the trauma memory of everyday life

68 of stability at home, in the face of gun-carrying soldiers outside. Most importantly, the everyday consists of a domesticated spectacle of violence and a curious and connotative subtext of silence on the narrators part. She cannot, in light of a pervasive fear and awe of The Father speak out. She chokes several times in unsuccessful attempts to speak, as her body becomes part of a spectacle of violence and silence and therefore itself a narrative of trauma. Heather Hewett (2005) has argued that Kambili‟s body is a site of critical silence made visible by the constant choking and inadvertent inability to speak at crucial moments. Her ordinary life is illuminated through the subtexts of violence, silence and wounded bodies that depict a long-suffering and traumatised existence. Scars, left behind by inflictions of torturous punishments, like Jaja‟s crooked finger and Mamas awkward limp, remain taboo subjects and residual marks to be read as texts of a pervasive threat of violence in this household. The unspoken issues are relegated into a complacent silence that defines the ironies of the existence of fundamental Catholicism and violence. Silence, as it is depicted here, is ontological of the bodies and voices suppressed, while at the same time defining the conduct of daily life, in which it takes on a psycho-physically problematic presence Our stepson the stairs were as measured and as silent as our Sundays the silence of waiting until Papa was done with his siesta so we could have lunch the silence of reflection time, when Papa gave us a scripture passage or book by one of the early church fathers to read and meditate on the silence of the evening rosary the silence of driving to the church for benediction afterward. (31) Yet again, this representation of a pervasive, oppressive and suppressive silence can be read against the irony of the narrators fathers attempt at breaking the silencing of democracy by the military regimes through protests in his progressive newspaper, The
Standard. Purple Hibiscus foregrounds trauma on the familial level, through its depiction of the child narrators psychosomatic distress – her witnessing and experience of physical and psychological violence within the assumed comfort and security of daily family life.

69 Hence the memories that precede the blooming of the purple hibiscus flowers, which are portrayed by their startling redness, have an overhanging consciousness of the experience of psycho-physical trauma, an experience that defamiliarises daily routine. These trauma memories are presented as embodied in the red hibiscus flowers. The homely space Kambili inhabits acquires a searing tactility through a gothic like description, what (Edensor, 2002) calls the “smellscape and soundscape These are sensory topographies where the everyday is mapped in narrative forms that then provide a critique of the everyday life and how it deconstructs macro-senses of identity. In this way macro-identities are localised into the micro-activities of everyday life. The narrator succeeds in creating sensations out of attention to colour, sound, smell, sight and touch, aspects that help her to apprehend the daily experiences around her. These become touch points to the content of these memories she is laying out before the reader. She plots her metaphors around the smellscapes and soundscapes she inhabits. As in the above depiction of chromatic metaphor of redness the extent of her trauma at the sight and sound of the battering of her mother and eventually the trickle of blood is extended further to the letters in her textbook, swimming into one another, and then changed to a bright red, the red of fresh blood. The blood was watery, flowing from Mama, flowing from my eyes (35). This watery image of blood is further extended to the narrators critical observation of the stale saltiness (36), on her lips, of the holy water needed to cleanse the family from the mothers sinful act of refusing to visit the priest after mass, despite the miscarriage caused by the beatings. The extension of this metaphor does in fact reflect the temporally fragmented experience of a traumatic event, in its Freudian “belatedness”. Kambili‟s memories here take on complex depiction of temporality as these images of redness and blood that testify to the event she witnessed begin to blind her vision. Scholarship on trauma memory explores the confounding belatedness and recurrence of trauma memory, something that as we see with Kambili recurs against the rules of a Freudian unconscious because they are not repressed, yet neither can they be controlled by the unconscious. Cathy Caruth (1995:4-5) says in fact, that to be traumatized is precisely to be possessed by an image or event. And thus the traumatic symptom cannot be interpreted, simply, as a distortion of reality, nor as the

70 lending of unconscious meaning to a reality it wishes to ignore, nor as the repression of what once was wished Hence trauma memory, as with Kambili‟s case is confounded by her reliving the pain of an inner journey through the traumatic event, and by her inability to witness as she listens to the pounding in her parents bedroom which she safely ascribes to the idea that her father was finding it difficult to open the door. Later, in one of the few crucial and critical moments of self-reflection, Kambili concludes, I did not think, I did not even think to think, what Mama needed to be forgiven for (36). In these moments, we get to seethe spectacular in the everyday. We especially see how the practice of religious ritual, apart of this particular family‟s daily ritual is fraught with anomalies whenever it is appropriated, as can be implied in a patriarchal locus of power and control that Papa Eugene represents here. Similar anomalies and slippages of laws and principles are the subject, for instance, of Naguib
Mahfouz‟s Cairo Trilogy – Palace Walk, Palace of Desire and Sugar Street – which in their depiction of the everyday lives of an Egyptian middle class family, reflect on the ambiguities of the practice of everyday life and the ideals of Islamic religious practice that overdetermine the consciousness of the characters in the text. The material and sensorial aspects that trigger memory are the way that the everyday is constructed. In Purple Hibiscus Kambili‟s memories are made real through moments of family congregation, and the dinner table is one such activity that represents Kambili‟s experience and critique of everyday life. Tensions and fears are enacted within this smellscape, as detailed attention is paid to Nigerian cuisine by the author. Physical and psychological violence is experienced here as well as Jaja‟s acts of resistance that we find at the beginning of the novel. The dinner table is where the order of ritual, including the invention of tradition (Hobsbawm, 1983) is enacted through Papa Eugene symbolically presiding over prayers and novenas, some lasting for up to twenty minutes. A religious etiquette illustrated in an obsessive compulsion to pray before and after meals, as well as making necessary compliments at specific times during the meal, epitomises the pervasion of ritual activity in this household. These activities also depict the functioning of patriarchal power. Moreover, these moments present the banality of the ritual

71 practices. For instance when Papa Eugene, having been interrupted and has to leave the table barely after the eating has began, prays the end of the meal prayer in advance before going off to deal with the interruption (198). For Kambili, the dinner table portrays at most times the trauma memories, especially when some ritual or order has been violated. For instance, in an incident where Kambili‟s brother Jaja shows defiance, I turned to stare at him. At least he was saying thanks the right way, the way we always did after a meal. But he was also doing what we never did he was leaving the table before Papa had said the prayer after meals (14). These moments offer horrific flights of imagination for Kambili, as she defines the consequences in a hyperbolic, grotesque fashion – where she suffers vicariously I reached for my glass and stared at the juice, watery yellow, like urine. I poured all of it down my throat, in one gulp. I didn‟t know what else to do. This had never happened before in my entire life, never. The compound walls would crumble, I was sure, and squash the frangipani trees. The sky would cave in. The Persian rugs on the stretches of the gleaming marble floor would shrink. Something would happen. But the only thing that happened was my choking. My body shook from the coughing. (14) The rituals of order at table offer for us the spectacle of violence, from Kambili‟s perspective. The dinner table becomes an occasion in which fear is produced and reproduced. It is a moment in anticipation of violence, and trauma, as with another instance in which Kambili, in anticipation of punishment for coming second in her class which happens after hearing and seeing the effects of her mothers physical abuse and eventual miscarriage, chokes and suffers I did not, could not, look at Papas face when he spoke. The boiled yam and peppery greens refused to go down my throat they clung to my mouth like children clinging to their mothers hand at a nursery

72 school entrance. I downed glass after glass of water to push them down, and by the time Papa started the grace, my stomach was swollen with water. (41) The rituals at table therefore depict traumatic memories that standout in Kambili‟s narrative. Kambili‟s body is itself a text to be read, as a spectacle of violence in everyday life. Traumatic memories here are therefore located within the frontiers of Kambili‟s psychic and somatic consciousness. Kambili‟s body becomes a text that depicts a violated body and therefore the locus and visibility of traumatic memory, reflected best in her silence and stuttering speech. On the other hand, these traumatic memories can also be seen to be depictions of material culture mediated by the postcolonial migrant novel. While food here is a synecdoche of the traumatic memories, the attention to descriptions of the varieties of food and their forms of preparation in Purple Hibiscus reflects a nostalgic diasporic consciousness reflected in the authors autobiographical memory. In this sense we find similarities with Chris Abani‟s Graceland which has serialised recipes derived from Nigerian cuisine as part of an intertextual process that seem to point to
Abani migrating cultural relics through the medium of the text. Hence food, a material object that reflects the tensions in the social relations in Kambili‟s household is also part of the smellscape of an authorial diasporic consciousness. Around the representation of activities that centre on food is enacted the rituals that define familial relations and therefore the everyday life in the narrators household. These activities involve cooking and its ingredients and recipes, arrangement of cutlery and crockery for dinner, as well as the rituals of prayer before and after meals. These activities are accompanied by a schedule of operation, a strategy defined by the rituals that are acted around the food. Their purported significance to religious ideals and the subtexts of an identity crisis are made conspicuous by a tangible silence as well as
Kambili‟s traumatic experiences. The seemingly consistent ordering of activities and appliances that accompany the act of eating, which include a uniform arrangement of cutlery and crockery, a rhythmic pattern of speech at table and an insistence on specific etiquette at table, are but an appurtenance to a subversive narrative of (psychological)

73 disorder and violence – the violence of disorder, that is constantly alluded to by
Kambili‟s choking, bloated stomach and speaking with her spirit Ina sense, her Enugu home becomes a gothic topography that represents an order of violence and a violence of order. The everyday takes on a disturbingly unfamiliar pattern of violence that fora lack of physical escape necessitates speaking [...] our spirits flights of imagination and landscapes of desires that find an alternative experience of the everyday in Nsukka.
Nsukka is that memory-place that as Kambili says at the beginning of the text started it all. Nsukka as she says, and with much nostalgia, defamiliarises her own experience of the everyday in Enugu: And perhaps then we would never have gone to Nsukka and everything would have remained the same (104).

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