Childhood(s) in Purple Hibiscus

Abstract

The current blossoming of fiction in contemporary Nigeria is, as many critics have pointed out, creating a ‘third generation’ of Nigerian literature. Defined using Waberi's (1998) famous words ‘children of the postcolony’, this writing is actually informed by the idea of childhood. This study argues that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus ([2005] 2006. Harare: Weaver), a text in this new dispensation, begins a discourse on childhood as ‘a set of ideas’ that engages, through alternative memory and the father figure, with what can be described as postmodern identities. Adichie's contemporaries, children spawned by literary and literal fathers, struggle with these fathers as critical memories in an attempt to delimit and transcend the symbolic boundaries carved out by identification with the father figure. In Purple Hibiscus, childhood equivocates its relation with this figure and problematises it in a manner that gives this childhood power, agency to consume hybridity, third spaces and, as Madeline Hron (2008. Ora na-azu nwa: The Figure of the Child in Third-Generation Nigerian Novels. Research in African Literatures 39 [2]:29) puts it, ‘possibility and most importantly resistance’.