Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- EDITORIAL ARTICLE: The African Novel in the 21st Century: Sustaining the Gains of the 20th Century
- ARTICLES
- Resurgent Spirits, Catholic Echoes of Igbo & Petals of Purple: The Syncretised World of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus
- Ambivalent Inscriptions: Women, Youth & Diasporic Identity in Buchi Emecheta's Later Fiction
- The Interrupted Dance: Racial Memory in Isidore Okpewho's Call Me By My Rightful Name
- The Ivorian Crisis & Ahmadou Kourouma's Posthumous Political Novel Quand on Refuse on dit non
- Ngũgĩ's Wizard of the Crow: Women as the “Voice of the People” & the Western Audience
- The Ankh & Maat: Symbols of Successful Revolution in Ayi Kwei Armah's Osiris Rising
- A New African Youth Novel in the Era of HIV/AIDS: An Analysis of Unity Dow's Far & Beyon'
- The Prison of Nigerian Woman: Female Complicity in Sefi Atta's Everything Good Will Come
- Manufacturing Skin for Somalia's History: Nuruddin Farah's Deep Hurt in Links
- A Zimbabwean Ethic of Humanity: Tsitsi Dangarembga's The Book of Not & the Unhu Philosophy of Personhood
- ‘Coming to America’: Ike Oguine's A Squatter's Tale & the Nigerian/African Immigrant's Narrative
- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun
- REVIEW
- Index
Resurgent Spirits, Catholic Echoes of Igbo & Petals of Purple: The Syncretised World of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus
from ARTICLES
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 April 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- EDITORIAL ARTICLE: The African Novel in the 21st Century: Sustaining the Gains of the 20th Century
- ARTICLES
- Resurgent Spirits, Catholic Echoes of Igbo & Petals of Purple: The Syncretised World of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus
- Ambivalent Inscriptions: Women, Youth & Diasporic Identity in Buchi Emecheta's Later Fiction
- The Interrupted Dance: Racial Memory in Isidore Okpewho's Call Me By My Rightful Name
- The Ivorian Crisis & Ahmadou Kourouma's Posthumous Political Novel Quand on Refuse on dit non
- Ngũgĩ's Wizard of the Crow: Women as the “Voice of the People” & the Western Audience
- The Ankh & Maat: Symbols of Successful Revolution in Ayi Kwei Armah's Osiris Rising
- A New African Youth Novel in the Era of HIV/AIDS: An Analysis of Unity Dow's Far & Beyon'
- The Prison of Nigerian Woman: Female Complicity in Sefi Atta's Everything Good Will Come
- Manufacturing Skin for Somalia's History: Nuruddin Farah's Deep Hurt in Links
- A Zimbabwean Ethic of Humanity: Tsitsi Dangarembga's The Book of Not & the Unhu Philosophy of Personhood
- ‘Coming to America’: Ike Oguine's A Squatter's Tale & the Nigerian/African Immigrant's Narrative
- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun
- REVIEW
- Index
Summary
Vibrant bushes of hibiscus reached out and touched one another as if they were exchanging their petals. The purple plants had started to push out sleepy buds, but most of the flowers were still on the red ones.
(Purple Hibiscus, 9)Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie strives for a holistic vision in her novel, Purple Hibiscus, one that integrates Igbo customs and language with Catholic ritual and which incorporates men into her gender politics and embraces the literary traditions of her elders – Chinua Achebe, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o and Alice Walker. If this sounds high flown, we need to understand that Adichie attempts to represent this syncretised world through the material culture and everyday realities of life in modern Nigeria. Solid objects – tables and chairs, grains of rice and ceramic ornaments – are syncretised with bodies and infused with spiritual life. They create a world where the boundaries between the living and the dead, the animate and the inanimate, the big and the small, the literal and the symbolic, words and things, are breached.
Where does this implicit belief in the power of the old gods sit in a novel by a Catholic African author? She says in an interview that she is ‘interested in colonized religion, how people like me can profess and preach a respect of their indigenous culture and yet cling so tenaciously to a religion that considers most of indigenous culture evil’ (Adichie in interview with Anya 2003: 15).
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- Information
- New Novels in African Literature Today , pp. 1 - 12Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2009