Purple Hibiscus by
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Fourth Estate, London/2004.
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Purple Hibiscus, in
 its three hundred odd pages, packs in a dense and intellectually
challenging story that broaches some of the larger themes that preoccupy
people anywhere in the world--life and death, the ambivalent meaning of familial love,
domestic violence, religion, history and politics. In Adichie's work, the latter refers
specifically to Nigerian politics. This is a powerful and unsettling novel, at times
emotionally demanding. It is populated by a number of strong characters, most of whom we
retain in our minds well after turning the last page. An ambitious work of imagination, it
leads readers into making sense of some complex and difficult issues, not least ethical
considerations.
The novel takes its title from the flowers that
grow on the hibiscus shrubs in the family's
compound, in the town of Enugu. The shrubs were taken from Aunt Ifeoma's garden as cuttings,
planted in Enugu by Kambili and Jaja. In the course of the novel they will have taken root in
Enugu, and began to add to the riot of colour and scent that characterises the family's vast
property. At one level they symbolise the energy and joie de vivre associated with Aunt
Ifeoma and her family, her strength and passion for learning and loving. But they also stand as
a crucial marker of the momentous shift in the family's fortunes...Incidentally, echoing as they
do the title of one of the best-known works of Nigerian literature, Chinua Achebe's Things
Fall Apart (1958), the opening lines of Purple Hibiscus at once pay homage to one of
Nigeria's literary giants while self-consciously signalling its 'Nigerianness'. Not unlike
Achebe's work, Purple Hibiscus is written primarily in standard English, liberally interspersed
with Igbo words, and, on a couple of occasions, uses Nigerian English.
The colour purple plays a number of important
functions throughout the narrative. Most of
all, it is the colour of bruised blood, of which there is much here. If I had to identify one
single theme above all others in Purple Hibiscus it is that of domestic violence. Mama's
frequent 'black eyes', along the brutal beatings and acts of torture she and her children
endure at the hands of Papa must certainly stand as the key memory in any reader's mind once we
turn the last page. Purplish in colour, too, is the foetus, and in the course of the story Mama
loses not one but two babies, both as a direct consequence of Papa's unspeakably brutal
beatings. Throughout it all, the family remains together, doing all they can to hide the true
nature of their various abrasions and lesions; pretending that their family life is no
different from that of their friends and neighbours. Indeed, the first overt sign of the
violence Papa regularly inflects on his wife does not occur until page 32, and on the whole
family on page 102. That said, the novel's opening lines already hint at some of the simmering
tensions at the heart of this seemingly perfect family. Nevertheless, the casual manner in
which the visible signs of this violence are introduced is one of the ways in which Adichie
challenges her readers to read on before passing judgement. This is a deeply disturbing
narrative, telling a story while posing some very serious questions about human behaviour.
Through a meticulous attention to detail and
controlled use of language, Adichie conveys at
once the broad picture of the family and through it of the nation's horror, as well as their
most tender moments of love, of beauty, of intimacy, of pain. Rather than a 'large canvas'
novel, Purple Hibiscus focuses on the small things in everyday life, the banality of living and
loving, of dreaming a better tomorrow and of daring to ask the big questions. This is
literature at its best: creating a world of fiction into which we are irresistibly drawn whilst
lifting up a mirror to the society on which it feeds.
This is
an extract from Tony Simoes da Silva's "Family life in shades of purple," originally published
in
African Review of Books.
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I Hit Like A Girl by Debbie Kirk: Feel Free Press, UK/2004
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Something tells
me that Debbie Kirk is afraid of the dark--afraid of the girl staring back at
her, but even skeletons have shadows. Her latest book of poetry, I Hit Like A Girl is a
testament to the skeletons, and I can hear them singing.
While I find the thought of Debbie thinking her
friend poet j.j. Campbell is a robot
extremely amusing, this collection is more soulful than all that. The poem "I Am The Skeleton
Of Burrough's Bullet" is both a glance at pop culture, and an elegy for the spirit of William S.
Burroughs common law wife Joan, who as the story goes was shot in a drunken William Tell act by
Burroughs himself.
This book is all about spirits--the ground seems
to be littered with corpses. Those of Jack
Micheline, d.a. levy, and those of the poet's own past--her own childhood. Like her poem/prose
piece "Tire Swing", which isn't about a tire swing at all, but rather a family set into motion
with little control of their emotions, and the direction of the cosmos. The poems in this book
are the shovel, meant to dig up the poet's misdirected roots.
Most importantly, there's the title poem "I Hit
Like A Girl", which talks about going
into someone else's brain. The only problem with that, is that we all have the same cobwebs in
the round about way, and what this book is really telling us is to go with the fear, respect the
voices running around in our heads.
Debbie Kirk may indeed hit like a girl, the
sheer power of this book is that she keeps
hitting, never letting up, until those sweet nothings you thought you heard, become a black-eye
floating across Bukowski's tombstone. It's a good thing she held a flashlight under the
covers long enough to finish these poems, for $4--I think you can afford to put your own fears
aside long enough to read them.
Reviewed by John Dorsey
The New Irish Poets edited by Selina Guinness:
Bloodaxe Books, UK/2004.
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In my Jesuit
schooldays, they were called ‘sins of omission’. All anthologies are prone
to them. The thirty-three poets of Bloodaxe’s The New Irish Poets
include many names familiar from Carcanet, Gallery Press and Bloodaxe itself,
but where are, say, the Dedalus poets? Or the Wild Honey poets? To
be fair, in her speech to launch the book, editor Selina Guinness freely
admitted that an anthology is by its very nature a partial and subjective
beast. What one objects to, rather, is the claim implicit in the use of the
definite article in this anthology’s title. But then, when have the titles of
Bloodaxe anthologies ever erred on the side of modesty?
Accusations of coterie politics are not,
however, the concern of the
present review, which is itself unashamedly partial and subjective.
Since, as the book’s introduction points out, the chief criterion attaching
to the word ‘new’ is that the poet’s first collection have been published in
the last ten years, there are no restrictions on age, and it is refreshing
to see Fergus Allen (born 1921) and Leanne O’Sullivan (born 1983)
between the same covers. Nor can the collection be said to have a
gender bias, with some fifteen female poets included. The tally
should hardly raise an eyebrow, given that talents as formidable as
Vona Groarke, Catríona O’Reilly and Sinéad Morrissey have all
emerged over the last decade. One already suspects that, one
day soon, the challenge will be to find an Irish anthology which does
not include poems such as ‘Imperial Measure’, ‘Octopus’ and ‘&
Forgive Us Our Trespasses’.
In an anthology of emerging voices,
it is scarcely surprising that a number
of these women poets deal specifically with issues of articulation. In Sinéad
Morrissey’s ‘If Words’, for instance, the image of words as ‘a stream of
unfortunates / [that] Fall from the mouth … They spill like sewage and dismay’
is counterpointed by the marvellous ‘I dream of the mouth as a nest / Giving
flight to / Lilies, windows, / Gold letters…’. Paula Cunningham’s ‘Hats’ is
equally startling, its rhythm hip and hypnotic in a manner that recalls Carol
Anne Duffy: ‘This year I tried on voices just like hats. // Whore hat / Bored
hat / Life’s a fucking chore hat’. Elsewhere, ‘Naming It’, by Leonita Flynn,
humorously hints that the inadequacies of ‘preachy booklearning’ need to
be rounded out by experience - the reader must imagine the difference
between avocado and aubergine being literally pointed out to the poet.
Celia de Fréine’s poem Máthairtheanga, meanwhile, suggests that the
Irish language has now become a domain for poetry with a feminist edge.
Another theme common to a number
of the women poets present is a
preoccupation with the body. Dorothy Molloy, who died in January this
year on the eve of the publication of her inaugural collection, lists ‘The
small / shovels of my collarbone. / The caterpillar of my / spine. The
wide plates / of my hips’ (‘Envelope of Skin’), while Catríona O’Reilly’s
‘Thin’ is a meditation on anorexia built upon a nexus of phrases involving
the word ‘bone’: ‘I might even ping delicately like bone- / china when flicked.’
After such a poem, we are apt to read the sense of revulsion from her
beautifully crafted ‘Octopus’ in a different light: ‘The tenderness of their
huge heads / make them tremble at the shameful / intimacy of the
killing / those ropes of sticky muscle do.’ But there is room for the
erotic, too, much in evidence in poems such as Mary O’Donohue’s
‘The Textures’ or Vona Groarke’s ‘Veneer’.
Expatriate writing has been
something of a sub-genre in Irish
literature for more than a century now, and many of the male poets
in the present anthology draw freely on their experiences living or
working abroad. This is certainly a key source of inspiration in the
writing of Fergus Allen, Aidan Rooney-Céspedes, Justin Quinn,
Cathal McCabe and Michael Murphy. The mordant, politically
loaded humour of Eastern Europeans such as Miroslav Holub and
Zbigniew Herbert has clearly made an impression on the poetry of
Justin Quinn, who has been living in Prague for a decade now.
Writing of the older communist apparatchiks in ‘You meet them
at mid-afternoon receptions…’ he writes:
their smiling tolerance of the dissidents
who now hold power, like parents who indulge
idealistic children and won’t divulge
hard truths just yet, their sympathy immense;
their bonhomie; their polished anecdotes -
all this suggests you couldn’t have them shot
and afterwards feel good about it …
For Rooney-Céspedes, who for many years has been teaching French in Massachusetts, the
slippage between neighbouring semantic cultures has become something of a staple, as is
evidenced here in his poem of Québec, ‘The Cure’.
Whether or not the official status of
Ireland as a bilingual country makes our
poets more open to other linguistic traditions, the present collection includes
three poets who write in the minority language, but only one of whom is from a
Gaeltacht area. Notwithstanding the obvious attractions of the possibilities inherent
in another tongue, I have to admit to a certain small but persistent unease when
reading the poetry of fluent non-native speakers. Undoubtedly, the perimeter of Irish
language poetry is being stretched to encompass new territory of contemporary
relevance, but how many of us, trying our hand at French or Spanish, would claim
to be making a significant contribution to French or Spanish literature? The gap
between Gearóid Mac Lochlainn’s ‘Teacht I Méadaíocht’ and his own free-moving
English translation on the facing page is itself eloquent in this regard:
Ní dhearna mé dearmad ar an lá sin That was that, as they say,
Ag dul chun na scoile, pimpled pubescent, teeny-bob,
Ceithre bliana déag d’aois, slugging a trail to school,
Mé ag teacht in oirbheart, scalpelled tongue,
An chéad uair a mhothaigh mé the hypodermics
Snáthaid ghéar náire, faobhar fuar fuatha, of military operations,
Céadtuiscint a first stab
Ar an fhocal - at translation.
Éireannach.
Of course, it is entirely possible that this idiomatic gap is precisely the point that Mac Lochlainn wishes to make.
Reviewed by David Butler, Education Officer,
the James Joyce Centre, Dublin.
The Captain's Tiger : A Memoir for the Stage by Athol Fugard: Theatre
Communications Group, New York/1999.
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The Captain's Tiger does not only present a typically social experience of a
transiting South African society, but articulates, in an interesting and complex mode of
dramatic presentation, Fugard's personal dilemma and career experience as a writer, a director
and an actor. The Captain's Tiger is quasi-autobiographical: Tiger, the protagonist-author,
is Fugard born in 1932. He sets out to write a novel about Fugard's mother, Elizabeth Magdalena
Katerina Potgieter, from a small Karoo town.
The play has two plots: external and internal.
The external plot is the biography of Betty Le
Roux. The internal plot unfolds the particularity of Tiger's growth and maturity as a writer.
It is the interconnection between both plots that gives the play structural unity.
Set on board
a ship, SS Graigaur, The Captain's Tiger explicates the secret dreams, ambition and personal destiny of
a seventeen year old Afrikaner girl, Betty Le Roux, as recreated in the imagination of Tiger, a
twenty year old budding writer, who sets out to write a novel drawing inspiration from a
photograph of his mother as a young girl that was hanging in her bedroom.
Tigers novel tells a simple story of how Betty leaves small Karoo village for Port Elizabeth in
search of 'a life of action and purpose' and gets a job as a waitress in the Rand Cafe. Thereafter, she moves into a
room above the Cafe and in one of her romantic adventures she meets and falls in love with a
Pianist playing with the 'melodians,' a band that plays often at the Palmerston hotel.
In the
development of this external and simple plot pattern, the play weaves a tapestry of three
cardinal principles: life, liberty and love.
Thematically, it portrays the freedom engendered by the death of apartheid, and it testifies to
the new life of freedom in the post-apartheid South Africa. Betty's movement from Karoo to
Port Elizabeth is symbolic: a break-away from the apartheid past, into new hopes, dreams
and a vision of the post-apartheid South Africa.
The complex internal plot pattern,
which makes the play so engaging is achieved by the dramatized conflict between Tiger,
the author and Betty, the novel's main character. Whilst Tiger wants to exercise 'the freedom and
authority of the creative artist to go in any direction his imagination chooses' (11), Betty
insists on reality: 'I want to be real. I want a real life' (32). This apodal positions is
represented in scene seven where Tiger attempts to recapture the very moment Betty chooses to
leave Karoo village to join her aunt in Port Elizabeth and look for a job. Tiger makes 'reality
dramatic' by presenting Betty's journey as a desperate and pre-determined escape from a
claustrophobic situation, but Betty takes such exercising of creative authority as a violation
since the decision to leave Karoo is an agreement reached with her family.
However, it is Fugard's dramatic style and
techniques more than anything else that give The
Captain's Tiger its dynamic character. A notable technique used in the play is writing.
The entire play of sixteen scenes is writing-dramatized. There are two types of writing :
letter-writing and novel-writing. Letter-writing operates on the level of the external plot
pattern which we have identified earlier, whilst the novel-writing unfolds the internal plot
pattern. Both writings, the five letters to Tigers mothers and the manuscript, are intended to
draw the audience attention to the 'narrative endeavour' of the play and articulate Fugard's
obsession with the magic power of words.
But the technical resource which gives The
Captain's Tiger its intense vitality is the physical
dramatization of what takes place in Tiger's imagination. Fugard makes Betty not to appear as
phantasm but a created reality of Tiger's imagination. She is seen real on stage, alive and
breathing. Thus, both character and the author become active participants. The dramatic conflict between
Tiger and Betty earlier discussed is not an illusion of the author but a creation that is real.
What has remained central to the post-apartheid
discourse is the direction and artistic vision
of a new South Africa, taking into consideration the fact that apartheid themes dominated
South African literature for nearly five decades. In The Captain's Tiger Fugard gives two
compelling and interesting hints: (1) A South African literature that has taken a complete
break from a holistic apartheid political concern to a more dynamic socio-cultural imperative
engendered by the incipient post-apartheid air of freedom. And (2) a new artistic truth and
beauty with a particular concern for an art that is very engaging and aesthetically nourishing.
Less melodramatic. No propaganda. Indeed, this is a welcome indication that at last art can be
rescued from the muddy waters of South African politics. Its contrary is the genuine fear that
has plagued the minds of many aesthetes like myself.
Reviewed by Peter Anny-Nzekwue
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