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Matatu 49 (2017) 358–385

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Traversing Geography, Attaining Cognition The Utility of Journey in the Postcolonial African Bildungsroman

Ogaga Okuyade Niger Delta University, Wilberforce Island, Bayelsa State, Nigeria [email protected]

Abstract

Although a number of studies of the African bildungsroman exist, they hardly explore the utility of journeying in the development of the protagonist. Some of these studies continue to reiterate the existence of the postcolonial African bildungsroman and its structure or how postcolonial writers have subverted this genre to narrativize the African experience of growth. However, the crucial role of travel in the African bildungsroman remains to be discussed comprehensively. It is my intention, therefore, to address this oversight and begin to fill the gap. My central contention is that travel is an essential catalyst in the process of personal growth. Chimamada Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus will function as my primary text for analysis, but I also make reference to other narratives as ancillary texts in order to accentuate the functionality of journey, its metaphoric implications, and its structural application to Purple Hibiscus as a postcolonial African bildungsroman. In order to understand how mobility facilitates the construction of consciousness in Purple Hibiscus, I situate Kambili’s personal growth around a kind of mobility which resides within the usual-everyday kind of journey, which is by no means mythic, to articulate a template that foregrounds Kambili’s struggle for individuation—familial confinement, separation-cum-isolation, initiation, and return.

Keywords bildungsroman – growth – journey – individuation – setting – postcolonial – Africa – family

Oro yare mre mu no ro tore1

When we deal with each other, we should do so with the sense of awe that arises in the presence of something holy and sacred. For that is what human beings are: we are created in the image of God.2 ∵

Interest in the scholarship and research on the bildungsroman as a narrative form in the criticism of the African novel has become popular over the last two decades. This is so because a number of recent African narratives, especially debut works by novelists whom Pius Adesanmi and Chris Dunton describe as ‘third generation’3 writers, explore the process of growth undergone by their protagonists. Although the bildungsroman is a Western-oriented narrative form which evolved in Germany and became popular in most West- ern countries in the nineteenth century, its subject and plot-structure are by no means alien to Africa if one takes a fresh look at African oral narratives, particularly those including the trope of the orphan. Such oral narratives often exhibit traits associated with the bildungsroman, bringing to the fore as they do the crisis of survival, especially that of self-realization on the part of the orphan, who is usually trapped within the suffocating ambiance or the confines of the homes of foster or surrogate parent(s). Such tales recount the vicissitudes of growing up outside the comfort zone of the nuclear family of birth and its extensions. The point I am trying to make here is to insist that, although quite a number of the literary theories with which cultural productions are interpreted are rooted in the Western academy, which in turn makes the standard of innovation by which one can identify a narrative as bildungsroman wholly Western, there are

1 This proverb is very popular among the Urhobo of Delta State, in Nigeria. It is used to foreground the agency travels or journeys bequeath the traveler. It simply means the one who travels is more exposed than the one who enjoys long life. Invariably, the proverb prioritizes experiences acquired from journeying over that of old age. 2 Genesis 1:27. This biblical epigraph offers the calibrating indices or tool to gauge or determine human dignity—a subject I hope to explore in my analysis of Purple Hibiscus. 3 Pius Adesanmi & Chris Dunton, “Nigeria’s Third Generation Writing: Historiography and Preliminary Theoretical Considerations,”English in Africa 32.1 (May 2005): 7–19.

Matatu 49 (2017) 358–385 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 01:20:21PM via free access 360 okuyade ample indications that within the folkloric tradition of African literature, the narrative of growth remains a popular form. As already noted, the bildungsroman has become popular among third- generation African novelists. However, it must be pointed out here that it is by no means the exclusive preserve of the third generation, if one considers the subject and plot-structure of novels like Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Weep Not Child and Devil on the Cross, Mongo Beti’s Mis- sion to Kala, Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s Ambiguous Adventure, Buchi Emecheta’s SecondClassCitizen, and Zainab Alkali’s Stillborn.Tanure Ojaide notes: “Most of the novels of the younger African immigrant writers often deal with the themes of coming of age.”4 Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation, Unoma Azuah’s Sky-High Flames, Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, Moses Isegawa’s Abyssinian Chronicles, Diane Awerbuck’s Gardening at Night, Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus, Chris Abani’s GraceLand and Becoming Abigail, Sefi Atta’s Everything Good Will Come, Helon Habila’s Waiting for an Angel and Measuring Time, Yaba Badoe’s True Murder, Amma Darko’s Beyond the Horizon, Shimmer Chinodya’s Harvest of Thorns, Patricia Schonstein Pinnock’s Skyline, K. Sello Duiker’s Thir- teen Cents, and Shatto Gakwandi’s Kosiya Kifefe fall within the latitude of the bildungsroman. The literary prototype of the bildungsroman protagonist is the German author Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s early-nineteenth-century hero Wilhelm Meister, who embarks on a spiritual journey “to seek self-realization in the service of art.”5 Although recent African novelists have continued to deploy the structural pattern of the bildungsroman to account for the African experience, the African variant of the coming-of-age narrative differs from the traditional Western variants. The subject of my essay is not to specifically identify the differences between the Western and postcolonial African traditions; nevertheless, Benjamin Kohl- mann remarks that the traditional bildungsroman “articulated the hope that individual and community might after all be reintegrated.”6 However, a re- examination of the dialectic of the individual and the nation in Africa reinforces the fact that African coming-of-age narratives do not emphasize re- integration and harmonious reconciliation of the protagonist with his/her society as the prototypical Western bildungsroman does. Instead, it expresses a

4 Ojaide Tanure, Contemporary African Literature: New Approaches (Durham nc: Carolina Aca- demic, 2012): 33. 5 Jerome Hamilton Buckley, Season of Youth:The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding (Cam- bridge ma Harvard up, 1974): 9. 6 Benjamin Kohlmann, “Toward a History and Theory of the Socialist Bildungsroman,”Novel: A Forum on Fiction 48.2 (August 2015): 168.

DownloadedMatatu from 49 Brill.com09/30/2021 (2017) 358–385 01:20:21PM via free access traversing geography, attaining cognition 361 variety of forces that inhibit or prevent the protagonist from achieving self- realization in postcolonial African spaces, characterized by a kind of permanent flux “as societies in uncertain transition.”7 These forces include exile or dislocation, problems of transcultural interaction, poverty, and the difficulties of preserving personal, familial, and cultural memories.The fundamental prob- lem in most postcolonial African narratives of formation is the socialization process of young people, which brings amply to the fore the clash between individual freedom and social norms. Although there are a considerable number of studies of the African bildungsroman, they hardly explore the utility of journeying in the development of the protagonist. Examples that readily come to mind here are critical studies by Abioseh Michael Porter, Pauline Ada Uwakweh, Rose Sau Lugano, Ericka Hoagland, Ogaga Okuyade, Eunice Ngongkum, and Nilima Meher.8 Some of these studies continue to reiterate the existence of the postcolonial African bildungsroman and its structure or the ways in which postcolonial writers have

7 Apollo Amoko, “Autobiography and bildungsroman in African literature,” in The Cambridge Companion to the African Novel, ed. Abiola Irele (Cambridge: Cambridge up, 2009): 207. 8 Abioseh Michael Porter, “Second Class Citizen: The Point of Departure for Understanding Buchi Emecheta’s Major Fiction,” International Fiction Review 15 (1988): 123–129; Pauline Ada Uwakweh, “Carving a Niche: Visions of Gendered Childhood in Buchi Emecheta’s The Bride Price and Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions,” African Literature Today 21 (1998): 9–21; Rose Sau Lugano, “The Portrayal of the Girl Child in Selected African Female Bildungsromane” (doctoral dissertation, Pennsylvania State University,2005);Wangari wa Nyatetu-Waigwa,The Liminal Novel: Studies in the Francophone-African Novel as Bildungsroman (New York: Peter Lang, 1996); Ericka A. Hoagland, “Postcolonializing the Bildungsroman: A Study of the Evolu- tion of a Genre” (doctoral dissertation, Purdue University, 2006); Ogaga Okuyade, “Washing the Childhood from Their Eyes: Recent African Narratives and the Politics of Growth,” Journal of the Annual International Conference on African Literature and English Language 6 (2009): 110–125, “Geography of Anxiety: Narrating Childhood and Resisting Familial Order in Recent Nigerian Women’s Writing,” Language Society and Culture 31 (2010): 72–80, “Weaving Mem- ories of Childhood: The New Nigerian Novel and the Genre of the Bildungsroman,” ariel: A Review of International English Literature 41.3–4 (2011): 137–166, “Negotiating Growth: The Self and Nation in Sefi Atta’s Everything Good Will Come,”iup Journal of Commonwealth Literature 3.2 (July 2011): 32–54, “Narrating Growth in the Nigerian Female Bildungsroman,”AnaChronisT 16 (Winter 2011): 152–170, and “Negotiating Growth in Turbulent-Scapes: Violence, Secrecy and Growth in Goretti Kyomuhendo’s Secrets No More,” Tydskrif vir Letterkunde 52.2 (2015): 117–137; Eunice Ngongkum, “The Bildungsroman in Cameroon Anglophone Literature: John Nkemngong Nkengasong’s Across the Mongolo and Margaret Afuh’s Born Before Her Time,” Research Review 26.2 (2010): 55–74; and Nilima Meher, “(Re)Writing Postcolonial Bildungsro- man in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus,” International Journal of English and Literature 5/8 (October 2014): 206–210.

Matatu 49 (2017) 358–385 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 01:20:21PM via free access 362 okuyade subverted this genre to narrativize the African experience of growth. However, the crucial role of travel in the African bildungsroman remains to be discussed comprehensively. It is my intention, therefore, to address this oversight and begin to fill the gap. In considering the structural import of journeying in narratives of growth, Marta Mazurkiewcz argues:

in the novels classified as Bildungsroman a protagonist (usually male) makes an actual or metaphoric journey, experiencing many obstacles and difficulties but finally achieving a better understanding of himself and of the society in which he lives.9

The central argument of my essay, therefore, is the contention that travel is an essential catalyst in this process. Consequently, Chimamada Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus will function as my primary text for analysis, but I shall equally make reference to other narratives as ancillary texts to demonstrate the functionality of journey, its metaphoric implications, and its structural utility in Adichie’s narrative. The journey motif or the connection between travel and individuation is not a new phenomenon in literary studies. In fact, it is one of the most com- mon and dominant themes in literature, including the quest narrative and the picaresque. Mobility has “different manifestations, but one of the most obvious is travel.”10 Iain Chambers’ Migrancy, Culture, Identity gives expression to the importance of mobility in the formation of the self:

Our sense of being, of identity and language, is experienced and extrapo- lated from movement: the ‘I’ does not pre-exist this movement and then go out into the world […].11

Charles Nnolim expatiates as follows on the enduring centrality of the journey in narratives:

When we turn to Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Rabelais’ Gargantua, Voltaire’s Candide, or Fielding’s Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones, we turn to works employing one of the most universal plots in prose fiction—plots in

9 Marta Mazurkiewicz, “Bildungsroman All’Italiana: The Formation Novel in Italian Post- War Fiction,” The European Connection (Auckland) 16 (2012): 47–48. 10 Stella Bolaki, Unsettling the Bildungsroman: Reading Contemporary Ethnic AmericanWom- en’s Fiction (Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2011): 39. 11 Iain Chambers, Migrancy, Culture, Identity (London & New York: Routledge, 1994): 24.

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which the Journey, by land or water, carries the story-line forward, and in some cases, embodies the meaning. From the earliest novels in western literature, it has been in the nature of the novel genre to record the protagonist as on a journey or a quest, as he goes forth on a search— sometimes for a treasure, often for a father figure.12

Vladimir Propp, in his Morphology of the Folktale (1968), was among the first to claim the predominance of this motif, where the whole tale turns on on the hero setting out on a quest to fulfil a lack or a desire. Purple Hibiscus does not necessarily follow the same pattern as these tales, but most definitely centres on the notions of journey and a desire for a better life, which is at the core of many of the stories that Propp analyses. In mapping some of the distinct features of the bildungsroman, Jerome Hamilton Buckley notes that a geographical movement which brings to the protagonist both freedom and corruption is essential to the process of individuation.13 If the cardinal defining feature of the bildungsroman is predicated on change, the tropes of mobility and travel invariably become a fundamental precondition for change, as already noted in the above epigraph on the utility of journeying among the Urhobo of Nigeria. For the purpose of this study, the journey motif with its implications of personal development is to be regarded as a conspicuous presence in most instances of spatial traversal in the narrative. It ranges from a leisurely walk around the neighbourhood to a journey by any means of transportation from home territory. Mikhail Bakhtin notes the significance of “the road and encounters on the road”14 in the prototypical bildungsroman, Wilhelm Meister. His concept of the chronotope of the road is especially important to my reading of travel in Purple Hibiscus. Esther Labovitz profits from Bakhtin’s position on road encounters when she states incisively that the “road from ‘nothingness’ to selfhood is traversed in the quest.”15 As I have already noted, the bildungsroman is populated with ordinary heroes, thus the journeys embarked upon by the

12 Charles Nnolim, Approaches to the African Novel: Essays in Analysis (Lagos: Malthouse, 2010): 152. 13 See esp. Jerome Buckley, “Portrait of James Joyce as a Young Aesthete,” in Buckley, Season of Youth, 225–247, for a relevant discussion. 14 Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, tr. Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: u of Texas p, 1981): 244. 15 Esther Kleinbord Labovitz, The Myth of the Heroine: The Female Bildungsroman in the Twentieth Century: Dorothy Richardson, Simone de Beauvoir, Doris Lessing, Christa Wolf (New York: Peter Lang, 1986): 248.

Matatu 49 (2017) 358–385 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 01:20:21PM via free access 364 okuyade protagonist in Purple Hibiscus are not in any way mythical, because the “novel- istic hero discovers the meaning of life out of his everyday experience of it.”16 My exploration of journey in Adichie’s narrative is, then, not dealing with a hero quest in the traditional sense; involved, rather, is the kind of journey or trips taken by everyday people who struggle to define themselves in a society with little space for survival. The journeys Kambili and Jaja take are all within the eastern part of Nigeria, except on one occasion where they venture out of Eastern Nigeria to North Central, specifically the small village in Benue State called Aopke, for an excursion to see the apparition of the Virgin Mary. Along with the emancipatory force and agency Nsukka offers Kambili, I shall discuss the enigmatic and destabilizing force of the excursion to Aokpe in Kambili’s development. Indeed, the journeys within the confines of the family network eventually provoke the change one notes as Kambili develops. Numerous critics regard Kambili’s journey as a positive indication of inner, psychological change and growth. Cheryl Stobie, arguing from a theological perspective, notes the utility of journey in Purple Hibiscus and connects Kambili’s positive change to a renewed attitude towards religion.17 Ogaga Okuyade insists that Kambili experiences psychological growth from the moment Ifeoma suggests the need for her brother’s children to journey out of the familial base, where they are con- fined to Eugene’s authoritarian rule.18 However, to understand the utility of journey in Purple Hibiscus, I have organized my argument around a kind of mobility that resides in the usual, everyday kind of journey, which is by no means mythical, to articulate a template that foregrounds Kambili’s struggle for individuation—familial confinement, separation-cum-isolation, initiation, and return. Unlike Ifemelu, Adichie’s protagonist in Americanah, whose journey is somewhat transnational—from the usa to Nigeria, the journeys the protagonist and her brother take in Purple Hibiscus are all within the borders of Nigeria. More so, they are equally negotiated around the comfort zone of the extended family. In the light of the above-stated intention, it will not be difficult to come to terms with how Adichie uses structure and form to advance meaning. Signif-

16 Fiona F. Moolla, “Negotiating the Bildungsroman: Feminist Individualism in Nuruddin Farah’s From a Crooked Rib,” paper presented at the annual postgraduate conference, Stellenbosch University, September, 2007. 17 Cheryl Stobie, “Dethroning the Infallible Father: Religion, Patriarchy and Politics in Chi- mamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus,”Literature & Theology 24.4 (2010): 430. 18 Ogaga Okuyade, “Changing Borders and Creating Voices: Silence as Character in Chima- manda Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus,” Journal of Pan African Studies 2.9 (2009): 247, 257.

DownloadedMatatu from 49 Brill.com09/30/2021 (2017) 358–385 01:20:21PM via free access traversing geography, attaining cognition 365 icantly, therefore, subsumed under the journey motif is the primary action of the novel, and it is this action that functions as a signpost for the central symbol of the novel by foregrounding the main conflict and acting as the synchroniz- ing principle which makes the novel cohere, thereby providing it with shape and meaning. Without a doubt, PurpleHibiscus eloquently explores a kind of psychological and spiritual journey of the protagonist—which is usually crucial to the process of growth undergone by characters in the traditional bildungsroman. Through my reading of travel in Purple Hibiscus, I offer a more extensive overview of mobility and its centrality to Kambili’s growth in order to frame the relationship between utility of travel and structure in the narrative, irrespective of the fact that one may be tempted to assume that Purple Hibiscus is less about corporeal journeying than a psychological account of living in two fixed spaces. Mobility thus has different manifestations in cultural studies, but the most obvious is arguably travel—the journey from a provincial primordial base to a civic metropolitan space, which Buckley identifies as among the principal components of a bildungsroman plot.19 Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus is not only cyclical in structure but it also begins in media res, as realized through flashbacks. The novel eloquently maps the physical and psychological development of the protagonist, Kambili, and her brother, Jaja. However, it is Kambili who is the focus of this evolutionary process. From childhood, Kambili’s development is not dynamic but fogged-up, as it were. The protagonist and her brother struggle to define themselves beyond the rigid, suffocating world their calvinistic father has designed for them. This fussy mercantile man builds an environment that lacks the ventilation necessary for a steady relationship with the outside when the inside becomes too suffocating. The narrative is woven around Palm Sunday, yet the development of the protagonist and her brother has a quadrilateral dimension; their father’s mansion at Enugu, school, church, and Nsukka. Nsukka has the most amazing effect on their developmental process, especially as it is the only location Kam- bili visits on four occasions. Purple Hibiscus is set in Nigeria, where Kambili journeys from her home in Enugu, to Abba, the hometown of her parents, and then to her aunt’s sub- urban home in the university town of Nsukka. The home in some female bildungsromane is constructed as a colonized space where views of the col- onizer/father permeate everyday conversation and relationships. Novels like Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, Atta’s Everything Good Will Come, Azuah’s

19 Jerome Buckley, Season of Youth, 18.

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Sky-High Flames, and Darko’s Beyond the Horizon are just a few examples of postcolonial African female bildungsromane where the home overpowers the personality of the protagonists specifically because of the hectoring presence of the patriarchy.Thus, the familial base where the female protagonists reside is not only a site of oppression but also functions as metaphor for the eurocentric culture that pressures them to assimilate. In Purple Hibiscus, Enugu, where the Achikes reside, becomes a site of entrapment or confinement because it pre- vents the protagonist from embracing a fulfilling identity.20 Indeed, from the very moment the reader meets Kambili, she is almost lifeless, because the culture of her home is characterized by silence and shrouded in the notion that Catholicism is the most reliable means of negotiating religion, thereby con- demning Igbo religious customs as heathenish. Consequently, home in some postcolonial female bildungsromane becomes a symbol for family structure and its constraints. The seemingly overwhelming ambiance of the home articulates sharply the first phase of the template—familial confinement. The Achike children are very typical of children from the aristocratic class, yet they are empty psychologically. Kambili is alienated socially, culturally, and psychologically from everyone around her except her brother; she easily loses perspective and focus. On a number of occasions she hardly expresses her intentions. Kambili’s father’s house is wild and grand, but menacing—a suffocating paradise. It lacks almost nothing, yet the house overwhelms her psyche instead of elevating and animating it. Eugene’s personality and his presence in the house as the “god” of the family continues to stunt any emotional and psychological stability Kambili tries to build up naturally from the inside. Eugene runs the family like a domestic Hitler and an emotional terrorist; he is not evil, but brutish and loving, a benevolent protector and an affectionate mon- ster. His character enunciates not only the sense of intimate brutality but also that of traditional phallocentricism geared towards the domestication of violence. From Kambili’s narrative the reader becomes exposed to the fact that besides Eugene the other three members of this nuclear family are less than fully human, specifically because they lack the kind of dignity that lends an individual life respect and identity. The concept of dignity is not based solely on any human quality, legal man- date, or individual merit or accomplishment. Human dignity is inalienable— an essential, intrinsic component of human life hardly separable from other essential aspects of human existence. In Purple Hibiscus, the lives of Kambili,

20 Carole Boyce Davies, Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (New York: Routledge, 1994): 21.

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Jaja, and their mother are under attack from the dictatorial domestic regime of Eugene. The value of their lives is under threat from his incessant brutality. Consequently, Eugene actions and attitudes compromise the dignity and freedom of other members of his immediate family. Infamy reigns: Eugene humil- iates his family—there are the regular beatings he gives his wife and children, the scalding episode, his denial to them of the right to think autonomously, his shutting them off from the outside world, his verbal taunting, particularly when Kambili comes second in her class, the miscarriage incident, the debil- itating domestic-cum-familial conditions under which the Achikes negotiate their existence, where they are treated as objects rather than as free and responsible people. Thus, at the very beginning of the narrative one encounters a traumatized family almost on the brink of collapse. Sara Ahmed, in The Cultural Politics of Emotion, explores what emotions do to an individual or group and how emotions can drive individuals forward or render them glacial or immobile. Emotions have the capacity to push and pull, in so doing shaping “the very surface of bodies, which take shape through the repetitions of actions over time, as well as through orientations towards and away from others.”21 Significantly, therefore, pain can shape and reframe a body physically, through a wound or lesions, as well as orienting the subject who feels pain away from the ‘other’ who inflicts the pain. Indeed, existence for the Achikes is predicated on the primacy of pain. This absence of free will withers Kambili’s psychological and physical energy for development and pushes her from the centre to the periphery, where she becomes a captive in her father’s house. Buchi Emecheta suggests, in Head AboveWater, that the “greatest type of slavery is […] the enslavement of ideas.”22 Adichie graphically describes the dehumanization and enslavement that are operational in the Achike family. Played out is an ultimate form of hypocrisy: Eugene is revered in the community and held in high esteem in the church, while his family is coming apart at the seams. The mental iconography of the world of the Achikes is psychologically impregnable; it is airtight, and nothing emotional can enter. Consequently, the Achikes possess a house and not a home. A home is supposed to represent shelter, warmth, protection, and security; Kambili’s father’s house is frightening and un-homely in its very nature. It stands at attention, like a soldier ready to do battle with whomever enters or approaches. The high walls protect the house from uninvited outsiders and give a cold, hard, and uninviting stare. The

21 Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004): 4. 22 Buchi Emecheta, Head Above Water: An Autobiography (London: Fontana, 1986): 204.

Matatu 49 (2017) 358–385 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 01:20:21PM via free access 368 okuyade house is built to keep elements out, not to welcome people in. The Achikes merely size up the empty rooms; they are never able to impress their own identity on the structure that surrounds them. Adichie describes the house in an unconventional manner, portraying it not as a peaceful place but as the site of battle. The building fights off outside elements and resists the influence of the natural world. The building is a negatively prophylactic edifice, blocking its inhabitants from enjoying the freedoms that society values. Kambili, like the protagonist of some other female bildungsromane, exhibits a sense of ‘awakening’, which includes the recognition and acceptance of her limitations. If the psychological, cultural, and religio-graphic limitations of her life are summed up, what emerges is a resounding silence. Indeed, the most important aspect of her transition or rite of passage is the quest for a voice. If she must attain voice, she must transcend and traverse her geo-spatial limitations. To grow up in stability, she needs a united family and a home. It appears that Kambili’s problems go beyond the bounds of her father’s household regime. Though the pressures of family life are enough to drown her, she must also cope with the social and emotional ups and downs of adolescence, peer relations, and petty rivalries associated with being a teenager. Consequently, the process of the re-humanization of Kambili and Jaja must be negotiated outside their home. Journeying from the primordial base—their home at Enugu—becomes the only pragmatic way of beginning to gain a voice. Invariably, journey in Purple Hibiscus does not only carry the storyline forward; in itself it embodies meaning. Thus, the female bildungsroman focuses on the development of the female protagonist and her epiphany as she reaches adolescence.23 Purple Hibiscus therefore, reinforces not just the relevance of journeying for the protagonist in order to attain this epiphanic state but affords the kind of structure that confirms the viability of the bildungsroman genre. As Grace Okereke states, “Mobility is fundamental in the construction of consciousness.”24 The journey towards retrieval of Kambili’s voice begins with what would have been a permanent ritual of silence during Christmas celebration, if her aunt Ifeoma had not shown up with her family. The conservative mindset and authoritarian personality of their father makes them see as abominable

23 Pin-chia Feng, The Female Bildungsroman by Toni Morrison and Maxine Hong Kingston: A Postmodern Reading (New York: Peter Lang, 1997): 11–12. 24 Eche Grace Okereke, “The Journey as Trope for female Growth in Zaynab Alkali’s The Virtuous Woman,” in Currents in African Literature and the English Language, ed. Azubike Ileoje (Calabar: u of Calabar p, 1997): 91.

DownloadedMatatu from 49 Brill.com09/30/2021 (2017) 358–385 01:20:21PM via free access traversing geography, attaining cognition 369 anything he labels evil, without any rational or dialectical questioning. Kam- bili’s doughty aunt Ifeoma becomes an exemplar of iconoclastic identity and a demystifier of patriarchal despotism. Though a Catholic devotee like Kambili’s father, she is the breath of fresh air that relieves the domestic captivity imposed by her brother. In addition to her strength of character, Ifeoma is a thorough- bred, not by class placement derivable from education and social status, but by her untippable deportment. Ifeoma has the ability to transcend geographic and social borders. If Kambili is to grow into stability, she must be enabled to see beyond her father’s religious fanaticism and her mother’s docility, the latter indicative of the hollowness of traditional African maternity. Following Kambili’s realization of her childhood restrictions, she begins the struggle to overcome the burden of voicelessness. This awakening introduces the second template of the bildungsroman—separation, which is a tempo- rary, not a permanent, break, a transition to apprenticeshi, where the art of becoming is learnt under the guardianship of a network of strong women. Beat- rice, Kambili’s mother, lacks the maternal courage to protect her from Eugene’s incessant persecution of his daughter. What Kambili’s mother does is merely to nurse her back to health after regular battering. But Kambili needs more than a nurse. Indeed, Beatrice is a mother who loves her children, but she is genuinely incapable of protecting them from the tyranny of Eugene. The consequences of Beatrice’s inertia reflect how Kambili comports herself—fear and pain, and no opportunity to develop a sense of self and free will. A girl with a fragmented identity, and no hope for the future. Aunt Ifeoma affects Kambili in three ways. She is, first of all, the maternal figure offering guidance, helping Kambili, through through her religious belief, to distinguish between right and wrong, and to find her rhythm and balance in a social setting choked by asymmetric gender configurations. Secondly, Kam- bili sees her aunt as a woman who is self-reliant in a male-dominated milieu. Thirdly, she effectively combines the roles of father and mother for her children, playing these roles so well that her children hardly miss their father. Through this character Kambili begins her initiation into womanhood. It is in her house that Kambili learns the domestic business of cooking, which, in her father’s house and like Enitan in Sefi Atta’s Everything Good Will Come, she has not had access to. The kitchen is a very important aspect of her apprenticeship phase, introducing her to role models necessary for her transition from adolescence to womanhood. I shall return to Kambili’s culinary initiation later, pointing it out here only to establish Ifeoma’s place as mentor—an employed female who simultaneously has sole responsibility for the upkeep of her family, a woman who does not have to rely on men in a society regulated by men. In short, an emancipated African woman.

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Socially, Ifeoma is well positioned, but she does not intimidate others with her position as a female lecturer at a large federal university. She argues intel- ligibly and intelligently and listens to others with close attention. She is able to provide for her family, clothe them, put food on the table, and is also able to offer a seat at her dinner table to unexpected guests. Regardless of her brother’s social position—an aristocratically rich man—she is able to preserve her independence even when she lacks items her brother can easily provide her with. The issue of the gas cylinder is a good example. Eugene has countless gas cylin- ders sitting unused around his factory; all she needs to do is ask, but she does not do so, even when Beatrice insists she should. It is not because of feminism or academic pride, but out of the sense of self-independence as a liberated woman, one of those “who refuse to be compartmentalized into […] chiseled up roles”25 patronized by males. Ifeoma is able to easily discern the cosmetic life her callow nephew and niece are leading. She observes that Kambili’s face is inexpressive her whole mien tongue-tied, unlike her children, who converse animatedly and freely inside and outside the home. She equally notices that Kambili is afraid of crowds or large groups (what psychologist call cluster phobia). Her sense of sociality is almost non-existent and she exhibits traits of battered-child syndrome.26 Above all, Ifeoma suspects that her niece has a depersonalized identity, the effect of Eugene’s treatment of his family. In order to initiate osmotic pressure in their lives, she prescribes a trip to Nsukka for Kambili and Jaja, a trip that constitutes an unshackling from Eugene’s unbridled religious hegemony. Although Eugene’s acquiescence to the proposal is welcomed by the children’s mother, to maintain his authority even in his absence he imposes a schedule they must adhere to strictly. This authority starts to crumble away in absentia when Kambili and Jaja embark on the trip to Nsukka. Adichie stresses the importance both of Nsukka as a town that houses Nigeria’s first indigenous university and of the liberating atmosphere of the university itself:

25 Rosemary Moyana, “Men and Women: Gender Issues in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions and She No Longer Weeps,” African Literature Today 20 (1996): 30. 26 This is a pattern of behaviour which may result from being a victim of physical child abuse (includes the inability to form adequate relationships—a poor self-image). Kambili exhibits as much, though children need not have been the victims of physical assault for this syndrome to develop; the radical domestic suppression of self-expression can suffice. Kambili is eventually redeemed from this condition, and the process of her redemption is holistic—psychologically, emotionally, biologically, culturally, and socially.

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I turned to stare at the statue in the middle of the lawn, a black lion standing on its hind legs, tail curved upward, chest puffed out. I didn’t realize Jaja was looking, too, until he read aloud the words inscribed on the pedestal: “To restore the dignity of man.” Then, as though I could not tell, he added, “It’s the university’s motto.”27

As already noted, the protagonist and her brother are both disoriented. It can be inferred here that the notions of dignity and restoration will strike a chord in the breast of the youngsters. Nsukka becomes the observation post and turning point where they begin to question their father’s autocracy and rigid religious stance. The entire narrative centres on the process of restoring the dignity of Kambili, her mother, and Jaja. Kambili begins to find her own voice by freeing herself from her father’s schedule and allowing herself to be drawn into conversations initiated by her new-found friends, especially Father Amadi. Ifeoma’s presence in Abba during the Christmas celebrations is enchanting and animating for Kambili, and stands in stark contrast to her father’s controlling rituals. Eugene only grants his children audience with their grandfather for fifteen minutes; anything more is is an abomination that must be confessed before the priest for remission of the assumed sin. From her father’s prayers and remarks, Kambili concludes that her grandfather must be deeply pagan. Eugene would not allow his own father onto his premises because their religious beliefs are at variance. Kambili regards her grandfather with filial attachment from a distance but, indoctrinated by her father, cannot get too close to the old man because he is evil and hell-bound. It is Ifeoma who dispels this illusion by granting Kambili and Jaja insight into their grandfather beyond the distortions their father has etched on their inno- cent minds. Kambili’s silent observation of how Ifeoma and her children interact and conduct themselves around the house constitutes the third template—initiation. Kambili’s finding of her voice and freedom, signified almost clinically by her mouth functioning properly for the first time, is acted out unconsciously. On arrival at Nsukka, Kambili is stunned at the way in which her aunt and her children initiate and sustain conversations. She is confused by the untram- melled grace with which everybody carries themselves in the house. Her inability to comprehend this disposition pitches her even deeper into silence. But the journey of apprenticeship continues, opening into another re-awakening,

27 Chimamanda Adichie, PurpleHibiscus (Lagos: Farafina, 2004): 112. Further page references are in the main text.

Matatu 49 (2017) 358–385 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 01:20:21PM via free access 372 okuyade the intellectual epiphany that is one more distinctive feature of a number of African female bildungsromane. Kambili keenly observes in silence how her aunt and her family bond; Adichie is giving her character an opportunity here to see how this single woman/parent of a different social class, education, and carriage communicates and interacts with her children and friends. Aunty Ifeoma’s home is cramped, mismatched, and noisy, yet it has everything Kambili’s home lacks: laughter, freedom of expression, and warmth, a place “where you can say anything at any time to anyone, where the air was free for you to breathe as you wished” (120). Initially, Kambili cannot encompass the infiniteness of the power of expression in this borderless zone; she is frightened and amazed at the same time. Amaka, Kambili’s cousin, becomes the catalyst behind Kambili’s empowerment in Nsukka. When Aunty Ifeoma asks Kambili to prepare the orah, she is nonplussed by this simple culinary task because back home in Enugu, Sisi, the Achikes’ maid, was responsible for the cooking. Understanding Kambili’s predicament, Ifeoma asks Amaka to take over, where- upon Amaka exclaims: “‘Why? Because rich people do not prepare orah in their houses? Won’t she participate in eating the orah soup?’” (170). Amaka’s outburst is just a form of harmless teasing about the Achikes’ aristocratic status and Kambili’s ignorance about how to prepare a local delicacy. Aunty Ifeoma’s exhortation that Kambili defend herself (“‘Talk back to her’,” 170) initiates or constitutes the girl’s first act of self-articulation:

“You don’t have to shout, Amaka,” I said, finally. “I don’t know how to do the orah leaves, but you can show me.” I did not know where the calm words had come from. I did not want to look at Amaka, did not want to see her scowl, did not want to prompt her to say something else to me, because I knew I could not keep up. I thought I was imagining it when I heard the cackling, but then I looked at Amaka—and sure enough, she was laughing. Purple Hibiscus 170

For Kambili, Nsukka is not only the town where her aunt lives and works but also a symbol of liberty, as the concluding chapter shows. Her teenage development is rounded out in Nsukka because for the very first time her mouth performs almost all the functions associated with it. As noted earlier, the kitchen in some recent female narratives such as Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions is the hub of action where the ambiguity of female bonding in confinement is vibrantly expressed. It is from this marginal kitchen space that Kambili claims her voice and is initiated into womanhood. Madelaine Hron substantiates this position:

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It is only when Kambili herself learns to cook and prepare traditional Igbo dishes that she breaks away from the fabricated sweetness of her childhood and gains agency as a woman. At first Kambili does not even know how to handle a yam (134); Aunt Ifeoma must show her how to soak her hands in water and slide the skin off (165). Kambili’s hand-soaking initiation in Ifeoma’s kitchen thus contrasts starkly with that of Eugene, whose behaviour was conditioned by a missionary’s basin of scalding water. Moreover, Kambili’s entry into language, her first voiced rebuttal in Nsukka (176), also concerns food preparation; she demands to learn how prepare orah soup.28

The kitchen becomes the first site of Kambili’s redemption in her process of becoming because it is the space where women can express their domestic power and transform limitations into an opportunity for creative culinary experimentation and expression. After the kitchen initiation, Kambili learns every other thing with ease. She smiles, talks, cries, laughs, jokes, and sings. Through Ifeoma, Kambili discovers Papa Nnukwu’s sense of pantheism, as she watches him from a distance communing with his (G)ods, an occasion which proves the old man a better believer, one who understands the intricate geometry of religion, especially the relationship between (G)ods and humans, thereby disproving and debunking Eugene’s compassionless fundamentalism. For the very first time she lives a life not dictated by schedule, though the items in the schedule have been permanently engraved in their hearts. Ifeoma rejects any conditioned expectation on the part of her niece and nephew that the mindlessly rigid schedules of Eugene’s household might be the standard in her home. She conditions them to the democratic order of her family—an order characterized by the application of the commonest of senses. In Ifeoma’s house everybody has carte blanche to say anything, provided elders are not insulted. The enthusiasm with which topics are broached and sustained is not only mind-boggling for Kambili but also causes her considerable consternation initially—she must grow through this phase of cognitive disarray. Through Father Amadi, Kambili discovers a new brand of Catholicism, which is neither mechanical nor dictatorial, but supple, contrasting sharply with the brand her father and Father Benedict practice. Father Amadi understands Kambili’s problems, which are basically psychological and emotional,

28 Madelaine Hron, “Ora na-azu nwa: The Figure of the Child in Third-Generation Nigerian Novels,”Research in African Literatures 39.2 (Summer 2008): 34.

Matatu 49 (2017) 358–385 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 01:20:21PM via free access 374 okuyade especially the crisis of character disorder29 created by the fear of not satisfying her father’s caprices. He gives her space for dissent, embarking on a project of cognitive restructuring30 to help her construct a formidable identity. He coaxes her out of her cocoon of her silence. Since her sense of Catholicism is program- matic and ritualistic, he sees that she will be willing to do anything provided it is associated with God or Jesus—even to commit crimes in their name.

“Do you love Jesus?” Father Amadi asked, standing up. I was startled. “Yes. Yes, I love Jesus.” “Then show me. Try and catch me, show me you love Jesus.” He had hardly finished speaking before he dashed off and I saw the blue top of his tank top. I did not stop to think; I stood up and ran after him. The wind blew in my face, into my eyes, across my ears. Purple Hibiscus 176

Father Amadi takes advantage of her dogmatic naivety, and she falls for the bait and runs for it. She does not stop to think before chasing after Father Amadi; her psyche is programmed, and the name of Jesus and God is all that is needed to drag her out of her shell even if it means doing the wrong thing. Through cathartic therapy31 as initiated by Ifeoma and Father Amadi, Kam- bili experiences a feeling of immense relief from familial tension and emotional meltdown. As Father Amadi continues to groom her, she beams her first, icy smile; on their way home, Kambili opens her mouth and utters a mirth- less laugh. She blooms under the tutelage of Amadi, perhaps the only male outside her family circle who has been so close to her. As she matures physically and mentally, her emotional lexicon expands as well, reaching a climax with a sensational declaration of love for the priest. At this point she lacks knowledge of the implications and consequences of what she has done. This invariably becomes a vibrant statement of her first access to freedom of speech.

29 This is a rather nebulous term for maladaptive behaviour or personality (e.g., a gross lack of self-confidence), which, while not necessarily indicating mental illness, may be sufficiently unusual to merit treatment. 30 This is the act of replacing faulty ideas and concepts with new and better ones; it is predicated on rationalism. 31 Any therapeutic method or exercise which enables the patient to release a suppressed emotion or memory, e.g., through an outburst of emotion or hypnosis. I regard Kambili as a patient because her aunt initiates all this process of helping her in re-cultivating new habits by introducing her to people with the potentials to liberate her from the conditioned identity Eugene has bequeathed her. Thus, she is treated like a patient, if one considers the attention she attracts when the other characters deal with her.

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This kind of freedom is empowerment realized through a change in consciousness. Anna-Leena Toivanen contends that Kambili’s behaviour is submissive and self-effacing, and that it is clear that she has “internalised her father’s vio- lent authority.”32 Father Amadi becomes the idea of a guardian and protector for Kambili, especially as Eugene lacks the emotion resources to help her attain agency. Kambili’s voicing of her love for Amadi only accentuates the fact that she earnestly desires a father figure-in her life. For Toivanen, Amadi “a new masculine authority,”33 is the life-affirming force who enables Kambili to reject Eugene and his suffocating paradise at Enugu and to radically liberalize her relationship to religion. In the scene with the apparition of the Virgin Mary at Aokpe, Kambili’s yearning for a figure of authority is transmuted, and she finds a new source of admiration. The apparition articulates the agency in a healing force, but it also reinforces Kambili’s subservient disposition. Cheryl Stobie sees theVirgin Mary as symbolizing wholesomeness and unconditional love, and argues further that the apparition offers a new kind of femininity that transforms Kambili psychologically.34 Kambili’s registers the apparition solemnly as a girl who is “dressed in white, and strong-looking men stood around her so she would not be trampled” (274). This fragile girl reflects Kambili’s emotional condition, that of an abused teenage girl in need of a father figure who can offer her protection. But the paternal replacement could equally be associated with the question of submission and emotional dependency—when Amadi’s fingers touch her tongue during communion, she wants to “fall at his feet” (241). This is an apt demonstration of her total submission to a God-like man, and, by extension, of a lack of emotional strength. Although Kambili’s new force of love is liberating, she is merely replacing her fear of Eugene and the pain he has inflicted on her with a less fearful but still submissive attitude toward Amadi. Cynthia R. Wallace contends that Ifeoma and Amadi can be seen as “surrogate parents” for Kambili, while Amaka, her cousin, becomes her mirror; both help her heal and evolve.35 She begins to idealize her relationship with the two of them. Sara Ahmed notes that such a love attachment often involves a subject who

32 Anna-Leena Toivanen, “Daddy’s Girls?: Father–Daughter Relations and the Failures of the Postcolonial Nation-State in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus and Véronique Tadjo’s Loin de mon père,” ariel: A Review of International English Literature 44.1 (2013): 110. 33 Toivanen, “Daddy’s Girls?,” 111. 34 Cheryl Stobie, “Dethroning the Infallible Father,” 430–432. 35 Cynthia R. Wallace, “Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus and the Paradoxes of Postcolonial Redemption,” Christianity and Literature 61.3 (June 2012): 474.

Matatu 49 (2017) 358–385 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 01:20:21PM via free access 376 okuyade idealizes the future life with the loved object. Invariably, this love is not so much about the specific object in particular as, rather, about the internalized perception of the ideal image the subject has of itself and its environment, while sustaining a relationship with the object.36 Ifeoma and Amadi explicitly fulfil their role as idealized objects for Kambibli and, by extension, offer her an idealized image of a future life beyond Eugene’s suffocating paradise. At this point, Kambili is already on the threshold of the physical and mental changes of adolescence and her obsession with Amadi and admiration for her cousins illustrate her urge to liberate herself from her father’s brutish affection and factitious benevolence. For Kambili, this raised ‘consciousness’ and the ‘idealization of the object’ amount to a natural profession on her next stage to maturity in the struggle as a female African adolescent to discover her self-identity. As ClaudiaTate suggests in an analogous context,

If a black woman is forced to remain “motionless on the outside” she can always develop the “inside” of a changed consciousness as a sphere of freedom. Becoming empowered through self-knowledge, even within conditions that severely limit one’s ability to act, is essential.37

Kambili’s empowerment is part of a natural progress towards womanhood in which she gradually becomes self-reliant in a patriarchal society. With help from women like Ifeoma and her daughter, Amaka, she is gradually moving closer to unconscious goal of a “journey towards empowerment [that] lies within the individual woman.”38 Kambili continues on her journey towards womanhood, but now the challenge is much greater. She needs to summon all her female resources in order to sustain her new identity when she goes back to Enugu. It is only on the death of her grandfather that Kambili begins to truly know him. Jaja, who goes through the same psychological and emotional torture as Kambili at Enugu, sometimes displays a sense of affiliation motivation39 which has helped him get closer to their grandfather and their cousins. Kambili’s cousins and Jaja seem to be closer to Papa Nnukwu, but she is too distant—a

36 Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 127. 37 Claudia Tate, “Maya Angelou,” in Conversations with Maya Angelou, ed. Jeffrey M. Elliot (Jackson: up of Mississippi, 1989): iii. 38 Patricia Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (Boston ma: Unwin Hyman, 1990): 27. 39 The drive to belong to a group, in order to form friendships, etc.

DownloadedMatatu from 49 Brill.com09/30/2021 (2017) 358–385 01:20:21PM via free access traversing geography, attaining cognition 377 fact she eventually hates herself for. As Kambili prepares to return to Enugu, Amaka gives her the unfinished painting of their grandfather she had been working on when he died—the painting becomes something she earnestly desires but cannot possess. She handles the painting with reverence as their father takes them home to Enugu. The painting is not just the link between her aunt’s world and Enugu, it is equally a symbolic object which will prompt rebellion and the contestation of Eugene’s rules. The return to Enugu takes us to the fourth template—return. This is not just a physical return to the primordial or familial base; it eloquently foregrounds the veracity of what has been learnt in the phase of apprenticeship and how the initiate can deploy what is learnt in sustaining the new identity. Eugene notices remarkable changes in his children as they settle down after their trip from Nsukka. One such change, quite unprecedented, is Jaja’s calm demand (though, for him, it is throwing caution to the winds) for the key to his room. His father sees Jaja as displaying a kind of pugnacity that is symptomatic of psychosis—the sudden turn of events is indeed incredible. Kambili, who usually complies with her father’s dictates, suddenly refuses to do so. Eugene, astounded, takes practical steps to disabuse his children of the ideas they have brought with them from their travels. A cleansing ritual will purge and purify Jaja and Kambili of the sinful dust of Nsukka and the pagan air of Ifeoma’s home. Amidst Kambili’s screams of pain, Eugene scalds her feet, perhaps with the aim of sterilizing them from the infectious and contagious germs of freedom associated with Nsukka. The cleansing ritual fails to achieve the effect Eugene intended. The children possess their own ritual antidote in the form of two items that they have brought with them from their aunt’s Nsukka home: Jaja brings seeds of the purple hibiscus, while Kambili brings the unfinished painting of their grandfather. With these prized possessions they hope to escape the zone of frustration, dis- illusionment, alienation, and existential solitude of the world they know only too well. The items will help them fill the vacuum created in their lives and help them sustain a stable relationship with their aunt’s world. Kambili’s father suddenly discovers her painting as she and her brother are admiring their grandfather. Extremist that he is, Eugene snatches the painting from his children, who claim ownership of the item simultaneously. Stunned and angered by this rebellion, Eugene destroys the painting. Kambili is unable to hold back: she is no longer prepared to look on as her father tears something she holds sacred from her just like that. She has remained silent all her life: her response to her father’s assault is a different kind of silence–ominous, passionate, uncom- promising. The painting betokens freedom for her, and at the same time the remains of her grandfather, whom she had been denied while he was alive.

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So strong is Kambili’s attachment that Eugene’s destruction of the painting is, ironically, tantamount to desecration. Although Kambili’s self-actualization reaches a high point in her relationship with Father Amadi, the destruction of the painting is the catalytic event that spurs her to revolt against her lot. Audre Lorde states in Sisters Outside:

the true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations which we seek to escape but that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within us.40

After her first return from Nsukka, the memories of the home at Enugu are sad, destructive, and even poisonous. Psychologically, living at home wears down Kambili’s ambitions, dreams, and hopes for the future. For Kambili and her brother, Jaja, the home front is a destructive force in their lives, not a supportive base. As already noted above, the physical journeys from Enugu mark the defining occasions for self-reappraisal. Christopher Ouma notes how the atmosphere of oppressive silence and violence in which Kambili and Jaja grow up in their parents’ house is contrasted with and “ruptured by the laughter and music in Ifeoma’s household.”41 Kambili has to move beyond the limiting boundaries of her home in order to change her situation and take control of her own life. Moving outside may not be physical; she could be in her father’s house and yet reject his baseless and biased moral codes. Eugene’s destruction of the painting is the deciding moment of her existence. She temporarily snaps, escaping the reality of the moment; ignoring the physical presence of her father, she lurches into a metaphysical space where her father’s laws are not operational. In a schizophrenic frenzy, she experiences freedom for the first time. Rose Ure Mezu argues: “In psychosis, the ego is ever under the sway of the id, ready to break with reality.”42 Kambili throws caution overboard because her father has violently re-opened a crack in her psyche that she has fought hard to caulk. It takes courage to escape patriarchal domination. Deleuze and Guattari, echoing Maurice Blanchot, remark: “Courage consists, however, in agreeing to flee rather than live tranquilly and hypocritically in false refuges,” such

40 Audre Lorde, Sisters Outside (Trumansburg ny: Crossing Press, 1984): 123. 41 Christopher Ouma, “Journeying Out of Silenced Familial Spaces in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus”(ma thesis, University of Witwatersrand, 2007). 42 Rose Ure Mezu, “Buchi Emecheta’s The Bride Price and The Slave Girl: A Schizoanalytic Perspective,” ariel: A Review of International English Literature 28.1 (1997): 136.

DownloadedMatatu from 49 Brill.com09/30/2021 (2017) 358–385 01:20:21PM via free access traversing geography, attaining cognition 379 as morals, homeland, and religion.43 Kambili intuits that the disconnection from her father’s power and authority will afford her the opportunity to move beyond her home to new connections—new growth. As Kambili gathers up the torn pieces of the painting as if her life depended on it, she begins to regard her father with a defiant air of unequivocal rejection and condemnation of the sterile upbringing that he has imposed on her. The swiftness with which she reacts to the desecration of the painting contradicts everything her father stands for and signals the collapse of her father’s regime and, by extension, of the suffocating paradise called home. Incapable of grasp- ing the wrongness of his behaviour, Eugene, in a fit of anger, beats Kambili unconscious, to the extent that last rites (extreme unction) are administered to her. The trips to Nsukka are not only a plot accelerator harmonizing the formal structure of the narrative but they also mark the turning point in the development of Kambili and Jaja. And not only of the children—Beatrice, like- wise exhausted by Eugene’s incessant violence, poisons him, and Jaja, taking the blame, goes to prison. These radical consequences and measures are coun- terpointed in negativity by the fate of Aunty Ifeoma, who, unfairly dismissed from her university lecturing job, leaves to take up a new life in the usa. Kambili’s inward liberation is accompanied by social liberation through these family circumstances. After the death of her father and the incarceration of Jaja, Kambili becomes the head of the household, her mother having suffered a nervous breakdown resulting from her poisoning of Eugene. In the concluding chapter, she defiantly plays tapes of Fela, Nigeria’s Afro-beat mae- stro, a bohemian artist and icon of freedom of speech, fair play, justice, and defiance of highhanded authority. His lifestyle and the lyrics of his songs pit- ted him against a succession of Nigerian governments, which subjected him to repeated incarceration. On Kambili’s first visit to her aunt’s at Nsukka, the kinds of tapes Amaka plays are abominable to her; she has no powers of dis- crimination as yet. Since she is now free, not because of her father’s death but because she has reached the pinnacle of her development, she can easily discern between good and bad and enjoy defiant music that matches her own rebellion and growth into responsibility. When Kambili returns from Enugu the second time, she still exhibits emotional instability; it is only at the end that she displays traits of functional autonomy.44 She discovers her selfhood as she evolves from what she learnt at Nsukka

43 Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus:CapitalismandSchizophrenia (Minneapolis: u of Minnesota p, 1983): 341. 44 The concept is derived from Gordon Allport’s theory of personality development. Allport

Matatu 49 (2017) 358–385 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 01:20:21PM via free access 380 okuyade and puts that knowledge to use to increase her own worth. While Ifeoma opens the pathway for Kambili to do this, Amadi helps her to self-expression and a sense of her sexual identity. Kambili is able to rescue her mother, who is dying of grief and guilt, with what she has learnt during her apprenticeship at Nsukka—the art of communication and private perception, an art that applies both within the novel of formation and as an exploratory programme by which women writers in particular identify and affirm the position of themselves and other women in hostile patriarchal spaces.

Many women writers of color, both ethnic Americans and postcolonial, use the bildungsroman precisely to ‘affirm and assert’ the complex sub- jectivities of their characters and by extension, themselves.45

Fiona Moolla has argued that the female bildungsroman in Africa “often involves a journey inward, a spiritual awakening or self-discovery.”46 The journey is, furthermore, always set within the “wider community,”47 in contrast to the traditional European bildungsroman, which has a male protagonist and “charts the hero’s journey outward into society.”48 It becomes amply evident that Pur- ple Hibiscus combines the inward, spiritual and outward, physical movement of Bildung.49 Journeying in Purple Hibiscus is a plot accelerator and the threshold

argues that children do not possess personalities so much as a collection of behaviours, which vary according to the needs of the moment (e.g., children behave radically differ- ently with their friends and their parents). The behaviours eventually coalesce into selves, which are sets of behaviours consistently used in different settings—the child a home self, a school self, etc. An individual reaches maturity when the selves in turn coalesce into a proprium, which is a personality or self relatively stable across situations. In addition, All- port sees maturity as involving shifting the motivation for actions from simply earning reward, avoiding punishment, obeying orders, etc, to motivation to do something for its own sake and virtues (functional autonomy). This shift in motivation is called the lack of emotional continuity. 45 Maria Karafilis, “Crossing the Borders of Genre: Revisions of the Bildungsroman in Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street and Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John,” Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 31.2 (1989): 63. 46 Fiona F. Moolla, Reading Nuruddin Farah: The Individual, the Novel and the Idea of Home (Oxford: James Currey, 2014): 4. 47 Moolla, Reading Nuruddin Farah, 4. 48 Reading Nuruddin Farah, 4. 49 Willem Jacobus Smit, “Becoming the Third Generation: Negotiating Modern Selves in Nigerian Bildungsromane of the 21st Century” (ma thesis, Stellenbosch University, 2009): 34.

DownloadedMatatu from 49 Brill.com09/30/2021 (2017) 358–385 01:20:21PM via free access traversing geography, attaining cognition 381 the protagonist crosses to reach mental maturity. This is so because concur- rent with the physical journey is a spiritual one—experience and maturation. The aspect of becoming is of crucial importance for the bildungsroman as a narrative form. And in Purple Hibiscus, the process of becoming entails journeying, which in turn foregrounds Kambili’s transformation or gradual change from a “passive subject in a state of self-ignorance into an active one that is self-conscious.”50 From the textual analysis and concomitant identification of features of the traditional bildungsroman in this study, the form can be seen to be by no means alien to African cultural expression, present as it is in folkloric narratives con- taining the trope of the orphan. Purple Hibiscus is an eloquent example of a postcolonial African female bildungsroman. Almost all the elements of the form are represented in the narrative. Journeying serves as the launching pad for the process of initiation undergone by the protagonist towards the voicing of identity. The home front at Enugu is only an edifice which constantly submits the protagonist to the oppressive rule of Eugene. Only when Kambili travels to Nsukka does she come to realizes the extent of her father’s tyranny. As Kambili compares herself to Amaka, her mirror figure, she notices stark contrasts, such that she now realizes her weaknesses as an ‘abnormal’ girl-child. When she is exposed to her aunt, her children, and Amadi, individuals who are capable of autonomous thought, Kambili takes the opportunity given her and flourishes, developing as an individual in a “school-without-walls.” Adichie deploys two different templates of journeying in her narrative, the physical or literal and the metaphorical. The corporal journey is the physical excursion, while the metaphorical brings about a development in a character. Kam- bili’s literal journey from Enugu to Nsukka facilitates or catalyses her psycho- metaphorical journey from child to young woman. Structurally, the physical narrative is chronological, while flashbacks, blending without disrupting this linearity, bear the main psycho-metaphorical burden. These textual mechanics ensure that the dynamics of Purple Hibiscus are organically associated through- out with the trope of the journey. However, since the traditional bildungsroman emphasizes the harmonious socialization of the protagonist, Purple Hibiscus departs from the conventions of the form. This is so particularly because the protagonist of Purple Hibiscus neither achieves harmonious reconciliation-cum-integration into her society nor tranquil socialization in a society that remains stubbornly constrictive.

50 Marta Mazurkiewicz, “Bildungsroman All’Italiana,” 48.

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Instead, Adichie’s narrative articulates a variety of forces that inhibit and retard the development of the protagonist. The desires and goals of the individual that are necessary for his/her self-cultivation run counter to the demands of society, and this explains why postcolonial variants of the bildungsroman lack definite closure on the level of conflict resolution. One is tempted to call this hard-headed realism. Even given the fact that the newly autonomous individual remains con- strained by the social environment, hope remains. The liberational quality of the journey is articulated most strongly in Kambili’s fourth journey to Nsukka. While awaiting her brother’s trial and release, Kambili makes this journey, only to discovers that Nsukka has changed significantly. Her aunt has already left for the usa, the lawns are overgrown, and the statue of the lion appears to be a little rusty. However, she still notices the liberatory air of the city, which “smells of hills and history,” an ambience which “could free something deep inside your belly that would rise up to your throat and come out as a freedom song. As laughter” (299). Kambili reinforces the enigmatic ambience of Nsukka when she insists twice that when Jaja is released from prison they will take him to Nsukka first before attempting to visit Ifeoma in the usa. Significantly, therefore, mobility is not only analogous to the process of self- realization and individuation; it is equally a necessary precondition for shifting the focus of the individual beyond the everyday to the confluence of a spectrum of experiences. Through the trope of the journey, Adichie provides a alterna- tive, contrasting settings, and, by extension, creates a sort of alternate reality through which Kambili and Jaja can negotiate and construct an identity from their dialogic interaction with the outside world. By journeying from their primordial base, the Achike children break the socio-familial inertia that charac- terizes daily life in their Enugu family house. Besides being the hinge of the narrative events, travelling functions as more than a device for the furthering the plot; it introduces a multitude of new possibilities for the protagonist of Purple Hibiscus. Thus, the various places and locations Kambili visits not only create new social roles and new trajectories for her, but they also they expose her and the reader to both the complexities and the commonalities of human existence.

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