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COPYRIGHT 2008 Indiana University Press
ABSTRACT
This article examines Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus (2003) and Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) through an "African Postcolonial Gothic" lens. It begins by tracing the historiography and manifestations of Gothic attributes in precolonial and colonial Africa as exemplified in novels such as Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart (1959), Mongo Beti's Poor Christ of Bomba (1971), and Bessie Head's A Question of Power (1974). It then discusses Half of a Yellow Sun, which explores postindependence ethnic strife in Nigeria, particularly the Biafra War, and situates it as the historical precedent of the contemporary haunted setting in Purple Hibiscus. Adichie, I argue, participates in an ongoing reinvention and complication of Gothic topography in African literature. She teases out the peculiarities of the genre on the continent; dissects fraught African psyches; and engages in a Gothic-like reclamation of her Igbo heritage, including Igbo-Ukwu art, language, and religion.
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Gothic as a literary term emerged in the later eighteenth century and has been thought by some to have hardly anything to do with the European Goths who sacked Rome in 410 AD. Some revisionists like Robin Sowerby, however, note that Edward Gibbon wrote the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire about the time Gothic fiction emerged on the literary scene. Such revisionism links the word metaphorically to its origins by intimating that Gothic fiction tells tales of "invasions," which embody transgressions of all sorts, including those across national, social, sexual, and identity boundaries (Heiland 2-3). Eighteenth-century Europe evoked the Goths' "fierce avowal of the values of freedom and democracy." During this time and on to the French Revolution, the Goths were remembered and admired for their opposition to the tyrannical expansionism of the Roman Empire, an expansionism that was "subsequently identified with the Catholic Church" (Botting 5).
Similar opposition to empire and church emerged in twentieth-century African novels that predate Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus (2003). In Mongo Beti's The Poor Christ of Bomba (1971), the people of Tala, in colonial Cameroon, are set in direct contestation with Catholicism much like the Goths and subsequent eighteenth-century protagonists of Gothic novels. In the novel, Fr. Drumont-Father Superior of Bomba mission-abandons Talas residents for three years for failing to convert to Catholicism or for backsliding to their indigenous religion and cultural practices, including polygamy. While visiting the village of Timbo in Tala country, Fr. Drumont asks the local catechist what the people there think of religion. "Father," the catechist answers, "they say that a priest is no better than a Greek trader or any other colonialist. [...] They say that you must be hiding things from them. What about all the whites who live in concubinage with loose women in the town, do you ever rage against them?" (Beti 20). Fr. Drumont does not rage about this, not to mention the fact that "he refuses to believe that Zacharia is really bad" (Beti 10). Already married and with two sons, Zacharia takes sexual advantage of the sixa girls who live in the mission for "two to four months [doing] manual work for more than ten hours a day," all in the name of being prepared to be "mothers of Christian families" (Beti 5). Denis, a fifteen-year-old mission boy under Fr. Drumont's care, narrates Zacharia's affair with Catherine, one of the sixa girls. In addition, Denis reveals his own seduction by Catherine and provides readers with an insight into the eventual collapse of the mission of Bomba, whose sixa turns into a brothel raging with syphilis.
Seen through a Gothic lens, Denis is reminiscent of the sexually naive priest Ambrosio who is seduced by Matilda in Mathew G. Lewis's The Monk (1756). According to Steven Blakemore, "[T]hematically and allusively, Matilda is the Lovelace-like seducer protesting his innocent intentions, and Ambrosio is like the damsel whose virtue is threatened" (524). Blakemore argues that "Lewis's point is that Catholic vows of chastity feminize monks whose sexual ignorance makes them vulnerable to temptation and hypocrisy" (522). This is the same point that Beti seems to be making, especially in regard to Denis, whose seduction is filled with lamentation: "Oh God, what shall I do?"--Denis asks--"I'm so unhappy. And all because of that cursed girl, that Catherine. AN She is Satan herself [...]. I should have watched out, indeed I should. But how could I have done? How could I suspect that she wanted to make me do that?" (Beti 81). The parallels between the initially innocent Ambrosio and Denis and the demonic Matilda and Catherine enhance the thematic similarity between these two novels and their anti-Catholic subtexts. Further, Lewis's novel posits that "cloistered 'feminine' virtue is easily seduced" (Blakemore 524), a point that Beti demonstrates in the seduction of Denis and the sixa girls. In The Monk and The Poor Christ of Bomba, Catholicism is depicted as having perverted "pure" religion and produced "deviant sexual practices originating from 'unnatural' vows of chastity," which violate nature.
Geographic locations aside, novels like Lewis's and Beti's reveal that Gothic fiction is imbued with "a nostalgic relish for a lost era of romance and adventure, for a world that, if barbaric, was [...] also ordered [and that in] this respect Gothic fiction preserves older traditions" (Botting 5). From this it might be argued that most, if not all, African literature, by virtue of its effort to preserve and reclaim older traditions and cultures, is imbued with Gothic trappings and demonstrates varying degrees of commitment to the genre's topography and stock features. Indeed, such literature in the twentieth century has contributed to the emergence of the "postcolonial Gothic." As Gina Wisker argues, the "history of postcolonial peoples is one that reeks of the elements of horror: silencing, hauntings of repressed past histories, ghosts, abjection and the split self, [and] colluding with the ruler" (174). As African novelists like Beti demonstrate, however, "colonized peoples attempt to maintain and revive indigenous or exiled homeland conditions, belief, and ways of looking at the world [and] the imaginary" (Wisker 174).
Undoubtedly, the boundaries of the Gothic novel/fiction have widened over time to include the "Postcolonial Gothic" novel among others. That said, Gothic fiction has retained certain stock features; it, for example, usually has a castle setting that is sometimes surrounded by wild and desolate landscapes and dark forests. Such landscapes, present in early Gothic fiction like Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story (1764), immediately emerged as well in the modern African novel like Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart (1959). Here the village of Umuofia stands surrounded by a large forest imbued with both good and evil. On one hand, the village is host to the sacred python, revered shrines, and sacred caves like that of Chielo--the priestess of Agbala. And on the other, it is partly the Evil Forest, a cursed landscape where people who die of evil diseases are buried. It is also the dumping ground for twins (who are considered evil) and the site for ritualistic killings such as the oracle-stipulated murder of Okonkwo's adopted son, Ikemefuna.
Other stock features of Gothic fiction include apparitions, curses, and other notions of evil; an atmosphere of overwrought emotions, fear, and doom precipitated by various notions of evil, ancient prophesies, or the sublime and supernatural; and women in distress--female characters that are often terrified, oppressed, and driven to psychological disintegration by a powerful tyrannical male who embodies patriarchal oppression. Indigenous sexism and patriarchy, which were no strangers to precolonial Africa, were further compounded in the colonial and postcolonial settings where color and gender served as dual oppressors for women. This Gothic feature is well exemplified in Bessie Head's A Question of Power (1974). In this novel, Elizabeth, exiled in Botswana, is driven to a psychological hell by her abusive lover, Dan. Head's novel can also be read as a tale of a romance gone bad; indeed, Gothic fiction, from its early beginnings, was a tale of romance. Walpole's novel The Castle of Otranto has been described as "a gruesome tale of passion, bloodshed and villainy" (Cuddon 356). Elements of Gothic romance include a sudden and passionate love; tension between the female protagonist's true love and patriarchal control; a painful parting of the lovers; and the threat of illicit love or lust, usually emanating from some other evil man's desires for the woman or one of her multiple suitors.
These stock features of Gothic fiction, as already seen, are not a novelty in African fiction, and writers like Beti, Achebe, and Head are significant when tracing the historiography and manifestations of the genre's attributes on the African continent. That said of Adichie's African literary predecessors, I deem her novel Purple Hibiscus as encompassing a larger palette of these Gothic stock features than is found in many preceding texts. Hers is, on the whole, a more faithful rendition of the genre. Further, I argue, Adichie teases out the peculiarities of the "Postcolonial Gothic" in continental Africa as she dissects fraught African psyches and engages in a Gothic-like reclamation of her Igbo heritage, including Igbo-Ukwu art, language, and religion. In the following pages, I flesh out this thought in greater detail by closely examining Gothic topography and elements in Purple Hibiscus and their historical roots, which I trace to her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun (2006). These two novels have been published to wide international acclaim but have so far generated hardly any significant criticism. By showing Adichie as participating in an ongoing reinvention and complication of the "African Postcolonial Gothic" topography, I also hope to attract further scholarly attention to her works.
Purple Hibiscus is set in the South Eastern Nigerian towns of Enugu, Nsukka, and Abba, which are predominantly Igbo in ethnicity. The main protagonist, Kambili Achike, almost sixteen, narrates her family's life and history in modern day Nigeria. She brings the reader into her family's palatial homes in not only the coal mining town of Enugu, where her father Eugene Achike runs various businesses, but also in Abba, her paternal ancestral home that the family visits every Christmas. Kambili is extremely close to her mother, Beatrice, and her older brother and only sibling, Jaja (possibly named after a historical Nigerian figure, Jaja of Opobo). A fanatically religious patriarch, Eugene overexerts his children academically, and his character generally reads like the proverbial oppressive Gothic patriarch. Kambili and Jaja often seek refuge from him in Nsukka, a university town, where their paternal aunt, Ifeoma, and her children live. Ifeoma,...
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