Purple Hibiscus: A complex and compelling Novel

One of the ways I put myself in the shoes of other cultures and peoples is to read their literature.  I have read such novels as Endo’s Silence, Potlock’s My Name is Asher Lev,  and Hussein’s Kite Runner.  Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Adichie  is the first novel I can remember reading from an African author. I could not, I believe, have chosen a better one.    Adichie’s novel is set in her postcolonial home country of  Nigeria.  I first encountered her as a novelist when she presented a Tedtalk on the theme of “The Danger of a Single Story” . If you have not seen this Tedtalk I highly recommend you take a look at her presentation. I have finally, several years later been able to get around to reading one of her novels. Purple Hibiscus is a novel that can be read on a number of levels, each of which raises questions of both our diversity as human beings and our shared human brokenness.

The plot centers around a financially well off family in the city of Enugu in the country of Nigeria.  The story is told through the eyes of Kambili Achike, the youngest child and only daughter in a family of four. The plot slowly twists, turning the emotional tension of the novel up a degree with every page. About half way through the novel, the tension is sprung as the result of a small infraction committed by Kambili.  Her father Eugene beats her so badly she has to be hospitalized.
The beating results, in turn in an extended stay with her paternal Aunt Ifeoma. As her aunt states after the incident,  “When a house is on fire, you run out before the roof collapses on your head” (pp. 213-214).  Here Kambili and her older brother, Jaja, have their first real taste of freedom and love. “I had felt as if I were not there, that I was just observing a table where you could say anything at any time to anyone, where the air was free for you to breathe as you wished” (p. 120).  But it is not meant to last and after a period they are brought home. However, their journey home comes after both siblings have realized their father is not simply difficult but dangerous.  In the end steps and taken to protect themselves.  Events are quickly brought to a boil once again. When the story draws to a close, Jaja is forced to protect his mother and sister by  spending time in prison. Thankfully the novel does not end in complete tragedy but a feeling of hope and expectation of redemption. 

 Adichie’s portrait of a broken family is an arresting one.  It is interesting to see how community and extended family play an outsized role in the disfunction compared to what an American novelist might have written. But broken family dynamics are sadly universal. One could map out the classic roles of villain, hero, victim.  One can easily contrast the monetarily poor, but happy and free Ifeoma and her children with the monetarily prosperous but oppressed Achike family.  The narcissistic father who pleads in the moment of violence and betrayal that he is simply trying his best to love those he is hurting. As Aunty Ifeoma describes, “Eugene quarrels with the truths that he does not like.” (p. 95).  Kambili states in one of the most haunting lines of the book that she was, “feeling the love burn my tongue.”   Jaja sacrifices himself to protect his sibling and his mother. The mother who seeks to defend her husband even as she carries the scars of her husband’s abuse.  The lies that are continuously presented to the outside world in order to cover up the sickness within.  All of these elements make for a compelling if heart breaking picture of the Achike’s.

 Another way in which to read this novel, or at least an element within the novel to pay close attention to is the place of religion in the story. Kambili’s father is as abusive physically and emotionally as he is deeply religious.  It is well worth noting that Adiche does not bash religion universal, but again contrasts what is of the husband and father’s religion with the religious faith found in Ifeoma’s network.  In the Achike family religion is used as a means of gagging protest, of keeping those around the father inline with his own desires. It is meant to terrify individuals to proper behavior.  But in Ifeoma’s network religion is of the people, growing into and out of a mix of Roman Catholic Faith and native culture in a unique but orthodox Christianity. One of the most interesting characters is Ft. Amadi. A priest who toward the end of the book journey’s to Germany to do missions work.  His presence, his peace and the love he has for others is literally attractive to Kambili.

Finally, one could also examine this novel in light of colonialism and post colonial struggles.  I imagine this is to be an expected element in any novel out of Africa.  However, I feel Adiche does an excellent job looking at the complexity of the issue.  I feel stung with guilt by Adiche’s words, “We had to sound civilized in public, [Eugene] told us; we had to speak English” (p. 13).  Or when Eugene extols the virtue of his grandfather, “He did things the right way, the way the white people did, not what our people do now!” (p. 68).  Adiche’s characters have perspective on the events and tragedies of their home.



“There are people, [aunt Ifeoma] once wrote, who think that we cannot rule ourselves because the few times we tried, we failed, as if all the others who rule themselves today got it right the first time. It is like telling a crawling baby who tries to walk, and then falls back on his buttocks, to stay there. As if the adults walking past him did not all crawl, once.”  (p. 301).
      
In conclusion, I have appreciated this novel on  number of levels. This novel works as a study of genuine faith verses controlling abusive faith. It works as a story of families broken  by expectations and fears, and families living free under the oppression and failures of others.  It is also a novel of the complexity of cultural identity.  The mixture of different stories trying to find their place in a larger more complete story.

Dreher's mono-colored glasses

         The Benedict Option by Richard Dreher fails as a book, and on the whole as a project. It fails not because of what it is but because of what it so obviously ignores.  The Benedict Option as an argument sets out to convince the reader the Church must preserve at all cost.  The Church will do so by retreating, like a turtle into it’s shell, from the larger world and the chaos of postmodernism. It must do so not only because truth and virtue and not valued in our time but also because the Church defends all that is good and beautiful in the West. Instead of Tolkien’s Aragorn pronouncing “Men of the West, Stand and Fight,”  Dreher would have the Church run and hide.  The Church’s act of preservation as Dreher contends will in the end result in creating a Church that is peculiar in the extreme. A church that is outside of the norm as much as a Division One state university not having a football program is to college sports. He pronounces technology dangerous and current sexual practice on par with the like of Sodom and Gomorrah.  I too believe technology needs to be understood and utilized within its proper limits.  I believe that our  current sexual practices and beliefs leave people in absolute ruin.  What troubles me is the alarmist tone which underlines and shadows every claim and piece of evidence.         No, what is needed is something more. Dreher fails to convince that his book is anything more than alarmist hand ringing because he fails to call for something new based on the examples of the past. Indeed the past must be mined. But we can not simply look to recreate that past that has long since fallen into the history books.  He jumps 1500 years in the past in order to find communities that can provide a model for the future.  What he so clearly misses to me is that the church in the recent past has been living out what he argues. 
              Here is what really dooms his book, his mono-culturalism. One of the benefits, blessings even of postmodernism is our awareness of and interactions with dozens of other cultures.  It is no longer the elite ambassadors traveling to foreign countries but it is the local high school student who is shaped and becomes aware of more then his small community. Dreher’s is fixated with white, European, liturgical expression of church in the first millennia. He ignores rich traditions of other ethnicities.
 The black Church for 100 years at least (since reconstruction at minimum) has been developing a peculiar Christian church.  The Black Church has stood fast in the face of racial injustice and a larger corrupt culture bent on shaping the world not into the kingdom of God but a safe kingdom for a particular ethnic identity. There are many lessons and pitfalls that we should learn from.  Or Dreher might have looked to the Chinese Church under communism. Or the Roman Catholic Church in Japan and authors like Suski Endo. His argument what have felt more substantive had he broadened his research sources.
               What I wish Dreher would have written is an analysis of the black church for white Christians who are waking up to their minority status in American culture.  What lesson does the black church have to teach us about being The Church?  What pitfalls and problems has the Historical Black Church faced? How can we avoid these mistakes in the church that will come about in the next 100-200 years?  I look forward to a future taking the tradition of Dante, Augustine and Bach and seeing the creative explosion of new art, music and literature when it is placed in conversation with Endo, Du Bois, and Ellington. Not to mention the countless other Christian communities living out what he argues for in a non-western context.

               He begins his argument by demonstrating that the Church is losing the culture wars. Really?  Is anyone in Western Christianity really still so naive to believe we are wining against secularism? Why thump us over the head, again with what many of us have already come to decades ago?  I  find only the out of touch, arrogant, and cloistered away in ever smaller churches would hold fast to the belief that power politics and strict moralism will save the Church. 

Review Minorty Body by Elizabeth Barnes

In her book Minority Body Elizabeth Barnes in my opinion both makes a prescient observation, those with a physical handicap are onto themselves a minority population that is no better or no worse than any other minority, while also making her argument by means that are deeply disturbing and flawed.  For full disclosure, I consider myself mildly disabled white man.  I  have hemispherical Cerebral Palsy which is by and large limited to my right hand. Over my 40 years on this planet I have had 8 surgeries on my hand.  But my understanding and reading of this book is also seen through the lens of my personal faith— orthodox, evangelical, anglican Christian.  Dr. Barnes writes, as evidenced from her work from a secular, postmodern narrative.  Our differing points of view contrasts with one another in significant directions.
Barnes, rightly I believe, discusses the hermeneutical injustice that is a constant feature of those with a disability.  I have been addressed in ways that discount or discredit my experience.   “Well just act normal.”  “Don’t be defined by your disability.”  I have experienced  bullying from one particular religious leader who insisted that I shake hands with my disfunctioning hand.  He assumed that not greeting others with my broken hand was a sign of  internal self loathing on my part.  There is a reality, that one can not speak to a person’s experience of disability, and here we could extend it to any minority experience, unless one has lived it. My accomplishments and successes are somehow more stunning because I have a handicap. But in such a thought is assumed something about how little people expected of me in the first place. They assumed I was incapable of accomplishing “the normal things in life”  because of my disability. There are assumptions being made by the abled majority about what it is and is not meant to experience disability. Not all parts of the disability experience as Barnes points out are necessarily all bad.  There are ways in which disability positively shapes a persons life and outlook.  From my own experience, I have a greater intuitive understanding I believe of other minority experiences.  I can make the epistemological leap in a way many others are not.
I am grateful for her articulation disabled and abled are indeed shaped in much the same way by their bodies.  In other words a man who stands 5’4” will not likely have a career in the NBA simply because his body dictates other choices.  Our culture tends to over look and underestimate the importance our physical being plays in shaping life outcomes.  Barnes makes clear  that all of humanity is shaped by their physical, bodily existence.
 In relation to this point is her excellent job at the beginning of her narrative of demonstrating how difficult a precise definition of disability is to articulate. One cannot simply declare that it is the absence of something, limbs or sight.  For in doing so one eliminates those who like me have Cerebral Palsy whose limbs are intact but we can not control them. Even to include cases of CP and the like in our definition would still exclude those whose condition are temporary (epilepsy) or indeed invisible (lupus). Disability is far more complex than what it might first appear.
However the ease at which she conflates gayness and disable-hood seemed to me to undermine her argument. Not with standing an orthodox Christian view of human sexuality as condemning sexual relations and acts between two people of the same sex. Whatever the particular reality of gayness is, it has to be far more complex of a reality than mear physical disability. There seems to be both physical, emotional and environmental factors in a person’s sexual identity and behavior. That there are personal narratives that defy the majority gay story, see Wes Hill and Rosaria Butterfield,  should give one pause. To not see that physical handicaps are just that, primarily physical with social and and behavioral issues arising primarily out of the reality of one’s physical condition seems misrepresent both minority groups.
   Still further is the intellectual (and admittedly emotional) discomfort with her argument concerning her doubts with the idea of a ‘cure’ for disability.  On the very next to last page Barnes quotes Chicago Disability Pride founder Sarah Triano. “Disability is a natural and beautiful part of human diversity. . . . Stereotypes the parade  refutes by giving us a time and space to celebrate ourselves as we are.” And then in the final paragraph of her manuscript Barnes writes, “the point is not that there are no bad effects of disability.  We are, all of us, limited by our bodies. . . .But the disabled body is a pathologized body.  It’s a body that departs from the ‘normal’ in ways we assume are bad or suboptimal.”
I am tempted at this point  to respond with a theological argument, and maybe there is simply no way not to object except on theological grounds. But even without a view of a ‘fallen’ or broken world, is in not safe to say that the world as it is, is not the world that we would hope it would be or even be one day in the future? Even as one needs to treat the disabled as a minority, one can not also treat the disabled as one would treat an a person with black or brown pigmented skin. It is not the dark skin tone itself that is hindering a person in society, it is societies reactions and actions toward the person with a dark skin that creates difficulties. A disabled person on the other hand is different. As Barnes points out there are indeed bad effects from the disability itself. From my own subjective personal experience even as disability has opened doors for me it has overall been something that has closed more than it has opened. Why then would we consider that which causes bad things in very specific ways to be  ‘normal and beautiful?’  Please understand I am not calling the person with a handicap unnatural or ugly. I disagree that disability is value neutral as she here argues.  Admittedly this simply may be a case of faith over philosophical speculation, but I will take it over Barnes’s noble but ultimately disconcerting argumentation.

Untitled Poem Rhyming Exercise

Pry open the souls of men. Their blackened ears,

Their broken pain, their dying lives can not hold the tears.

Their bodies purchased and sold by deviant cashiers

Who seek will gleeful will to break all hope like plundering buccaneers.

Two Untitled Poems

POEM 1

It is in the land of the human heart

Are were the greatest battles are fought.

To the depths of the broken being, 

On a Ridgeline of identity,

Searching shards of childhood’s memory.

For the signs of wholeness, which are like the signs of mouse trails.

The landscape of self burned and shattered by words thrown 

As ignited daggers at the image of red pine innocence.

POEM 2

Pry open the souls of men. Their blackened ears

Their broken pain, their dying lives can not hold the tears

Their bodies purchased and sold by deviant cashiers

Who seek will gleeful will to break all hope like plundering buccaneers

Collects for Diversity and Faithfulness

Collect 1

Father of all the Nations, You have sought from the very beginning for mankind to diversify and multiple across the many borders of our world.  Humble your servants that we may see in every tribe tongue and nation your work of sanctification in the Church.  So that we might glorify your Holy name as the creator of and sustainer of all humanity. We pray this through Christ our Lord by the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen

Collect 2

Heavenly Father, You have set the course and boundary of every individual’s life. Give to each man peace and faithful trust, so that each of us may faithfully run the course you have laid out and thus bring you honor and glory by the power of the Holy Ghost and for the name Christ our Lord. Amen.

First Date

         The young man approached the door deliberately, forcing his will to make his body move across the pavers.  He paused a moment to look back at his father sitting in the black sedan, his clerical collar clearly visible through the open window. His father stared at him and smiled.  

        The young man’s ivory colored scarf flopped to one side. He then awkwardly threw it backwards over his shoulder and proceeded to walk under the yawning of the porch. With one hand he opened the screen door. With the opposite hand he rang the door bell.  The knuckle of his index finger pressed the dirty white door bell. His other fingers griped the hastily wrapped gift in he had bought that afternoon. A quick pause and deep breath before the door opened. 

        “Hello Michael, come in. Amber will be down in a moment." The middle aged woman with a pleasant alto voice and neck length auburn hair pulled behind her ears gestured him inside. 

       “Thanks Mrs. Kohlberg.” Amber’s mom gave a motherly but knowing smile at her daughter’s date. Michael seemed oblivious to how much Mrs. Kohlberg could actually sympathize with Michael and understood the first date jitters. 

        “Do you know what movie you’re going to see?” 

        “Amber wants the new Pixar movie. I was hoping to talk her into the latest Marvel movie.” Michael paused, looked down at the wood floor and continued. “However, dad said it is better to watch what the date wants to watch, be a gentlemen, Dad said.” 

        “Father Schiano’s right, Mike.” Amber’s father could be heard entering from the den. His deep baritone had aveneer of good natured teasing to it. 

“Spence, don’t do this to the poor boy.” Amber’s mom light heartedly laughed, tapping her husband on his should before walking up the main stairway. 

“Do not piss off the Jr. Warden, and the date’s dad?” Spencer’s hand firmly planting on Mike’s shoulder before it he moved off and was offered up in a handshake.

The Rebel and The Brown Coat

          Harry placed his craft beer on the table. The dark hewed bottle nearly matching his own darkly colored skin. He adjusted the Rebel Alliance cuff link so that it was parallel with his wrist. He looked up. His two best friends had found the dance floor too enticing not to try. As a consequence Harry was left alone at the four person table with the blush wine and glass of whiskey.  The Aloe Blac slow jam remix  was playing just above the level in which one could have a conversation without the need to yell at the one you were talking to. 
           He looked around at the other 30 somethings who had gathered at Soul Sushi to enjoy their Friday night. Amanda and Frank had a knack for finding the quirkiest food fusion restaurants in the city. His closest white friends since college, Amanda and Frank had never been able to understand that some cultures really were never meant to come together.    Nowhere else could he imagine ordering a Tuna roll with an option of collard greens as an appetizer.  “How did I get myself talked into coming to a place like this?” Harry muttered.      
          “Because we were tired of seeing you mope around your apartment Friday night after Friday night.”
          Harry nodded as his two friends returned.
          “It’s been six weeks since Janel left.” Amanda’s voice high and all of a sudden to loud as the DJ fumbled with turn tables. “She made her choice, a dumb and shitty one, we can all agree. But the two of you were never right for each other.”
          “Just like all the other ex’s.”Harry sneered as the music started up again. “Not enough this, not enough that. If not one thing, another.”
           “You’re different, we all knew that the moment you and I  became dorm mates in Watson Hall. But cheer up, the one you looking for is bound to be out there.”  Desperate to change subjects Harry noticed Frank’s Whiskey was nearly empty. “Do you want another?” pointing to the glass.
           “Yes, but that is my last for now. I don’t want to get to the Restaurant and be tipsy.”
           Harry weaved his way through the crowd to the bar, and waved a hand at the bartender. He placed the empty beer bottle next to the glass, “Jamison on the Rocks.”
          “You want another one?” The bartender pointer gesturing to the bottle.
          “A glass of water this time.” Harry caught the bartender’s momentary frown of disapproval.
          “Nice cuff-links,” said a woman to his left.
          “Thanks.” Harry said flatly, looking in the direction of the woman briefly. He did not intend to give more than a glance toward the women. But he glimpsed just above her left breast at a pin. It was  yellow and orange concentric circles with Chinese characters and the word “Serenity” in the near ground. 
          “Your’s too.” Harry scrambled to say something else, “You aim to misbehave tonight?”
He regretted it the second he heard himself say it. But to his surprise, “Why? Do you want to be bad guys?”
         Both erupted in laughter.
        “Ok, that was admittedly the worst, or at least nerdiest pick up line ever. I apologize.”
         “No I have heard worse, you should hear the ones I got at Comic-Con last year. My name is Samantha.” Samantha extended her hand out in greeting.
         “Hi, um” Harry’s mind stumbled again as he finally really sized up the woman he had just met. She was a few inches shorter than he was and her skin tone was also a few shades lighter, almond colored verses his dark mahogany. She had a oval shaped face with bleached blonde cropped hair. Her lip stick was a mellow pink.
         “Hey, your drink.” The bartender, grabbing his attention, interrupted his train of thought.
        “Oh, yes. Thank you.” He said to the bartender and then turned back to Samantha, “Harry, name’s Harry. My friends are over there, you want to join us?”