“Sometimes Life Begins When Marriage Ends”: Hybridity and Female Empowerment in Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus and Americanah

Abstract

This paper argues that the incorporation of aspects of multiples cultures in hybridity by African female postcolonial characters allows for an improvement in “women’s fallback position and bargaining power within a patriarchal structure, and, identify different causal pathways of change; material, cognitive, perceptual and relational” (Rahman 11). Hybridity, here, is the creation of new transcultural forms within the contact zone created by patriarchy and elements of misogyny. Considering the interwoven-ness of hybridity and feminism, this paper interrogates hybridity as empowerment, foregrounding the several ways female characters in Purple Hibiscus and Americanah have been able to appropriate hybridity to their advantage, to bring about more respect, satisfaction, sociopolitical freedom, and self-reliance for themselves. It does this using the phenomenological approach in tandem with Obioma Nnemeka’s conception of Nego-feminism and postcolonial notions of hybridity and identity as given by Gayatri Spivak and Stuart Hall.