Childhood as a Representation of the Everyday in Purple Hibiscus

57 remembered and recollected in a specific way – it is reconstructed, through imaginative and emotional memory, as well as through voluntary (conscious) and involuntary unconscious) ways. The case of Purple Hibiscus arises from nostalgia and therefore the idea and materiality of home. This nostalgia is implicitly depicted in the mood of the teenage narrator in
Purple Hibiscus. In accessing her past, therefore, the world of childhood is brought alive to Adichie, while giving her its distinct experience of the everyday, as grounds for nostalgic reconstructions of home, which the nature of her presently adult world would have restricted. The content of this childhood memory, which is the subject of this chapter, is the everyday nature of its life – eating, cooking, washing, reading, going to school and observing adult regimes of authority at work. I use the word everyday herein light of what Mike Featherstone (1995:55) describes as what is usually associated with the mundane, taken-for-granted, commonsense routines which sustain and maintain the fabric of our daily lives
Featherstone‟s postmodern examination of the everyday is significant in view of its awareness of the “heterogenous knowledge, the disorderly babble of many tongues speech and the magic world of voices”.
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The idea of how the everyday connects with postmodern experience goes back to Henri Lefebvre‟s seminal text Critique of Everyday
Life. For Lefebvre, the consciousness of this condition of alienation, for the masses, leads to transcendence, through a return to a critique of everyday life.
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Michel De
Certeau (1984) picks up from the Marxist (re)positioning of Lefebvre to extend the idea of the everyday further, through his examination of the ways of consumption which he argues define the critique of everyday life. Michel De Certeau‟s theory of the everyday, according to Ben Highmore (2002:23), presents a pragmatic examination of the practice of everyday life. For Highmore, De Certeau, like George Simmel, Walter Benjamin and Lefebvre before him, presents an examination of the everyday that See Mike Featherstone The Heroic Life and Everyday Life pp.54-71.
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Lefebvre‟s critical examination of everyday life was a meta-critique of Marxism as a theory. Lefebvre connects Marxist critique of commodity fetishism to how these commodities relate to social relations that reproduce the worker in their performance of daily activities.

58 Can be seen to begin to fabricate an „alternative‟ aesthetic for attending to the experience of modern everyday life. It is an alternative to a range of options in regard to the everyday Emphasis mine Hence, Ben Highmore, like Mike Featherstone, examines the theories of everyday life in light of a postmodern experience and consciousness. The everyday, as Highmore and
Featherstone posit, is undetected in relation to the normative and spectacular narratives. However in the everyday there is the heterogeneity of voices and actions that are crucial aspects of identity and existence. De Certeau defines this as a form of tactical resistance as opposed to the strategies that characterise the structures of living and feeling that usually define subjective relations. Adichie resorts to the mirror of the everyday to represent, through memory, a composite past. This is aided by the child protagonists whose lives are not only defined by the notion of the everyday but also by their marginal status as child characters. As I proceed into examining the primary texts, it is important to point here that in noway am I positing that Adichie‟s texts are entirely autobiographical, other than that autobiographical aspects area dominant consciousness. The idea of nostalgia, which is influenced by Adichie‟s diasporic identity does inform (if a close reading is done) a lot of Kambili‟s perceptions to Nsukka as a place of liberty freedom and happy memories. The representation of childhood in Purple Hibiscus depicts mundane, daily existence, from the point of view of a teenage narrator. Adichie presents a tale that pays close attention to the everyday world of the protagonist. The narrative foregrounds the minutiae of routine in the house of this middle class family cooking, going to churchgoing to school, rituals at breakfast, lunch, dinner and doing homework. The narrative also describes in detail, from the teenage narrators perspective, the sounds of people moving in the house, the textures and smells of furniture, flowers, food, the moods of people in the house, tones and accents of speech, complexions of people, as well as the silences at table and in the rooms. This keen, vivid and detailed attention as narrated by Kambili, makes these events often taken for granted, become unfamiliar, through the manner in which they critique the senses of individual, familial and national identities that are

59 always assumed to be stable and univocal. The world of childhood is constructed through a detailed processing of memory as the narrator looks back to depict with, sometimes nostalgia and other times with a quiet anger, how what seems to be routine existence can become the most unfamiliar experience. Memory works here through making the pasta vivid and detailed present, while making unfamiliar what seemed like routine and mundane during the time of childhood. Memory structures the narrative of Purple Hibiscus through the way a ritualised religious calendar time is incorporated in the events that affect the narrator as a child. The Palm Sunday incident is the cue of a significant memory for the narrator. Events are organised around the Palm Sunday which represents a specific memory that spurs reminiscence and therefore propels the narrator into a myriad of recollections that then take us back to a causal pathway preceding, culminating and eventually transcending the Palm Sunday where the novel starts, to the narrative time of the present at the end of the novel. The narrative in Purple Hibiscus introduces the central conflict right at the beginning (PH, 3). As we will see later, the incident at the beginning is also an accurate representation of the irony that undercuts the narrative. To have a violent gesture in the context of contemplative communion is something that perhaps does not sit well with normative structures of religion. Violence and religion are in fact the strange bedfellows that account for the biggest irony in Purple Hibiscus. This introduction into the novel also reflects the position of the narrator, while at the same time underlines the rigour of the enforcement of routine through church ritual. The memory of this incident proceeds into a descriptive and detailed reflection of a history of the pious observance of religious ritual in the narrators house, and the oppressive silence symptomatic of the fundamental observance of religious ritual. The superfluous conduct of routine, allows the narrator to pay attention to how unfamiliar such things as prayer, eating, cooking among others can eventually become. In the context of an overly routine livelihood, the objects and people around the narrator begin to take on unfamiliar perceptions. Memory becomes vivid through the description of objects and their tactility flowers, furniture, and the architecture of the house, food, as well as the faces of family members.

60 The memory of Palm Sunday generates a de-familiarisation of the people and things that exist around the time that the incident happens. The representation of memory here takes on a positivist dimension – colours, smells and textures of objects come alive as the narrator describes in detail the rituals at church masses, as well as at home and the regular domestic routine that revolves around eating, praying, going to school and doing homework. This attention to the miniscule details of daily routine allows the narrator to isolate the importance of what happens at Palm Sunday – her fathers violent reaction, while juxtaposing it to the disturbing silences at mealtimes and around the house. The mood of silence, allows what is perceived as routinely to take on a subtext with unfamiliar undertones. These undertones, probing under the surface, pave way for an excursion into memory, on the part of the narrator I lay in bed after Mama left and let my mind rake through the past, through the years when Jaja and Mama and I spoke more with our spirits than with our lips. Until Nsukka. Nsukka started it all Aunty Ifeoma‟s little garden next to the verandah of her flat in Nsukka began to lift the silence. Jaja‟s defiance seemed tome now like Aunty Ifeoma‟s experimental purple hibiscus rare, fragrant with the undertones of freedom, a different kind of freedom
[…] A freedom to be, to do. But my memories did not start at Nsukka. They started before, when all the hibiscuses in our front yard were a startling red. (15-16) The narrator isolates the Palm Sunday incident, as a trigger into a landscape of memory. The hibiscus flower is a metaphor for memory, a tactile representation and cue for the memories that precede, and transcend the incident on Palm Sunday – that leads the narrator to conclude that her home is disintegrating. Hence, the delicate hibiscus flowers, their color, the time they bloom and their smell represent the sensory dimensions of the narrators memory. They carry a material and symbolic significance of a specific experience and are therefore a treasure of memory. The purple and red hibiscus flowers represent a trajectory of not only time and place (Nsukka and Enugu respectively, as well

61 as the time before and after Palm Sunday) but also of the memory, as it is to unfold in the novel. Indeed, Kambili says her memories, stretch back to when all the hibiscuses in our front yard were a startling red (16). While representing trajectories of place and time, the hibiscus flowers invoke nostalgic emotions attached to the places and times that they symbolise. Hence the hibiscus flowers are at the centre of the memory-place of Nsukka; as the narrator says, “Nsukka started it all The reader gets the feeling that Nsukka is of significant influence in the process of recollection. Therefore the memories actually start, as the narrator says before Nsukka, when the hibiscus flowers were a startling red – the place is Enugu, Kambili‟s home. The brightness of the hibiscus flowers is foregrounded, for its vivacity and the memories, as they are to unfold are similarly vivid and detailed, as the colour of the hibiscus flowers the narrator describes. The chromatic description of the flowers is keen, making it a metaphor for the memories that follow, as well as even synecdochic of the material cultures that are informed by an authorial diasporic consciousness and its condition of nostalgia. The narrator goes back to a time before the memory of Palm Sunday where she describes the minutiae of household chores. She defamiliarises herself and the reader in these chores, through the atmosphere of silence and a dramatisation of religious rituals. The silence is pervasive, muffling, choking and violating the narrator, her sibling and her mothers senses of the self. Yet the rhythm of life here is, on the surface, quite ordinary, with an illusion of genuine religious piety and family union. The figure of the father is pervasive in these memories. The father, Papa Eugene, sanctions daily chores and programmes, through the rationale of Catholicism and religious ideology. The daily life in this household is overshadowed by Catholic dogma and the narrator painstakingly depicts it with the similitude of the religiosity that pervades her consciousness and those of the people living in this household. Washing, cooking, doing homework, going to school, among other daily chores are pervaded by the ritual of prayer that has become synonymous to the authority and legitimacy of the figure of the father. Indeed, the figure of the father here has the twin inscriptions of a supreme being and an earthly one who is the head of this nuclear family. In this sense, the everyday as it is depicted here loses its

62 unspectacular status and is defamiliarised because of its claustrophobic, alienating and violating nature to the sense of the narrators self. Hence, the memories represented here seem to be of a narrators distanced persona, in an unfamiliar familial ritual. Moreover, even within the illusion of a spiritual enactment of ritual, the narrator, despite being a child and therefore a marginal figure in the hierarchy of authority in this household, stands above the silence and ritual through what she calls speaking with our spirits (17). The ubiquity of religious ritual, cooking, eating, doing school homework, dressing and even thinking, creates a telepathic form of conversation between Kambili and her brother Jaja which is the only way that filial warmth can be actually expressed. It is perhaps the only tactic available for Kambili within the everyday

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