (4-5)
Ugwu's counterpart in Purple Hibiscus is the longtime Achike housemaid,

Sisi, who procures poison from her uncle, "a powerful witch doctor" (PH 290),
and gives it to Beatrice. This is the poison Beatrice uses to eliminate her husband.
Poisons, bad medicine, and witchcraft evoke terror, a "powerful and emotive" ele
ment of the horror story (Cuddon 399)?the horror story itself being a literary form
that derives from the Gothic novel (Cuddon 394). The horror story, Cuddon says,
"explores the limits of what people are capable of doing and experiencing [...]; all
that lies on the dark side of the mind and the near side of barbarism; what lurks
on and beyond the shifting frontiers of consciousness [. . .] and where, perhaps,
there dwell[s] ultimate horrors or concepts of horror and terror" (389). This notion
of the horrific that is found in Purple Hibiscus is also explored in Half of a Yellow
Sun. Here Odenigbo's mother, for example, calls Olanna "an abnormal woman"
and a witch who did not suck her mother's breasts, as if alluding to Olanna's twin
birth, which was once considered an evil phenomenon within Igbo tradition. She
is against the idea of Olanna's marriage to her son and claims that she comes from
a family of lazy beggars in Umunnachi and that her father, formerly a tax-collector,
amassed his wealth by stealing from hardworking people (HYS 96-97). In defense
of his mother, Odenigbo tells Olanna that she is merely an uneducated victim of
their postcolonial world. He argues that she "had no say in whether or not [she]
wanted this new world" and had "not been given the tools to negotiate" it (101). It
is the ever superstitious Ugwu, however, who seems to see beyond Odenigbo's
modern reasoning and feels that his mother is up to something evil, that perhaps
she wants to "tie up Olanna's womb or cripple her or, most frightening of all, kill
her" (98). His worries are realized when he sees "more than a hundred fat green
ish flies" by the kitchen sink, "a sign of bad medicine from the dibia" (215). It later
emerges that Odenigbo, under a spell of his mother's making, impregnated Amala,
the young village girl that she brings to his house. Amala bears a girl, Chiamaka.
It is this child, nicknamed Baby, whom Odenigbo and Olanna-unable to bear any
children themselves-adopt as theirs.
The clash between dibia medicine and the modern postcolonial world as
exemplified in Adichie's novels has its roots in the late nineteenth century when
the two worlds came in contact for the first time in Igboland. While Odenigbo is
right in claiming that the old world, such as that of the dibia, has not been given
tools to negotiate the new world, so too is Ugwu in his suspicion that this past is
resentful of the new world and consistently raids or haunts it in a bid to reverse the
status quo. Felix K. Ekechi in his paper on Roman Catholic missionary strategy in
Igboland says that "the combined force of missionary evangelism and European
colonial power dealt a considerable blow to the social status and prestige of nde
dibia [medicine men]" and that the dibias, in turn, exhibited "relentless hostility
toward Christian elements" (225). Ekechi, drawing from M. M. Green's Ibo Vil
lage Affairs (1947), reveals that in times of sickness, death, or an unforeseen crisis,
dibias were "expected to make ogwe, (medicine) either for group protection or for
individual cures and protection" (224); the Igbo, however, were drawn to European
medicine particularly during the dysentery epidemic of 1890, which the local dibias
were unable to stem (221). This, according to Ekechi, forced the Igbo to recognize
"the potency of the white man's medicine" (224). In such a manner, Christian mis
sions challenged the influence of dibias, "eroded some of their traditional roles in
society," shrank their economic resources, and at times created "outright disbelief"
in their supernatural powers (224-25).
It is the possible Gothic reappearance and influence of this Igbo past that
Eugene Achike, in Purple Hibiscus, fights in his modern Igbo household?a setting
that, after the manner of the Gothic castle, represents possible desubjectification.
Expounding on this central Gothic motif, David Punter and Glennis Byron in The
Gothic posit that herein "one may be 'subjected' to a force that is utterly resistant
to the individual's attempt to impose his or her own order" (261-62), as happens
to Eugene.
Despite Eugene's eventual demise, we cannot help but marvel at the Catholic
fort he has erected against his Igbo cultural past. The novel's very structure is
reflective of this. That form complements function towards this goal is discernable
in Adichie's decision to divide the novel into the following four sections: "Break
ing Gods?Palm Sunday"; "Speaking with Our Spirits?Before Palm Sunday";
"The Pieces of Gods?After Palm Sunday"; and "A Different Silence?The Pres
ent." God's day of rest, the Sabbath or the Christian Sunday, is both a literal and
metaphorical device serving as the novel's structural linchpin.
The metaphorical significance of the Sabbath can be found in various reli
gious texts, including Aelred of Rievaulx's Speculum Caritatis. Aelred was a twelfth
century Cistercian monk who noted that the Sabbath had no morning nor evening
and that "it stood outside Creation and belonged to the divine order alone." Linked
to this was Aelred's idea of the connectedness of Sabbaths, each leading to the next
as the soul rose ever higher, each Sabbath a stepping stone, as it were, to the Sab
bath of Sabbaths, which "brings with it the vision of God" (Chevalier and Gheer
brant 817-18). Seen in this light, the structure of Purple Hibiscus and the world that
its characters inhabit acquire a deeply religious significance. The characters live in
a cloistered Catholicism partly of Roman-colonial making and partly of Eugene's
making, and they aspire to Aelred's idea of Sabbath of Sabbaths. The Achike family,
for example, is practically monastic in regard to prayer-they say the rosary even
while traveling (PH 54) and listen to "Ave Maria" on cassette (31). In addition, the
children, Jaja and Kambili, are strapped with a rigorous academic schedule reflec
tive of a Catholic work ethic that demands "serious and constant effort" (Ekechi
226) from its Igbo converts. Kambili reveals that their schedules have "meticu
lously drawn lines, in black ink, cut[ting] across each day, separating study from
siesta, siesta from family time, family time from eating, eating from prayer, prayer
from sleep" (PH 23-24). As the Holy Ghost Fathers argued in their early mission
ideology, a life any less demanding would hardly distinguish them from "pagans"
(qtd. in Ekechi 226)?a label that the Holy Ghost Fathers generally associated with
traditional Igbo religion and, increasingly, to Protestantism as well.
In this progressive Sabbath of the Achike family, Eugene looms as large
as God. His almost omnipotent influence even extends to their local church, St.
Agnes, where Father Benedict refers to him in the same context as the pope and
Jesus. "During his sermons," Kambili says, "Father Benedict usually referred to
the pope, Papa, and Jesus?in that order. He used Papa to illustrate the gospels"
(PH 4). Eugene makes the biggest donations to Peter's pence and St. Vincent de
Paul; almost single-handedly funds St. Agnes in Enugu; is the publisher of the
Standard?the only newspaper that dares speak the truth about a corrupt and
poorly governed Nigeria; and is the recipient of a prestigious human rights award
from Amnesty World (5).
But for all its divine intentions, this Sabbath-like world is riddled with the
remains of the empire in the form of British missionaries like Father Benedict whom
Kambili notes "still looked new"?he would not tan, not even after "the fierce heat
of seven Nigerian harmattans." Father Benedict deems Igbo unacceptable; it can
never be the language in which the liturgy is said, and he insists upon a Latin
recital of the Credo and Kyrie. When he does concede to the use of Igbo, in the form
of offertory songs, he calls the songs "'native' [with] his straight-line lips turned
down at the corners to form an inverted U" (PH 4). Kambili reveals that Eugene
acquiesces to Father Benedict's views of Igbo language and even makes the point
of speaking with a British accent when around white missionaries: "Papa changed
his accent when he spoke, sounding British, just as he did when he spoke to Father
Benedict. He was gracious, in the eager-to-please way that he always assumed with
the religious, especially with the white religious" (46), Kambili says.
From this we see that while the actual colonialists have seemingly left the
postindependence scene, the language[s] of colonization have not. These lan
guages have, instead, attained vehicular status as bureaucratic languages of the
state and robbed many indigenous languages like Igbo their cultural, religious,
commercial and educational functions. Afigbo traces the dilemma of the Igbo
language and culture to colonialism, Catholicism, and nationalism.
212 M RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITERATURES
Afigbo says that the "colonial government did not and could not show enough
interest in promoting the study of the language in view of the limited and selfish
objectives of colonialism. It was not one of the aims of colonialism to preserve the
cultural identity of subject peoples. [. . .] Hence there were powerful individuals
and interests in colonial circles who felt that the Igbo language should be allowed
to die a natural death as this would promote the spread of English" (384). The crisis
of the Igbo language, Afigbo continues, was further exacerbated by the Catholic
Protestant conflict in Igboland, a factor that was lacking in other parts of Nigeria
like the Yoruba territory, where the British-based protestant Church Missionary
Society (CMS) chose Yoruba as the language of instruction, and in the North
where Christian missions were restricted "while encouraging traditional Koranic
education and [the use of] Hausa as the second language of administration" (381).
Inevitably, there are those who argue that the CMS had hidden motives for this,
like hindering their trainees from moving to English-speaking Government
appointments and enterprises or the likelihood that they were white supremacists
who "wanted to deny Africans competence in English" (Afigbo 379). In the end
though, Afigbo notes, the Catholic approach was more popular: "Bishop Shanahan,
the premier missionary of the Catholic Mission in Igboland, went all out to bring
home to the people the overwhelming advantages of knowledge of the English
language and therefore, by implication, that it was a waste of time and resources to
attend Protestant schools" (379). Shanahan argued "that the principal impetus for
their [Catholic] aggressive education policy was the desire to destroy 'the citadel
of satan' [sic] in the country," but records indicate that the Roman Catholics were
actually "deeply anxious to outdo the Protestants" (Ekechi 257). Afigbo asserts
that this "down-to-earth, if also cynically materialistic, argument [. . .] carried
more weight than whatever the C.M.S. authorities could present as the advantages
of reading the Holy Writ in Igbo" (380). Presently, with "this material-success
oriented psychology few came to give any thought to proficiency and competence
in Igbo language since this would lead nobody anywhere. In fact any attempt to
emphasize the teaching of Igbo came to be looked upon as a satanic waste of time
[and] an imperialist plot to delay the prompt arrival of the Igbo nation" (383). To
avoid losing their converts, the CMS, which had up to about 1913 resisted a com
plete diet of English programs in their schools, was forced to give in (380), paving
the way for what Afigbo calls an "English deluge" in Igboland (381).
This is the Colonial-Romanist project that Father Benedict fosters and Eugene
Achike embraces in Purple Hibiscus. The appearance of a young newly ordained
reformist Igbo priest, Father Amadi, reintroduces past anxieties and fears for
people like Father Benedict and Eugene as they are against his reclamation of Igbo
language and song. Fr. Amadi's Gothic nostalgia for a lost era and his intentions of
preserving an older tradition set him in contestation with prevailing postcolonial
values. Invited to say Mass at St. Agnes, Father Amadi breaks into an Igbo song
halfway through his sermon: "Bunie ya enu . . . ," he sings. In response, Kambili
notes, the "congregation drew in a collective breath, some sighed, some had their
mouths in a big O. They were used to Father Benedict's sparse sermons, to Father
Benedict's pinch-your-nose monotone. Slowly they joined in. I watched Papa
purse his lips. He looked sideways to see if Jaja and I were singing and nodded
approvingly when he saw our sealed lips" (PH 28).
Following the sermon, Eugene, on his way to visit Father Benedict in the
parish residence with his family like they always did after Mass, inadvertently
launches an attack on Father Amadi: "That young priest, singing in the sermon like
a Godless leader of one of these Pentecostal churches that spring up everywhere
like mushrooms. People like him bring trouble to the church. We must remember
to pray for him" (PH 29). In a single mouthful, Eugene, without really pointing to
the real crux of the issue, which is the use of Igbo language and song, tags Father
Amadi as "Godless," "Pentecostal," and "trouble." To eliminate the threat Father
Amadi poses, he resorts to the old "satanic" (Afigbo 383) rhetoric that was used
against the language during colonialization.
Father Amadi's threat, however, is not that easily done away with and despite
Eugene's efforts, it lodges itself in Kambili and Jaja and can be said to contribute to
their ensuing revolt. His threat is not only leveled against linguistic imperialism,
but materialism as well, both of which Afigbo traces to colonialism and Roman
Catholicism in Igboland. Father Amadi, Kambili notices, "did not say how beauti
ful our St. Agnes altar was [...] with its steps that glowed like polished ice blocks.
Or that it was one of the best altars in Enugu, perhaps even in the whole of Nige
ria. He did not suggest, as all the other visiting priests had, that God's presence
dwelled more in St. Agnes, that the iridescent saints on the floor-to-ceiling stained
glass windows stopped God from leaving" (PH 28). By refusing to acknowledge
St. Agnes's material opulence, Father Amadi undercuts the value placed on such
possessions in the postcolonial Igbo society of which Eugene is a leading member.
Further, by not affirming that God lives in this space, he essentially undermines
its sanctity. From this, one may deduce that Father Amadi is actually anti-Catholic,
at least in regard to the brand of Catholicism introduced in Igboland?a three
pronged brand that mainly consisted of evangelization, education, and provision
of health services, and a brand that many scholars have noted was specifically
formulated to outdo the thirty years or so of a CMS head start in Igboland. By the
time the Catholic Holy Ghost Fathers arrived in Onitsha in 1885, the CMS was
firmly established in the region, having started missions at Calabar in 1846 and
in Onitsha in 1857 (Ekechi 218).
Unlike Father Amadi, Eugene seems to reject or ignore the calculated maneu
vers and historical short comings of the Catholic Church in Igboland. His failure
to adequately examine these shortcomings and their consequences leaves him
vulnerable to a seemingly vanquished Igbo past: bad dibia medicine. His blind
refusal to acknowledge any of these Catholic flaws is apparent from the very
beginning, a situation that enhances the novel's standing as a Gothic cautionary
tale against absolutism. When the novel opens, for instance, Eugene confronts Jaja
over his refusal to take communion and Jaja explains himself by saying that the
priest, presumably Father Benedict, keeps touching his mouth and that nauseates
him (PH 6). Eugene ignores this charge of licentiousness and threat to Jaja's virtue
and angrily flings the missal at him: this Kambili notes, is when "things started
to fall apart" (3).
A similar charge is also leveled against the Catholic Church in Adichie's
Half of a Yellow Sun. During the Biafran War, Kainene is instrumental in turning a
former primary school into a refugee camp (HYS 347). Assisting with relief food
distribution and other camp duties are two Holy Ghost priests, Father Marcel and
Father Jude. When a small girl, Urenwa, is discovered to be pregnant, it unravels

that Father Marcel "f***s most of them before he gives them the crayfish" that
Kainene slaves to get into the refugee camp and that Father Jude does nothing
about it (398). In this traumatic Igbo landscape of naked and starving war children
with "taut globes" for bellies, "buttocks and chests [that] were collapsed into folds
of rumpled skin" and spurts of black hair gone red from kwashiorkor (348), we find
a Catholicism gone profane in a manner not unlike that of The Monk.
Catholic priests such as Purple Hibiscus's Father Amadi, are depicted as break
ing away from this Gothic perception of Catholicism as perverted. Father Amadi,
who belongs to the order of The Fathers of the Blessed Way (unlike Fathers Bene
dict, Marcel, or Jude, who belong to the Holy Ghost Fathers), seems to advocate
for a new direction or an amendment of Catholic evangelical strategy in Igboland.
He seems symbolically set up for this role from his seat at St. Peter's Catholic
Chaplaincy, University of Nigeria, Nsukka. His association with the name St. Peter
connotes that he is the rock on which the new is to be founded.
The location of Father Amadi's chaplaincy and the University of Nigeria in
Nsukka adds to this Gothic revivalist sentiment. To this day Nsukka, unlike most
of Igboland, has remained a cultural stronghold. Afigbo, in Ropes of Sand, notes
that "The Nsukka area?with its aggressively alive Odo and Omabe masquerades,
guilds of titled men swinging [. ..] happily to village meetings and markets (and
almost to church), its child marriages and puberty rites?does not fit into the usual,
picture of an Igboland that lost its social and cultural identity with colonial con
quest" (351). This is something that Kambili and Jaja immediately sense of Nsukka
and something of which their father, Eugene, is wary. While visiting St. Peter's,
Kambili notes that it "did not have the huge candles or the ornate marble altar of St.
Agnes. The women did not tie their scarves properly around their heads, to cover
as much hair as possible. I watched them as they came up for offertory. Some just
draped see-through black veils over their hair; others wore trousers, even jeans.
Papa would be scandalized. A woman's hair must be covered in the house of God,
and a woman must not wear a man's clothes, especially in the house of God, he
would say" (PH 240).
Even more surprising for Kambili, Father Amadi displays extreme concern
for her grandfather, Papa-Nnukwu, with whom Eugene has cut ties and consis
tently refers to as a "pagan" and a "heathen." Father Amadi, in contrast, inquires
after Papa-Nnukwu "as though [he] were his own relative" (PH 163-64). On her
part, Aunt Ifeoma offers Kambili the following explanation of Papa-Nnukwu:
"[She] said Papa-Nnukwu was not a heathen but a traditionalist, that sometimes
what was different was just as good as what was familiar, that when Papa
Nnukwu did his itu-nzu, his declaration of innocence, in the morning, it was the
same as our saying the rosary" (166). Thus, the likes of Aunt Ifeoma and Father
Amadi affect what could be seen as a Gothic reformist change in Kambili and Jaja.
And this is not only in regard to traditional Igbo religion and customs, but Igbo
language as well.
As Afigbo notes in Ropes of Sand, "the main danger to the Igbo language is
the belief that proficiency in it cannot bring one material success or visible influ
ence and power or reveal to one the wonderful world of the atom" (383). Afigbo
envisions a solution to the problem by proposing to "replace that system with
another which will inculcate a balanced vision of life as it really is or demonstrate
that the man proficient in Igbo language and versed in Igbo culture can also attain
to as much" (383; emphasis in original). Aunt Ifeoma, who teaches at the Institute
of African Studies at the University of Nsukka, and Father Amadi embody such
characters for Kambili. While they are not as materially successful as Eugene
Achike, they are visibly influential in their defiance of prevailing negative percep
tions of Igbo language and culture and are critical of government autocracy and
failures. Indeed, it is defiant academics like Ifeoma who partly fueled the raiding
of Nsukka during the Biafra War. Adichie's novel perceives the university as a
"microcosm of the country" (PH 224) and defiance within it is symbolic of defiance
within the very state of Nigeria. It comes as no surprise, therefore, when in Half of
a Yellow Sun Adichie writes that "Ugwu had heard that the Nigerian soldiers had
promised to kill five percent of Nsukka academics" (HYS 422)?this percentile, by
insinuation, being Igbo.
The two heroines of Half of a Yellow Sun, Olanna and Kainene, also embody
this defiant Gothic prototype that goes against prevailing Igbo social norms. These
sisters are fluent in both English and Igbo. Ugwu, upon meeting Olanna, remarks
that her "Igbo words were softer than her English, and he was disappointed at
how easily they came out. He wished she would stumble in her Igbo; he had not
expected English that perfect to sit beside equally perfect Igbo" (HYS 23).
This Gothic-like reclamation of Igbo language and culture, "which the recent
[Biafra] war had done so much to blast further" (Afigbo 383), is underscored in Half
of a Yellow Sun by the character of Richard Churchill. Richard learns Igbo against
all odds and is nearly fluent (136). Richard's novel, intertextually fragmented and
interwoven in the main narrative, is titled In the Time of Roped Pots. Apart from
documenting the horrors of the Biafra War, the book celebrates Igbo-Ugwu art.
Richard reveals that he is "very interested in Igbo-Ukwu art" and that he wants
to make it a "central part of the book": "I've been utterly fascinated by the bronzes
since I first read about them"?Richard tells Okeoma, a Nsukka academic?"The
details are stunning. It's quite incredible that these people had perfected the com
plicated art of lost-wax casting during the time of the Viking raids. There is such
marvelous complexity in the bronzes, just marvelous" (HYS 111).
In her article on the Treasures of Ancient Nigeria exhibit, Suzanne P. Blier
notes that the "earliest of the cire perdue castings were those from Igbo-Ukwu
(ninth through tenth centuries). These castings, stylistic anachronisms in African
art, include a number of vessels and staff heads decorated with a profusion of
insects and interlace" and many are without peer (234; emphasis in original). Her
observations are very much in line with Richard's and the Gothic cultural reclama
tion that Adichie seems intent on in both Half of a Yellow Sun and Purple Hibiscus.
Afigbo notes that the "cultural renaissance which from the beginning had been
an essential aspect of African nationalism had by and large passed Igboland by"
(383). Present-day writers like Adichie seem to have taken Afigbo's observations
to heart and made an obvious effort to readdress the matter.
Indeed, Adichie sets up this Gothic cultural reclamation project at the very
heart of the conflict between Eugene Achike and his children. When a sickly
Papa-Nnukwu arrives at Aunt Ifeoma's house in Nsukka so that he might get
medical attention at the university hospital, Kambili and Jaja, who are visiting
too, get to spend more time with him than is usually allowed by their father?
"fifteen minutes" each Christmas in Abba (PH 63) and with strict orders not to eat
or drink anything given to them least desecrate their "Christian tongue[s]" with
"food sacrificed to idols" (69). It is during this period that Kambili's cousin, Amaka,
declares her intention to paint their grandfather on the verandah (169). Watching
them, Kambili notes Amaka and Papa-Nnukwu "understood each other, using the
sparest words," and that she felt a longing for something that she knew she could
never have (165). Admiring Amaka's artistic skills, Papa-Nnukwu tells Kambili
that her "cousin paints well" and that in "the old days, she would have been cho
sen to decorate the shrines of [the] gods" (164). From the very onset of the novel,
Kambili confesses that she was prone to examining Papa-Nnukwu "for signs of
difference, of Godlessness" and that even though she did not see any, she, like her
father insisted, "was sure they were there somewhere" (63). In Nsukka, however,
this opinion of Papa-Nnukwu as godless changes when Kambili sees him perform
ing his itu-nzu. In this scene Kambili acknowledges that she was surprised and
radically affected by the realization that her grandfather prayed for her own father
"with the same earnestness he prayed for himself and Aunt Ifeoma" (168). In Papa
Nnukwu, therefore, Eugene faces the real threat of his children's Gothic devolu
tion to the "pagan" stage he perceives himself to have escaped. Indeed, Kambili
acknowledges that Papa-Nnukwu's death, which occurs soon after this scene,
"had overshadowed everything [and] pushed Papa's face into a vague place" (187).
Eugene makes matters worse when he appears in Nsukka in favor of a Catholic
burial and inquires if Ifeoma had called for a priest to give Papa-Nnukwu "extreme
unction" (188). Ifeoma rejects the offer, insisting that Papa-Nnukwu would be bur
ied according to Igbo tradition. It is during this conflict that Amaka offers Kambili
the unfinished painting of Papa-Nnukwu as a memento.
Inevitably, this painting engenders the dramatic climax of the novel. When
Kambili and Jaja return to Enugu with their father, he scalds their feet with hot
water as punishment for sharing a house with a "pagan" and not informing him
of it. Regardless of the terror that Eugene metes and the day long novenas he
begins to say with Father Benedict as if in response to things gone badly on the
family and business fronts (the government shuts down his factories in retalia
tion to anti-government rhetoric in his newspaper), Kambili and Jaja hold on to
Papa-Nnukwu's painting. When Eugene, eventually, discovers the painting he flies
into a terrible rage and rips it apart. Kambili then reveals that perhaps that is what
she and Jaja had wanted to happen "without being aware of it," that perhaps they
had "all changed after Nsukka?even Papa?and things were destined to not be
the same, to not be in their original order" (PH 208-09). With the painting now in
shreds, Kambili realizes that it "already represented something lost," something
that she never had and "would never have" (210). In desperation, she rushes to
the dashed pieces of the painting on the floor, as if in saving them she would be
saving Papa-Nnukwu (210). It is then that Eugene?swearing against Godlessness,
heathen worship and hellfire?kicks her with the "metal buckles on his slippers"
until she is unconscious and has to be admitted to hospital (210-11).
Eugene, who has hitherto, relied on a "blanket of silence" to keep his violent
outbursts from leaking out, suddenly finds himself with an unprecedented chal
lenge?that of Father Amadi, who appears on the scene as Kambili's champion. In
congruence with Gothic tradition, Father Amadi is cast as the Gothic lover disap
proved of by the father figure, and as tradition demands, is fated to be separated
from his love. This happens at the end of the novel when the church sends him to
LILY G. N. MABURA ? 217
Germany. Before his departure, however, Father Amadi is instrumental in helping

Kambili [and Jaja] break the blanket of silence over their lives and grasp life by the
horns, so to speak. Father Amadi, in his charming, gregarious manner, instills in
Kambili the notion that she can do anything she wants (PH 239). He is somewhat
reminiscent of the dashing Father Ralph de Bricassart in Colleen McCullough's The
Thorn Birds. As Father Ralph draws little Meggie from Drogheda, an embodiment
of Mary Carson's own "particular brand of imperial malevolence" (McCullough
51), so does Father Amadi draw Kambili from her silent and mute existence. "He
had a singer's voice," Kambili says, "a voice that had the same effect on my ears
that Mama working Pears baby oil into my hair had on my scalp. I did not fully
comprehend his English-laced Igbo sentences at dinner [in Aunt Ifeoma's house]
because my ears followed the sound and not the sense of his speech. [. . .] Father
Amadi included Jaja and me in the conversation, asking us questions. I knew the
questions were meant for both of us because he used the plural 'you,' unu, rather
than the singular, gi" (PH 135-36).
To Kambili, Father Amadi seems to depart from Fr. Benedict's protocol-laced
ways. Unlike Father Benedict, whose interaction with his congregation seems
very formal, Father Amadi, with skin of a "fired-clay" shade (PH 221), is informal,
outgoing, and generally lives an uncloistered, antimonastic lifestyle. Arriving at
Aunt Ifeoma's early one morning to bring her the petrol she needs to fetch a sickly
Papa-Nnukwu from Abba, Kambili notes that he looked "even more unpriestly
than before, in khaki shorts that stopped just below his knees. He had not shaved,
and in the clear morning sunlight, his stubble looked like tiny dots drawn on his
jaw" (150).
Kambili's love for Father Amadi comes swiftly: "I had seen [his] small Toyota
hatchback only twice before, but I could point it out anywhere" (PH 163), she says.
"Even in the priestly garb, his loping, comfortable gait pulled my eyes and held
them" (163). Father Amadi, Kambili reveals, is "like blue wind, elusive" (176) as he
dashes up and down the football field, daring Kambili to use her good running
legs, and provoking laughter in a Kambili who says that she was not sure she had
ever heard herself laugh (176-79).
Conversely, Father Amadi's love for Kambili is no secret, and it is common
knowledge that she is his "sweetheart" in Aunt Ifeoma's household, which he vis
its frequently (PH 225). When Kambili is admitted in hospital, Father Amadi voices
his intention of speaking to Father Benedict, who he hopes will pressure Eugene
to put Kambili and Jaja in a boarding school and, consequently, out of harm's way
(269). Amaka, Kambili's cousin, tells her that Father Amadi was "really worried"
during her hospitalization and "it wasn't just priestly concern" (219); "he sounded
like a person whose wife was sick" (220).
In this manner, Purple Hibiscus is imbued with an intoxicating element of
Gothic romance. Father Amadi is cast as Kambili's true Gothic love and can hardly
be viewed in the same light as the corrupting love of cloistered Catholicism as
embodied in Mathew Lewis's Ambrosio or Father Marcel in Half of a Yellow Sun.
Within the Gothic novel, the later end in desecration of feminine virtue, and in
Ambrosio's case, even death and bloodshed. With Father Amadi, it is different:
their unconsummated love gives her grace, Kambili says, and they achieve such
a spiritual union, such a higher love, that Obiora, Kambili's cousin, remarks on it.
Kambili offers the reader a window into her heart:
Amaka [her cousin] says that people love priests because they want to compete
with God, they want God as a rival. But we are not rivals, God and I, we are
simply sharing. I no longer wonder if I have a right to love Father Amadi; I sim
ply go ahead and love him. I no longer wonder if the checks I have been writing
to the Missionary Fathers of the Blessed Way are bribes to God; I just go ahead
and write them. I no longer wonder if I chose St. Andrew's church in Enugu as
my new church because the priest there is a Blessed Way Missionary Father as
Father Amadi is; I just go. (PH 303)
Such thoughts reveal that the hierarchy of power within Kambili's ultimate
Sabbath at the end of the novel (the section labeled "A Different Silence?The
Present") has changed: where God and other smaller or metaphorical gods, like
her father and Fr. Benedict, formerly reigned supreme, they now no longer do so;
where the priest is formerly a figure solely avowed to God, his loyalties-as with
Father Amadi-are now split; where the apple of God's eye and, hence, his congre
gation's, is the priest with a British accent and white skin, the African priest with
an Igbo accent and "skin the color of fired clay," like Father Amadi, has taken his
place; where God was to be found only in St. Agnes, Kambili now seeks him in St.
Andrew's. God, in Kambili's new Sabbath, not only shares his power, but has been
decentralized from his elitist seat at St. Agnes to other churches as well. In this
ascent from the old Sabbath to the new Sabbath, Kambili finds voice and agency.
In Kambili's present, the god that was Eugene has been broken by the
Gothic-like invasion of his past African heritage. But looking close at his relation
ship with his wife, Beatrice, we see that Eugene has also fallen prey to a deeper
underlying and irreconcilable battle between his sexuality and Catholicism. "In
African societies," John M. Mbiti claims in African Religions and Philosophy, "sex is
not used for biological purposes alone. It has also religious and social uses. [. . .]
There are African peoples among whom rituals are solemnly opened or concluded
with actual or symbolic sexual intercourse between husband and wife or other
officiating persons. This is like a solemn seal or signature, in which sex is used in
and as a sacred action, as a 'sacrament' signifying inward spiritual values" (146).
According to Mbiti, "Marriage is, therefore, a sacred drama in which everybody
is a religious participant, and no person may keep away from this dynamic scene
of action" (148). Alienated from his African heritage and traditions, which firmly
situate sexuality within religious and social life, Eugene faces a peculiar psycho
logical dilemma similar to that explained by Cyndy Hendershot in The Animal
Within: Masculinity and the Gothic. Hendershot notes that sexuality is coded as a
sign of the original sin within Christianity while within Darwinism it is coded as
a sign of the animal origins of man because man copulates "in a manner similar
to animals" (103). Just as Darwinism and Christianity converge in the tortured
clergyman, Jennings, of J. S. Le Fanu's tale "Green Tea" (1869), so they do in Eugene
Achike. Jennings, who as part of his religious duties has been working on a book
on pagan religion, notes that this particular subject matter is "not good for the
mind?the Christian mind." Jennings sees pagan religion and art as a "degrad
ing fascination" and a "sure nemesis" for the Christian mind (qtd. in Hendershot
103). This degrading fascination, Hendershot explains, is the licentious nature of
pagan religion and literature, and is likely to undermine a Christian's chastity.
Eugene, like Jennings, is afraid of this degradation, not only for himself, but for his
offspring as well. In addition, he is unable to accept the implications of Darwin

ism: that "the history of man is of a difficult and extensive family network which
takes in barnacles as well as bears, an extended family which will never permit
the aspiring climber?man?quite to forget his lowly origins" (Gillian Beer, qtd.
in Hendershot 118-19). Eugene's distortion lies in his inability to accept that both
the human and the animal/primitive, as Henderson puts it, "shade into each other"
(110), that there is the pagan in the Christian, even a saintly Christian as he, and
the uncivilized in the civilized.
To expose this peculiar imperial trauma in her father, Kambili enacts the
Gothic trope of what Punter and Byron term as going "down to the cellar" (57) in
a prolepsis examination of his relationship with her mother in the section titled
"Speaking with Our Spirits?Before Palm Sunday." Beatrice as a Gothic character
embodies the "spectral presence of the mother [figure] representing the problems
of femininity that the protagonist [Kambili] must confront" to fully attain her
own "psychic individuation" (Byron and Punter 280). Kambili's ghosting, as it
were, reveals the profundity of Beatrice's problems and the violence she endures
in Eugene's hands:
I was in my room after lunch, reading James chapter five because I would talk
about the biblical roots of the anointing of the sick during family time, when
I heard the sounds. Swift, heavy thuds on my parents' hand-carved bedroom
door. I imagined the door had gotten stuck and Papa was trying to open it. If I
imagined it hard enough, then it would be true. I sat down, closed my eyes, and
started to count. Counting made it seem not that long, made it seem not that bad.
Sometimes it was over before I even got to twenty. (PH 32-33)
The full extent of Eugene's physical violation of Beatrice manifests itself in the
number of miscarriages she has had. While we could read Eugene's behavior as
an act merely aimed at subjugating his wife's body and keeping his family under
iron-clad patriarchal control, it goes beyond that. His violent relation to Beatrice
not only reveals a general obscured fear of sexuality as previously explained, but of
heterosexuality as well. Hendershot claims that "heterosexuality is a problematic
coded with epistemological issues of nature and man [...] because in the sexual act
feminine nature may master them rather than vice versa, [and] this fear is redou
bled when read within the context of Darwinian science [for] it threatens to remind
the male subject of his helplessness in the face of a feminine nature who created him
through natural selection and who, in the popular imagination at least, holds the
power to eliminate him and his species through further processes" (103-04). Using
Hendershot's premise, one may deduce that Eugene seeks to destroy the product
of his weakness (the sexual act with Beatrice) in order to regain his sexual mastery
over her and to also take over her feminine power of natural selection. As such, he
eliminates her unborn, devolution-prone species because they are unlikely to stick
to the straight and narrow and might, like Kambili and Jaja already have, seek a
hybridization path with his conceived notion of paganism. Thus when Beatrice
poisons Eugene, she is not only doing so to protect herself from physical harm or
to escape entrapment, but, in a way, to resist control over her feminine nature and
protect her endangered offspring. Her act also, figuratively, allows her "female
gothic" narrative, sandwiched between Eugene's and Kambili's, to be heard.
Despite its inevitability, the apocalyptic breaking of the god that is Eugene
comes as a surprise to Kambili. Her father's death, she explains, is unbelievable:
"I had never considered the possibility that Papa would die, that Papa could die.
[. . .] He had seemed immortal" (PH 287). Despite this declaration, Kambili is
nonetheless consciously aware of Eugene's waning power. According to Botting,
a character like Eugene could serve in this context as a Gothic trope in the manner
of the cursed wanderer or outcast. Such tropes, within the Gothic tradition, are
depicted as being alienated from their language and culture and only free to die if
other people take their place and cursed conditions (Botting 107). Using Botting's
paradigm, we see that Eugene is metaphorically free to die because Jaja is ready
to take his place and exchange his cursed condition?a product of "everyday life
and the corruption of social and religious institutions" (Botting 107)?for his own
suffering.
Jaja's sacrificial role is anticipated at the beginning of the novel when he
refuses Father Benedict's communion and Eugene throws the missal at him. From
this moment on, Jaja systematically challenges the status quo, as shown in the
scene when he refuses to offer compliments for a bottle of cashew juice from his
father's factory (PH 13-14). This turn of events is particularly significant when one
considers the terror Eugene has previously wielded over Jaja. "When he was ten,"
Kambili reveals, "he had missed two questions on his catechism test and was not
named the best in his First Holy Communion class. Papa took him upstairs and
locked the door. Jaja, in tears, came out supporting his left hand with his right, and
Papa drove him to St. Agnes hospital" (145). This moment is etched on Jaja's body
in the form of his deformed finger, the very finger he runs over Papa-Nnukwu's
painting.
The Nsukka experience is crucial because it transforms and empowers Jaja;
while there, Kambili notes, his "shoulders seemed broader," and she wonders if
"it was possible for a teenager's shoulders to broaden in a week" (PH 154). As with
Kambili, Nsukka enables Jaja to break the blanket of silence, embrace defiance, and
initiate a cultural reclamation of his Igbo roots. It is hardly surprising, therefore,
when Jaja, at the end of novel, identifies himself as his father's murderer in order
to protect his mother. Jaja's sacrifice has a twofold significance: he metaphorically
frees his father by taking his place in the family and literally frees his mother by
taking her place in jail.
When Kambili visits Jaja in prison, she knows that he is her hero as well: "I
want to hold his hand, but I know he will shake it free. His eyes are too full of
guilt to really see me, to see his reflection in my eyes, the reflection of my hero,
the brother who tried always to protect me the best he could. He will never think
that he did enough, and he will never understand that I do not think he should
have done more" (PH 305).
As siblings united under Eugene's monstrosity and excesses, Kambili and Jaja
are somewhat reminiscent of Olanna and Kainene who, in turn, are united by the
monstrosity of the Biafra War. As Jaja's imprisonment is unbearable for Kambili,
so is Kainene's disappearance unbearable for Olanna. As the novel closes, Olanna
consults a dibia, who instructs her to throw a copy of Kainene's photo into the
River Niger and walk around Kainene's house in Orlu three times so that she may
come back home. Even though Kainene does not appear, Olanna is convinced that
she shall come back again and that they shall "reincarnate" (HYS 433). Olanna, in
tears, declares, "Uwa m, uwa ozo. When I come back in my next life, Kainene will
be my sister" (433).
This desire is seemingly fulfilled in the subsequent world of Purple Hibiscus,
where much of Olanna is embodied in Kambili and much of the boyish, androgy
nous Kainene is embodied in Jaja. This, of course, is a peculiar situation since Pur
ple Hibiscus was written after Half of a Yellow Sun. In real time, though, this makes
sense since the sixties world of Half of a Yellow Sun predates that of Purple Hibiscus.
This notion of reincarnation is no stranger to the Gothic tradition, where ghosts
"frequently return [. . .] to continue alongside loved ones" (Wisker 165). However,
as Adichie suggests in Olanna's consultation with the dibia, reincarnation has its
origins as well in African traditions and culture. According to Mbiti, "Belief in
reincarnation is reported among many African societies. This is, however, partial
reincarnation in the sense that only some human features or characteristics of the
living/dead are said to be 'reborn' in some children [. . .] and without regard to
the sex of the living/dead" (164).
The twins, Olanna and Kainene, and the siblings, Kambili and Jaja, seem
reunited under this peculiar Gothic phenomenon. Further, this intergenerational
bond seems inextricably linked to Nsukka, with its experimental purple hibiscus
growing in Aunt Ifeoma's yard. Purple hibiscus signifies the state of Kambili
and Jaja's present, and, inadvertently, that of Olanna and Kainene's future. This
purple hibiscus is contrasted with the "startling red" hibiscus of the past (PH16).
Bright red is symbolically associated with the male and a vast irresistible strength
(Chevalier and Gheerbrant 1792 and 794). The emergence of purple hibiscus in a
formerly startling red space speaks to the presence of a new balance of power?a
purple hibiscus that is "fragrant with the undertones of freedom, [. . .] a freedom
to be, to do" (PH 16). Juxtaposed against "the palms of Palm Sunday [which not
only] prefigure Christ's resurrection after the tragedy of Calvary" (Chevalier and
Gheerbrant 734) but also reestablish his power, this experimental purple hibiscus
prefigures the eventual triumph of Kambili and Jaja on the haunted Igbo land
scape, which is perpetually threatened by the scepter of the past. In this respect,
Adichie's two novels pay homage to the silent children of Biafra. In addition, they
reflect the "persistence of a cluster of cultural anxieties to which Gothic writing
[continues] to respond" (Riquelme, qtd. in Davison 136). Their existence, however,
goes beyond that of mere Gothic texts: they embody that "curious new life" which
emerges "from the need to assert continuity where the lessons of conventional his
tory and geography would claim all continuity has been broken by the imperial
trauma" (Punter and Byron 57-58). One might even conclude that they are proof of
Afigbo's argument that colonial rule and the Biafra War transformed Igbo society,
but they "did not destroy Igbo identity or cultural soul" (283), because this reader
departs Adichie's Gothic writing in Half of a Yellow Sun and Purple Hibiscus with a
heightened sense of cultural identity.
WORKS CITED
Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. New York: Fawcett Crest, 1959.
-. Interview with Rajar Neogy. "On Biafra." Transition 75/76, The Anniversary
Issue: Selections from Transition, 1961-1976 (1997): 222-31.
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. Purple Hibiscus. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books of
Chapel Hill, 2003.
-. Half of a Yellow Sun. New York: Knopf, 2006.
Afigbo, Adiele Eberechukwu. Ropes of Sand: Studies in Igbo History and Culture. eHRAF
Collection of Ethnography 38. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan Library, 2002.
Beti, Mongo. The Poor Christ of Bomba. Trans. Gerald Moore. African Writers Series.
Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1971.
Blakemore, Steven. "Mathew Lewis's Black Mass: Sexual, Religious Inversion in The
Monk." Studies in the Novel 30:4 (1998): 521-36.
Blier, Suzanne Preston. "Treasures of Ancient Nigeria." Art Journal, Earthworks: Past and
Present 43:2 (1982): 234-46.
Botting, Fred. Gothic. London: Routledge, 1996.
Chevalier, Jean and Alain Gheerbrant. The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols. Trans. John
Buchanan-Brown. London: Penguin, 1994.
Cudon, J. A. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms & Literary Theory. London: Penguin,
1998.
Davison, Carol Margaret. "Burning Down the Master's (Prison)-House: Revolutions
and Revelation in Colonial and Postcolonial Female Gothic." The Empire and the
Gothic: The Politics of Genre. Ed. Andrew Smith and William Hughes. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
Ekechi, Felix K. "The Holy Ghost Fathers in Eastern Nigeria, 1885-1920: Observations
on Missionary Strategy." African Studies Review 15:2 (1972): 217-39.
Head, Bessie. A Question of Power. London: Heinemann Educational, 1974.
Heiland, Donna. Introduction. Gothic and Gender: An Introduction. Maiden, MA: Black
well, 2004.
Hendershot, Cyndy. The Animal Within: Masculinity and the Gothic. Ann Arbor: U of
Michigan P, 2001.
Mbiti, John S. African Religions and Philosophy. London: Heinemann, 1969.
McCullough, Colleen. The Thorn Birds. New York: Harper Row, 1977.
Nixon, Charles R. "Self Determination: The Nigeria/Biafra Case." World Politics 24:4
(1972): 473-97.
Oguibe, Olu. "Lessons from the Killing Fields." Transition 77 (1998): 86-99.
Punter, David, and Glennis Byron. The Gothic. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.
St. Jorre, John de. "Nigerian Civil War Notebook." Transition 38 (1971): 36-41.
Wisker, Gina. Horror Fiction: An Introduction. New York: Continuum, 2005.
M # & % M

African Postcolonial Gothic Novels Adichie's Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun

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African Postcolonial Gothic Novels Adichie's Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun

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Breaking Gods: An African Postcolonial Gothic Reading of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's

"Purple Hibiscus" and "Half of a Yellow Sun"

This article examines Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus (2003)

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