The story is narrated by Kambili, who is a teenager in Nigeria. Her father, Eugene, runs a newspaper and many factories and is a wealthy man. They live in a spacious compound and want for nothing. Her father is a pious man, who donates money freely (half his estate goes to the Church) to Catholic charities, missionaries, widows, orphans, and even beggars in the streets. Kambili accepts her father as he is seen by people outside the family, as almost a living saint, and she never quite loses this belief in his internal goodness.
This perspective is very real, and very chilling, because from very early in the book, she narrates matter-of-factly acts of physical abuse that ultimately send both Kambili and her mother to the hospital.
In cases of child or spousal abuse, you always hear people wonder incredulously, if the abuse was real, why the victims never told anybody. This. This is exactly why. In scene after scene, Kambili has the opportunity to tell someone--her Aunty, her cousin, her schoolmates, the priest--what is happening, and every time there is a part of her that yearns to say the words, but a lifetime of fear and shame seals her lips. In the artificial world constructed by her father, silence is the golden rule and she understands that all of her injuries are deserved by the moral failings he has told her are hers. One of my favorite quotes from this book is on the subject of silence: "Even the silence that descended on the house was sudden, as though the old silence had broken and left us with the sharp pieces."
I've written poems on this subject myself. In junior high, when I was being abused, I knew that silence was the golden rule. Like Kambili, I was thought by the kids in school to be aloof (and probably more than a little weird) because even when I could make the words come out, they were usually the wrong ones. I vividly remember bursting out into tears after asking a teacher the time. I poured all that I couldn't say through the mouthpiece of my clarinet, practicing for hours until my lip bled. Playing the clarinet was how everything became okay again because all the words I couldn't say became beautiful (eventually) music. Years later, I wrote about the odd feeling of having to speak through music:
loon screams out her pain
each note of shame, guilt, and rage
transmuted to love
Ultimately, Purple Hibiscus, is a hopeful novel. Things change for Kambili. Through her Aunty and cousins, she and her brother learn that the world they lived in was a carefully constructed nightmare, that it is possible to love and to worship without violence. Like the purple hibiscus itself, with care and nurturing, even the most fragile flower will bloom.
This is a set of haiku I wrote that won the Stand Up for Safe Families Haiku Contest in 2013. It expresses the same hope that comes to Kambili and her family at the end of Eugene's reign of terror.
After
screaming comes the flood:
he flings boulders from the cliff,
heedless of destruction
trapped in the log dam,
child of the river trembles,
hopeless of escape
his wrath all but spent,
dark river slinks to the sea
past debris unseen
in emerging day,
river's child finds wobbling legs
to seek out the light.
Purple Hibiscus is an amazing book. I highly recommend it. The book is available on Amazon.
