Purple Hibiscus (33 page)

‘
PURPLE HIBISCUS
IS
one of the finest debut novels of recent years, a complex and compelling account of a 15-year-old girl's sexual awakening and religious oppression, set against a backdrop of domestic violence and an incipient military coup in Nigeria,' says Alison Roberts in the
Evening Standard.
‘It is a novel as revealing and sensitive as Arundhati Roy's
The God of Small Things
, and as punchy and characterful as Monica Ali's
Brick Lane.&rsquo
;

The
Glasgow Herald's
Laurence Wareing was blown away by Adichie's ‘breathtaking confidence' in echoing Chinua Achebe's famous title
Things Fall Apart
in her opening sentence. Indeed, she takes up many of Achebe's themes and, like him, ‘eschews black and white answers'. But
Purple Hibiscus
is ‘more than a contemporary update on the impact of colonialism in Nigeria', he adds.

‘With writing marked by infinite wisdom and heart-breaking generosity, Adichie draws the African struggle for a modern identity into the heart of family life.'

The
New Statesman's
Michele Roberts considered
Purple Hibiscus
to be ‘in the best tradition of the coming-of-age novel'. With its ‘rich descriptions of physical and domestic environments' and ‘artful deployment of suspense and drama', it ‘serves as a reminder of what serious, committed storytelling can do'.

Writing in the
Daily Telegraph,
Christopher Hope welcomed Adichie as ‘a fresh new voice out of Africa'. The
Observer
's Hephzibah Anderson admired how she expresses the political in acutely personal
terms, telling ‘an intoxicating story that is at once distinctively feminine, African and universal'. The last word must go to Wareing, who hails the ‘balanced yet passionate' Adichie as ‘an inspirational new voice', and
Purple Hibiscus
as ‘a book to read at all costs'.

by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

THE ROADS ARE
full of potholes and the car jolts often. ‘Sorry oh, sorry oh,' the driver says, as if they are his fault. I know, though, that he is apologizing because I am a stranger now, because I am just back from America and am unused to the bumpy roads. The dust floats in through the open windows to settle on my skin, my eyelashes, and underneath my nails. Motorcycles hurtle past us, honking. Signboards slide past, cluttering the roadside. Most of them were once white and are now tan with years of dust and wind. In front of ramshackle sheds on the roadside, women are bent over smoky roasting basins, fanning corncobs.

The minute we turn into our street, I realize that our blue two-story house looks the same but that the plants seem faded, somehow; the frangipani trees are not as lush as they have been in my imagination. And our yard is silent, unlike in my childhood when it was alive with the shrieks of us children playing soccer on the lawn, the buzz of the bees around the ixora bushes, the laughter of my parents' guests on the balcony upstairs, the clucking of the chickens that sauntered around.

‘A quaint university town in eastern Nigeria' is how I described Nsukka to my American friends. A sterile description that did nothing to capture this small, slow town where I grew up, where chicken is a delicacy, where your neighbour is a witch and is responsible for all your illnesses, where young girls want to put on weight and people raise free-range goats that eat the flowers
in the yard next door, where life was full of the tiny wonders I tried to capture in my novel
Purple Hibiscus
.

I am back to spend Christmas with my dad. And I have been home only a few days when he tells me that his friend Professor E. has passed on. I remember the smallish professor of botany who grew saucer-sized roses in his yard. I remember the story that when my parents' baby died (Chukwuemeka, born 1971, six years before me), it was Professor E. who drove my distraught dad back to our ancestral hometown, Abba, for the burial.

‘I'll go with you to pay condolences,' I say, and my dad nods, as though he expected that I would anyway.

As we drive through the campus, I notice that the houses, too, are faded. The rains have whitewashed the light blues and light pinks, window nettings are torn, louvers are missing, hedges have gaping holes. There is not only a shabbiness about it all, but it is a resigned shabbiness – there is no attempt to conceal, to plant bright hibiscuses to draw the eyes away from the moldy walls. Or away from the soil-covered lines that the termites have drawn; those zigzag over the houses, like unwieldy veins, without any sense of direction.

Near Ikejiani Avenue, I see men – workers, carpenters, and plumbers – standing around a mango tree. They nudge the reddish-orange fruits down with long sticks. There is a small cheer when a mango comes hurtling down. Each man has a fruit in hand, each is chewing enthusiastically,
but they all want seconds, and they are still holding sticks and looking up at the tree.

When we get to E.'s, we do not knock on the front door because it is ajar; we simply walk through. There is a thick notebook on a sidetable, a condolence register. Next to it is a porcelain flower vase.

‘
Ngwa
, let's sign the register,' my dad says. He writes, ‘May his soul rest in perfect peace.' Afterward, he hands me the pen. I look over a few entries – most people have written, cryptically, ‘RIP' – before writing, ‘May he rest in peace.' I place the pen down reluctantly. I want to write more. I want to ask why Nsukka is fading, why the palm tree outside, in the middle of their yard, is shrunken, not the hulking thing I remember.

The widow comes out and we hug her and say, ‘
Ndo
, sorry.' Her face is free of makeup, dulled by grief. I remember her with a bright gash as lips; she always wore the reddest lipstick. She talks quietly to my dad, telling him about the arrangements, when the cultural funeral will be, who will formally inform the village elders, when the church service will be. I am not really listening. I want to reach out and smooth her uncombed hair because it strikes me then how alone she is: her husband is gone and her children live far away – in Brazil, Benin, Canada.

They will be coming home for the funeral, even though she asked them not to, especially her son in Brazil. ‘He only just left and it's too expensive, really,' she says. She looks at the condolence register, to make sure we have signed it, and then she runs a
finger over the vase. It is full of dried flowers. Not intentionally dried, that kind you can get in a fancy florist's, but dried from being there, on that table, for too long. The croton leaves droop, the lavender bougainvillea are rumpled, each of them fragile and papery. I imagine her gathering the dried flowers up later, when her husband will be long buried, when the guests will no longer troop in. I imagine her crushing them in her hands, perhaps sniffing them first, only they will have no scent. She will cry and remember him, and the years he played tennis at the university staff club, the years before their house became silent, before Nsukka became silent. The same years my brothers and I rode our Chopper bicycles around the campus, flying over speed bumps, when our friends came over to visit still chewing on their chicken bones from lunch, and we played raucously until someone got hurt and an adult made everyone go home. Or until our friends' mother hooted ‘Cuckoo!' from across the street. Or until the sun went down and it got too dark to see. The years when we raced to the Children's Library and I sat on the cool linoleum floor and entered Enid Blyton's world. The years when I threw stones at the boy I liked, and he threw stones back at me. A stone rain. I still remember the delicious pain of stones coloured red by mud, of a fleeting unfettered infatuation.

As my dad drives us home, I see that the men are sitting with their backs against the tree trunk, eating mangoes and laughing. Life has continued for them, I realize, life
continues, even though my father's friend has died, even though nothing remains the same.

‘
Nekene
, these men must have finished the mangoes on that tree,' my dad says, pointing, amused. I did not know he had noticed them. I laugh with him. Then I turn and watch him, this seventy-one-year-old man whom I adore. I notice that his face is wrinkled, that his front tooth, wiggly for a while, has fallen out and left a crooked gap. His mortality strikes me with a fierce clutch at my throat, a squeeze of alarm. He used to have the smoothest skin, dark like over-ripe grapes. He used to be invincible. He used to never sleep; we heard him walking around at night, muttering statistical formulas.

I sit outside that evening, on the stairs that lead to the backyard, and watch the sun fall. Near me is an avocado tree and it slants, sideways, like a tired old woman whose back is curved from years of bending over smoky firewood. There are cracks etched onto the bark. Deep divisions, they are beautiful and revolting at the same time. In my memory the bark was always smooth. I used to hate the fruits from that tree because they tasted sour. Like a slap on the face, I remember telling my brothers. Now it has no fruits. I wish it did, because I would eat them, and I would savor the sourness.

I get up and walk around the yard. In our old garage, full of dusty cartons and crates thick with cobwebs, I see the blackboard. There is writing on it, in my carefully curved hand:
Are AEIOU called vowels
?

I remember writing that, on a hot afternoon in 1987, as an English test for my
seven-year-old brother. I remember that I was wearing a pair of blue shorts and my cornrows were held up with a ribbon. I remember that my brother was not interested in the test.

I stare at the writing on that board, at the faded chalk. I cannot believe that nobody ever wiped those words. I am suddenly, achingly, nostalgic for a time past, for the ten-year-old me who was satisfied with the present, who was not bewilderingly confronted by change. I wonder if I should wipe the board, and finally, I decide not to. I leave it as it is.

© Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 2003

This essay was first published in the American literary magazine
Speakeasy
.

Other books by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Half of a Yellow Sun

WINNER OF THE ORANGE BROADBAND PRIZE FOR FICTION

In the civil war-blighted Nigeria of the 1960s three lives intersect. Ugwu, a boy from a poor village works as houseboy to a university lecturer. Olanna, a young woman, has abandoned her life of privilege in Lagos to live with her charismatic new lover the professor. The third is Richard, a shy Englishman besotted with Olanna's enigmatic sister. When the shocking savagery of the war engulfs them their loyalties are severely tested as they are pulled apart and thrown together in ways that none of them imagined…

‘Heartbreaking, funny, exquisitely written and, without doubt, a literary masterpiece and a classic'

Daily Mail

The Thing Around Your Neck

The Thing Around Your Neck
is a dazzling collection of twelve short stories, in which Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie turns her penetrating eye on the ties that bind men and women, parents and children, Nigeria and the West. Searing and profound, suffused with beauty, sorrow and longing, this collection is a resounding confirmation of her prodigious storytelling powers.

‘She makes storytelling seem as easy as birdsong'
JANE SHILLING
,
Daily Telegraph

Things Fall Apart

ChinuaAchebe

Published in 1958, this unsentimental portrait of traditional village culture in Nigeria is the seminal African novel published in English.

Nervous Conditions

Tsitsi Dangeremgba

Set in colonial Rhodesia during the 1960s, this is the coming of age of a teenage girl and her relationship with her British-educated cousin.

Joys of Motherhood

Buchi Emecheta

This story of a young mother's struggles in 1950s Lagos is a commentary on polygamy, patriarchy, and women's changing roles in urban Nigeria.

Disgrace

J. M. Coetzee

Set in post-apartheid South Africa, this Booker Prize-winning novel is about a man and his daughter and their personal and political responses to the new South Africa.

In the Heart of the Country

J. M. Coetzee

The story of a lonely sheep farmer in colonial South Africa who seeks private salvation in the arms of a black concubine, while his daughter fantasizes about murdering both of them.

The Grass is Singing

Doris Lessing

Set in Rhodesia, this is the story of Dick, a failed white farmer, and his wife, Mary, who seeks solace in the arms of the houseboy.

Annie John

Jamaica Kincaid

Growing up on Antigua should be a sojourn in paradise for Annie John. But adolescence leads the headstrong girl into open rebellions and secret discoveries, which eventually wrench her away from her island home.

A Grain of Wheat

Ngugi wa Thiong'o

This novel portrays several characters in a village whose intertwined lives are transformed by the 1952–60 Emergency in Kenya.

Petals of Blood

Ngugi wa Thiong'o

This political novel and satire, which centres on a murder in a Kenyan village, caused great controversy when it was published in 1977.