the sentimental disposition of daughterhood

201 alternatives to patriarchal ways of familial identification. The daughters presence erases the boundaries of the family, its certainties of identity and orthodoxy. Therefore, the claim can be made that the representation of daughters in the texts here embodies slippages of identity within the familial space they problematise paternity by calling into question its certainties and conventions. Moreover, the daughterhood, of Kambili and
Enitan occupies an intriguing space because of its postcolonial context.
Enitan, born on the independence of Nigeria considers herself a child of the oil boom.”
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She says Like any generation defined by the economics of their childhood, we were children of the oil boom, and therefore we were children who had benefited from the oil boom (77). Enitan grows up in a cosmopolitan environment and her neighbourhood is peopled with different races and religions (26). Her family is middle- class, and her father a Cambridge schooled lawyer. Enitan‟s closest friend Sheri is of Nigerian and English parentage. In addition, the author Seffi Atta grew up in a family where she went to the mosque on Friday and then to Church on Sunday.
Kambili also lives in an upper-middle class family, with a father who is wealthy and respected in public. Unlike Enitan, her childhood is cloistered with a middle class indifference to her neighbourhood. Kambili lives behind high walls and coiled electric wires and has a fleeting experience with the larger postcolonial world, mostly apprehended from behind the windows of her fathers car. What connects her to Enitan is the hankering to get out of a confined (pater)familial space. It becomes a successful attempt when she goes to the University of Nigeria at Nsukka to visit her aunt Ifeoma.
Daughterhood in both these texts embodies an innate transcendental quality. While occupying a postcolonial milieu fuels this quest to rupture familial frontiers, the daughters relationship with the father is at the centre of daughterhood‟s supposed vocation. The sentimental disposition of the daughter towards a father figure also gives The expression reflects Seffi Atta‟s perception of her generation one that was created by economic conditions that paved the way for migration to Europe and America, because of the gains of a booming Nigerian oil economy. Hers can be referred to as the first generation of extensive writing from postcolonial Nigerians in diaspora – a product of migration, and exile that represented a strong wave of actual brain drain in Nigeria, which intensified in the sands.

202 an androgynous dimension to her idea of genealogy and identity. Kambili and Enitan problematise normative ideas of genealogy that privilege the father figure while acknowledging the importance of this normativity within the sum total of what they consider as their composite identities. Significantly however, they arrive at androgeneity through a systematic and comprehensive unpacking of the figure of the father. Through this relationship, they engender an interesting dimension in postcolonial imagination, one that has been traditionally related and dominated by father figures. They delegitimise paternity by rupturing and multiplying the margins of their existence, in a manner that links up their postcolonial condition to the wider and more problematic condition informed by postmodernity. In other words, these postcolonial daughterhoods are at the heart of a process of decentralisation, delegitimation and multiplication of margins indicative of contemporary Nigerian fiction.
Kambili‟s life in Purple Hibiscus is defined by the discourse of the father – Papa Eugene
– who suffuses his household with his decrees, creating an atmosphere of silent obedience. He represses dissent through physical punishment, legitimising his violent actions with religious decrees. Kambili particularly bears the brunt of this silence and repression on regular occasions. Brutal punishment is applied on her regularly, but her attitude towards her father remains genuinely yet cautiously sentimental, because she understands that at the core of her fathers violence, also lies a problematic history of identification. It is Kambili‟s critical sentiment towards her father that perhaps makes her the only person in the household able to actually love and see beyond the image of a violent father.
Kambili‟s devoted admiration to her father comes surprisingly in the wake of an atmosphere of entrapment The compound walls topped by coiled electric wires, were so high I could not seethe cars driving by on our street (9). Her fathers house which is located in an upmarket area is spacious but has an internal architecture of silence

203 Our stepson the stairs were as measured and 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 a scripture or a book by one of the early church fathers to read and meditate on the silence of evening rosary the silence of driving to the church for benediction afterward) This is a silence of entrapment, created by an overbearing ultra-paternity that smothers through its ubiquity, while being aided by religious ritual. The sentiment Kambili builds is perhaps her precocious way of absorbing the crisis of identity that is embodied by her father. She also realises that the physical and psychological entrapment can be transcended by erecting similar forms of entrapment. She therefore builds a psychological carapace to deal with her sense of entrapment. Hence her sentiment is constructed by embracing the rituals prescribed by her father. What is interesting is that while her actions sometimes seem robotic, due to repeated rituality, she is precocious and portrays a selective sentimental disposition that maintains her status as not only a participant observer in the rituals, but one that directs the reader to the fact that hers is critical sentimentality that seeks a constructive rather than reductive understanding of her abusive father. In her fathers house, Kambili is also aware of and familiar with an atmosphere of violence. Her precocity and selective interpretation of this violence is best portrayed in this incident I was in my room reading James chapter five […] when I heard the sounds. Swift, heavy thuds on my parents hand-carved bedroom door. I imagined the door had gotten stuck and Papa was trying to open it. If I imagined hard enough, then it would be true. I sat down, closed my eyes, and started to count. Counting made it seem not that long […] sometimes it was over before I even got to twenty. I heard the door open […] Mama was slung over his shoulder like the jute sacks of rice his factory workers bought in bulk at the Seme border. (33)

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Kambili knows the reality of the violence and experiences it, but she goes beyond assuming that her father is maliciously violent. She understands her fathers missionary history and strives to love him. Moreover, Papa Eugene has his own ways of expressing love, including the ritual activity – the sip of love The tea was always too hot, always burned my tongue, and if lunch was something peppery, my raw tongue suffered. But it didn‟t matter, because I knew that when the tea burned my tongue, it burned Papas love into me (8). Kambili has developed a carapace around these ritualised experiences of pain. Her most sentimental and definitive moments with her father are ironically when he administers corporal punishment. She realises that these moments are important in exposing the chasms of his masculine persona. She, in these moments articulates passive resistance and psychological superiority quite unlike her brother Jaja, who overtly resists punishment.
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Kambili‟s sentiment towards her father is fearful, for he, like Okonkwo rules his family with a heavy hand. A discourse of discipline and perfection is enforced by corporal punishment. Papa Eugene expects perfect scores at school and a strict adherence to Catholic ritual. Yet Kambili actually loves her father and through the violent encounters she has with him, she probes into the weaknesses of his personality those that give insight into his problematic paternal legacy and chasms within his masculine persona Papa crushed Jaja and me to his body. Did the belt hurt you Did it break your skin he asked, examining our faces […] Papa shook his head when he talked about liking sin, as if something weighed him down, something he could not throw off. (102) He lowered the kettle into the tub, tilted it toward my feet. He poured the hot water on my feet, slowly, as if he were conducting an experiment and wanted to see what would happen. He was crying now, tears streaming down his face. (194) Heather Hewett (2005) has read Kambili‟s rationalization of the abuse using the object-relations theory of Ronald Fairbain (1952).

205 These are poignantly definitive moments of connection for Kambili with her father moments of self-abnegation for the sake of understanding him. This connection at the instances of violence expose those grey areas of Papa Eugene, similar to those of
Okonkwo‟s rage that speak of a different story from the rationale of his actions. While through his relationship with Ezinma Okonkwo spares luxury for sentiment, Papa
Eugene‟s relationship with Kambili builds a deeper sentiment in these acts of violence. These violent moments acquire a sadistic form of a love bond between father and daughter. They are perhaps the only moments that Kambili can take advantage of to domesticate her father, to articulate resistance and to expose the chasms in his fraught and fragile sense of identity – one that is illusively running away from its paternal predetermination (Gikandi, 1991). From the outset, violence seems an outrageous reason for connection between father and daughter, but it underlines the daughters complex position in her fathers house and in his mind. Her sense of identity is found in the process of negotiation, of possession and retention, love and hate, inheritance and non-inheritance. It is a conscious act of negotiation that also portrays the dilemma at the centre of her identity. The daughter exploits the sentimental space she occupies in her fathers house to articulate meaningful resistance to paternal forces. The daughters predicament here is articulated in the dilemma of identifying her father as a normative source of identity while trying to make meaning of the validity and primacy of violence in the fathers performance of the same identity. The father embodies a duplicitous characteristic of familial genealogy and the daughter a disturbing conscience the more reason why she is a temporary sojourner in the familial space. The daughter upsets the certainties of familial identity. What is also interesting is that the daughter plays the role of a significant link within the tenuous familial structure. Cohen
(1993), in her examination of the Daughters Dilemma in the domestic novel examines Samuel Richardson‟s Clarissa. Cohen uses psychoanalytic theory to examine
Clarissa‟s condition of Anorexia Nervosa, a commonly experienced eating disorder by daughters in middle-class families that are often symptomatic of the unstable structures

206 within the family unit. The daughter, in Cohen‟s (1993:2) words is the visibly symptomatic member of a pathological system to which each family member contributes Cohen examines eighteenth century family systems and how they maintained stability through a triangulation system that had the father, mother and children occupying the three points of the triangle. This triangulation was a system whose dysfunctional nature was portrayed in Anorexia Nervosa – a condition that consequently portrayed the daughters dilemma The daughter holds a significant role in the functional structures of the family. For instance, Nyasha‟s anorexia in Tsitsi
Dangarembga‟s Nervous Conditions, is a condition that comes out of not only Nyasha‟s dysfunctional relationship with her father, but also of the identity crisis embodied by
Babamukuru. Enitan in Everything Good Will Come is a subject at the centre of her parents conflict, mostly brought out through a divided sense of loyalty (38). Enitan stands between two warring forces of her father and mother. The conflict of religion between her parents is constantly played out in her presence, despite the fact that sometimes she is made a pawn in this same conflict. It is therefore not surprising that her parents divorce in her absence, portraying for us the stabilising role she plays in the structure of her family. In Purple Hibiscus, Kambili becomes a witness to the disintegration of the family structure. Her identity as a narrator does much to emphasise this point. Her role as a daughter in the family further substantiates her ambivalent status. She becomes the appropriate person from whom a story like this can be told. She literally suffers from the intrinsic turmoil that destroys her family. She suffers the weight of her fathers overbearing presence and the oppressive silence from his ultra-paternal control. She becomes a psychological martyr in this familial space, sometimes inadvertently averting violence. In an instance when her brother Jaja defies religious ritual by walking out after dinner before Papa Eugene said the grace, Kambili literally suffers on Jaja‟s behalf because she knows how blasphemous this act can be interpreted by her father. And nothing can be more punishable in this household than defying religious ritual (14)

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Kambili refracts attention from the blasphemous act of her brother Jaja, hence averting the imminent punishment that was to be visited on Jaja. This choking incidence is a reflection of the silenced body of Kambili, something which, as her cousin Amaka notices, is in the silent tone of her speech when she visits her aunt at University of Nigeria in Nsukka. The constant violence Kambili experiences is worsened by the psychological damage it also does to her. She stands as an embodiment of the damaged psychological fibre in this family. Interestingly, such incidences provided for Kambili‟s domestication of her father. She saw in him signs of more anxiety than anyone else in the family Papas breathing was always noisy, but now he panted as if he were out of breath, and I wondered what he was thinking, if perhaps he was running in his mind, running away from something. I did not look at his face because I did not want to seethe rashes that spread across every inch of it, so many, so evenly spread that they made his skin look bloated. (15) The use of the first person narrative point of view allows Kambili to express that dimension of her imagination in probing the legitimacy of the father figure. These are always poignant moments of the growth of her consciousness. In their own way these moments raise her emotional maturity over the rest of the family. Perhaps she alone can actually feel the disintegration of the family, for it has accumulated in her imagination. She does not say it to her mother after her father throws the missal in a fit of rage – she thinks it Maybe Mama had realized that she would not need the figurines anymore that when Papa threw the missal at Jaja, it was not just the figurines that came tumbling down, it was everything. I was only now realizing it, only just letting myself think it. (15)

208 The figurines that break are symbolic for Kambili‟s mother, who often polishes them after her husband beats her up. For Kambili, their breaking into pieces means something significant. They multiply Kambili‟s sense of the marginal and therefore inscribe a sense of the crisis of the father figure. The breaking of the dancing ballet figures with Papa
Eugene‟s violent gesture is an augury of the rupture of his authority and therefore the multiplication of margins. It portends the crisis of his legitimacy the missal, which is a relic of religious significance that symbolises his authority and legitimacy, has been de- consecrated by his violent gesture. Kambili‟s imagination conjures up these symbolic, sometimes metaphoric meanings, made possible by her theistic upbringing. In this sense, she finds her father a complex individual, something that is partly lost to the rest of her family members. She builds her sentimental disposition to her father substantially from an inner need to demystify him, and an instinctive impulse to reach out beyond her familial or even national condition. There is nostalgia for the alfresco, which is beyond just being outside the exclusive suburb of coiled electric wires and high walls Indeed the breaking figurines which multiply her feelings of marginality can be seen as rupturing the exclusivity of her entrapment – a postmodern moment signalled right at the beginning of the text. In fact as Appiah posits, the postmodern is created at that moment of the multiplication of exclusivity Appiah (1992). In the process of multiplication, exclusivity is demystified, ceasing to be a projected ideal and reference point. Kambili‟s sense of marginalisation arises out of a constant feeling of exclusivity. The overuse of catechism by her father contributed to chants of backyard snob from her friends at school. Within her world of ideals and perfections, her father stands as an unassailable embodiment of these ideals. He urges heron, punishes her, brutally even, to drive his point home. He successfully attempts to subdue her body but the real battle for Kambili is psychological. Her imagination wanders, into a metaphysical realm in which she actually questions the ideals that Papa Eugene stands for. Through her imagination, she transcends the physical barriers of entrapment represented by the architecture of the house. She also builds a psychological carapace that allows her to maintain space fora secularised understanding of the world that she yearns to encounter someday. This world comes through the eventful visit to Nsukka, which is credited with

209 the disintegration of her Enugu home. Kambili‟s story takes the shape of a memory, one she symbolises with the hibiscus flower But my memories did not start at Nsukka. They started before, when all the hibiscuses in our front yard were a startling red (16). The different shades of the hibiscus flowers symbolise the trajectories of Kambili‟s memories and subsequently of her augmentation out of her familial space. Nsukka paints different shades to her imagination, provides a different colour of the hibiscus flower and most significantly, provides alternative fathers. Nsukka multiplies the idea of exclusivity, of distinctions that Appiah talks about in his reference to how the postcolonial and the postmodern connect.
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Kambili finds functionality in Nsukka, she finds how pragmatism can demystify the metaphysical, how religion is secularised and domesticated by material realities. The young priest, father Amadi, embodies a foil for Kambili‟s father and the priest Father Benedict in Enugu. He is young and liberal, an antithesis to Kambili‟s knowledge of a father. Father Amadi symbolises new power and new freedom that multiplies the distinctions and exclusivities associated with the idea of the father as represented by Papa Eugene in his household. While Amadi is the father he is also the son with new legitimacy and pragmatism. He arouses in Kambili indistinctness and indeterminacy, sexual feelings, filial love and penitence at the same time. He is in Kambili‟s socialisation, a bundle of contradictions. He brings out, apart of her imagination she has never articulated until now My chest was filled with something like bath foam. Light. The lightness was so sweet I tasted it on my tongue, the sweetness of an overripe bright yellow cashew fruit (180). Out of her fathers house, Kambili finds multiple voices and perspectives in Nsukka. She finds a family headed by a single mother (her aunt Ifeoma) and the experience reorients
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Appiah (1992) uses the artistic metaphor of the Yoruba Man with Bicycle to launch a discussion into the functional nature of the concept of postmodernism in the postcolonial world. That while the sculpture of the man with the bicycle can be interpreted by the western reader as a pastiche of culture, its sculptor, the postcolonial subject does not care that it is the white mans invention – it is not thereto be Other to Yoruba Self it is there because someone cared for its solidity it is there because it will take us further than our feet will take us it is there because machines are now as Africans as novelists (152).

210 her perception of the father figure. In Nsukka, Kambili‟s experience of a humorous world becomes instrumental in getting her out of her psychological indoctrination and oppression. She finds and experiences laughter and spontaneity which is opposed to the regimental nature of her fathers household back in Enugu. The world here is liberal and without a domineering father figure, something that is initially disconcerting for her. Laughter becomes a metaphor for growth and freedom in Purple Hibiscus. Through laughter, silence is broken, allowing fora dialogic atmosphere with heterogeneity of voices. In Purple Hibiscus, Kambili parodies and domesticates the patriarchal authority represented by her father, together with its religious grammar, through her experience of laughter. In this new scenario her absent father is initially present, as a conscience, whenever some religious ritual or other as Kambili understands it is flouted. Kambili‟s conscience is initially haunted by the regimental schedule she is used to back home. Here she sees multicoloured plates, a low ceiling, earthworms in the toilet bucket and many things she has never experienced. The idea of cramped space is exploited in Kambili‟s new experience to create an ironical sense of freedom and to multiply the sources of authority. Laughter and music populate this new space and fill it with a polyphonous speech. The new space at Nsukka is juxtaposed to the silenced one in her Enugu home. In the midst of this newfound freedom and space for articulation, Kambili realises anew secular religion that debunks and decentralises her biological father from the originary discourse on identity. Nsukka therefore falsifies Kambili‟s internalised ideas of fatherhood. In fact, while at Nsukka, the news of her fathers death raises interesting observations about the death of patronymic genealogies of identification.

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