Fedorko Macholdt 1

Re-thinking Environmental Relationships:

Re-reading Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus

Through the Lens of Ecocriticism

Sarah Fedorko Macholdt

Bryn Mawr College Class of 2014

April 28th, 2014

For Professor Anne Dalke, advisor

Department of English

This essay examines Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s first novel, Purple Hibiscus, through
the lens of the emerging field of ecocriticism, which seeks to integrate current concerns about the
environment into the study of literary works. In an ecological reading of the text, the novel’s
primary focus shifts from the protagonist, Kambili, to Adichie’s explicit use of “nature imagery,”
an examination of more dynamic interaction of familial environments, and a study of the
complex ecosystem of religion and politics. Reading ecocritically encourages a broader, more
inclusive way of thinking—one that might well increase the prospects of survival for us all.
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I. Introduction to the field of ecocriticism

Discourses of power are, nevertheless, plays of language, too. We can navigate

the seemingly nonsensical or impenetrable together. Our focused goal could be to

discover the possibility of new ways of seeing familiar and unfamiliar texts using

tools honed by others in ways we may find simultaneously liberatory,

mischievous, playful, exploratory, and problematic.

Linda-Susan Beard, Methods of Literary Study Syllabus, 2012

In fall 2012, we began Methods of Literary Study, the core course for Bryn Mawr College

English majors, with selections from Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan’s Literary Theory: An

Anthology. This 1998 anthology showcases the editors’ selection of the most important topics of

literary criticism: formalism, structuralism, linguistics, narratology, rhetoric, phenomenology,

reader response, post-structuralism, deconstruction, post-modernism, psychoanalytic, historicist,

Marxist, cultural materialist, feminist, gender studies, ethnic literary, cultural studies, critical

race theory, colonial, post-colonial, and transnational (Rivkin v-viii). I was enrolled

simultaneously in a class on “Ecological Imaginings,” which immediately highlighted a major

omission in my “core” education as a literary scholar: the Rivkin and Ryan anthology featured

no essays about ecocriticism, a school of thought that has gained much ground over the last ten

years.

Ecological criticism, which now seems to me relevant to every story I’ve read, has flourished

in American academia over the last two decades. The term was first used by William Rueckert in

1978, in “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism,” and an essay exploring

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ecological criticism was first anthologized in 1996, in Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm’s The

Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Ecological criticism appeared for the first

time in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism in 2010 with the inclusion of

“Kochinnenako in Academe: Three Approaches to Interpreting a Keres Indian Tale,” a 1986

essay in which Paula Gunn Allen calls into question the conventional dichotomy between

“foreground” and “background” that structures so much of the interpretation of stories--and

relationship to the natural world--in the West. While literary criticism has conventionally

analyzed the “setting” where the action of the story takes place, Allen asserts that there is “no

setting (in the sense of inert ground against which dramas are played out)” (241). This

orientation brings the environment to the forefront and demonstrates the ways in which it

interacts with, influences, and even becomes a character in a story. Allen illustrates how

traditional peoples perceive their world in a “unified-field fashion” that is vastly different from

the “masculinist and monotheistic” modes of perception used in western storytelling. In Allen’s

interpretation of the Keres story, “Balance and harmony are preserved” (234) between organisms

and their environment.

Contemporary ecocriticism is not only about balance and harmony, however. It actually

unsettles a range of current presumptions about the ways in which humankind is connected to the

physical world. For example, in “On the Organism-Environment Distinction in Psychology,”

Daniel K. Palmer queries the conventional distinction between “organism” and “environment,”

observing that they “interpenetrate one another through and through. The distinction between

them… is only a matter of practical convenience” (233). In ecocriticism, the environment is

more than a canvas for action, less a “surround” than the “medium” in which the story takes

place (Palmer 320).

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There are many disagreements among eco-critics about how to think and write about this

“medium.” In Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the US

and Beyond Lawrence Buell says that ecological criticism is a project of raising awareness, one

that is not necessarily idyllic or bucolic. He draws on the observation of social theorist Pierre

Bourdieu that a human “takes the world about itself for granted” (Buell 19). Humans have long

underestimated the forces affecting us from outside our own bodies, and ecocriticism asks us to

examine the ways in which each of us is inextricably tied to the environment in which we exist,

as well as how we influence and are influenced by it.

Focusing on the importance of human attachment to place as “an articulation of

environmental unconscious” (28) in a world that is ever more “placeless,” Buell draws on the

observation of Edward Casey that “a placeless world is as unthinkable as a bodiless self” (55). In

sharp contrast to this valorization of place, however, Timothy Morton argues in The Ecological

Thought that fixation on place impedes a “truly ecological” view:

We want ecology to be primarily about location…. it must feel like home; we must

recognize it and think it in terms of the here and now, not the there and then…[but]

perhaps the ecological thought is picaresque—wandering from place to place, open to

random encounters…. “Place” contains too much “at-homeness,” too much finality, for

the ecological thought. Localism, nationalism, and immersion in the ideological bath of

the lifeworld, won’t cut it anymore…We need…a collectivity of weakness, vulnerability,

and incompletion (26-27, 48, 127).

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Attention to our shared vulnerability, as interdependent creatures in a material world,

leads much ecological criticism into the realm of social justice. Ecological criticism stands up for

the rights of all life forms to flourish. Graham Huggan contends, for instance, that one of the

axioms of postcolonial ecocriticism is that there is no social justice without ecological justice

(35). Huggan gives as an example the unjust execution of political activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, one

of the first African environmental martyrs, who fought against the oppression of the Ogoni

people by the Nigerian state and protested the extreme damage done to their land and water by

huge oil conglomerates. Saro-Wiwa’s diary described his struggle as two simultaneous wars, one

ecological and the other political.

Because the field of ecocriticism is still new, its aims and methodology are still emerging.

Simon C. Estok reports in his 2001 “Report Card on Ecocriticism” that “It all began with a bit of

a panic to describe itself” (1). In her undated reflections, “What is Ecocriticism?”, Stephanie

Sarver describes ecological criticism as drawing on other fields to “illuminate our understanding

of how human interactions with nature are reflected in literature” (2). Timothy Morton suggests

that, because ecocriticism is so vast in scope, its goals may never be fully defined: the

“ecological thought is the thinking of interconnectedness… it involves becoming open, radically

open—open forever, without the possibility of closing again” (7-8).

While ecocriticism is still developing as a field, and is filled with disagreements among

scholars practicing in it, these scholars do seem to agree that ecocriticism is committed to using

the academic discipline to make positive change in the interlocking social and natural world.

Estok says that “ecocriticism at its best seeks understandings about the ways that dynamics of

subjugation, persecution, and tyranny are mutually reinforcing, the ways that racism, sexism,

homophobia, speciesism… are interlocking” (8). Ecocritics believe that we to need better
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understand such interwoven power structures, both on a human and a planetary level, and the

ways in which they are damaging the earth, possibly beyond repair. This is the issue to which my

own study of ecocriticism primarily speaks.

Ecocritics accordingly agree that the work of the ecological humanities must not be

limited to the conventional environmental texts, (for instance Henry David Thoreau’s Walden),

what Andrew H. Wallis calls “paeans to the local”:

Such approaches can… seem insufficient in an ecologically, economically, and culturally

interconnected world…. present circumstances…seem to be calling for “bigger”

narratives and are seen by some as a lynchpin of the ecocritical enterprise…challenging

assumptions about border and scale (Wallis x).

It was the search for such a larger narrative that led me back to the works of Chimamanda Ngozi

Adichie, stories focused on the life of a single family, to see if and how they might be read

“ecologically.”

II. Introduction to Purple Hibiscus

Purple Hibiscus, published in 2003 by Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

centers on the experiences of fifteen-year-old Kambili Achike. Kambili begins the novel living

with her parents Eugene and Beatrice, known to her as Papa and Mama, and her brother Jaja in

the Nigerian city of Enugu. Papa is a powerful economic and political figure in Enugu due to the

factory and liberal newspaper that he owns. With the money that he has made in these ventures

he is able to finance much of the Catholic Church to which he and his family belong. Papa uses
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his Catholic faith as an excuse to treat his immediate family in cruel ways (physically and

emotionally) in the name of discipline and piety. At Christmas the Achike family goes to their

other home in Papa’s hometown of Abba. While Papa extends generosity to all of the

townspeople, he will not allow his own father, Papa-Nnukwu, into his home because Papa

considers him a heathen for practicing traditional Igbo religion. However, Kambili and Jaja are

given an opportunity to visit their grandfather when they accept an invitation from Papa’s sister,

who they call Aunty Ifeoma, to come stay with her in the University town of Nsukka. On this trip

they go on a pilgrimage to Aokpe, where the Virgin Mary was said to have appeared, and they

also have the opportunity to visit Papa-Nnukwu. Kambili and Jaja are able to learn about

themselves and their environment from Aunty Ifeoma and their cousins Amaka, Obiora and

Chima. When Kambili and Jaja return to Papa’s house in Enugu they face a tense political

atmosphere (Papa’s editor Ade Coker has been killed for printing pro-democratic stories in the

newspaper.)

Arguably the most dramatic part of the book is its surprising ending, in which Mama

poisons Papa’s tea, killing him, and leading her son Jaja to take the blame and resulting jail

sentence. This portion of the book could be considered a psychological melodrama. It is

character and emotionally driven and could be analyzed in a psychological or even Freudian

way. However this aspect of the novel would yield enough analysis for another lengthy paper

and is a different project from the one that I have undertaken here.

A search of Purple Hibiscus on any scholarly database will yield as many as 100 hits; the

novel has been frequently, and closely, read since its publication in 2003. These essays focus on

a wide range of themes, including culture, family, feminism, gender, genre (with a particular

focus on the Bildungsroman), history, patriarchy, power, language, psychology, religion, sex,
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sexuality, silence, and trauma. “Ecology,” “ecocriticism” and “environmental studies” came up

very rarely as keywords in my searches of the novel, but I see eco-theory as tying together all

these disparate ideas, encouraging a more broad and inclusive view of the whole story.

Some critical work on this novel is very minute and specific, focusing only on the main

character, Kambili or on her abusive father. For instance, Tanya Dalziell’s “Coming-of-Age,

Coming to Mourning: Purple Hibiscus, Lucy, and Nervous Conditions,” centers on Kambili’s

growth and development. Some examinations of the novel operate on a much broader level, and

so begin to demonstrate the “interlocking” nature of psychological, social and environmental

dimensions that I am calling “ecological criticism.” For example, in “Adichie's Genealogies:

National and Feminine Novels,” Susan Z. Andrade describes how the writing of female novelists

has become increasingly political--and increasingly mainstream. Women are essential to

Adichie’s representation of the Nigerian political crisis: she creates fully developed characters

who explicitly embody the political events of a nation.

In “Blood and Blossom: Violence and Restoration in Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus and

Vera’s The Stone Virgins,” Jonathan Highfield more explicitly adds an “eco”-dimension to his

analysis, when he describes how the hibiscus serves as a symbol of resistance of violence,

especially toward women. Highfield argues that Adichie’s novel deals “with the repercussions of

violence within a family group,” clearly indicates “that the causes of the violence are rooted in

colonial past,” and employs “a natural symbol as an antidote to the history of violence” (1).

I chose to write about Purple Hibiscus because I readily saw the important metaphoric

role of the flower in the title, but also because I realized that the novel’s reflections on nature,

and on the human role within it, might go much further than conventional symbolization. Of

particular interest to me, reading as an eco-critic, is the role that Christianity, and the patriarchic
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family structure it authorizes, assumes in the text. Some ecocritics see our ongoing ecological

crisis as the direct result of Judeo-Christian dogma. Lynn White Jr. argues, for instance, that the

Judeo-Christian tradition is anthropocentric in its arrogance. It takes a “domineering attitude”

towards nature and sees creation as made for human disposal (Glotfelty 3, 9). Humankind’s

arrogant attitude towards the natural environment is a dominant motif in Adichie’s fiction.

Other dimensions of the novel, which have previously gone unnoticed and unappreciated,

also emerge when Purple Hibiscus is looked at through the lens of ecocriticism. For instance, I

now notice the central ecological concepts of evolution and sustainability that apply at all levels

of the novel, from character development through the intertwined, oppressive institutions of

politics and religion, to matters of environment neglect and degradation. Attending to the

familial, religious and political environments in which Kambili, the protagonist of Purple

Hibiscus, interacts highlights the multifaceted nature of human- environmental relationships,

interrupting and expanding on the traditional western dichotomy between people and the natural

world.

My own analysis of Purple Hibiscus moves beyond the straightforward symbolism of the

novel’s title to seek out understandings of the interlocking dynamics of the personal, the familial,

the social, the political, and the environmental dimensions of the novel. I take a reflection of the

social theorist Pierre Bourdieu as a keynote for my eco-analysis. Bourdieu observes that “when

habitus encounters a social world of which it is the product, it is like a ‘fish in water’: it does not

feel the weight of the water, and it takes the world about itself for granted” (Buell 19). Human

beings are often unaware of the role that their environments play in shaping their lives, and

traditional literary criticism often relegates the environment of fictional texts to background or

setting.
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Ecological literary theory and criticism bring the environment to the foreground, studying

the way in which the different spaces of a novel affect the events that occur there, and

challenging the tendency to try to train the natural world to be exactly the way that humans want

it to be. Lawrence Buell notes, for instance, that one of the first steps of American modernity was

to view the environment as a nuisance to be dealt with, rather than something to make peace

with. For instance, one of Benjamin Franklin’s first “improvements” to the city of Philadelphia

was to pave its streets (Buell 19). While the Purple Hibiscus isn’t specifically about

“modernity,” it nevertheless takes direct aim at Kambili’s father, who believes that more recent

Christian beliefs are preferable to the older, more traditional forms of worship practiced by his

father.

Purple Hibiscus contains multiple ecological and human-made spaces that interact in

various ways with the characters. Most conventional methods of literary criticism--feminist, new

historicist, reader-response criticism, etc.—would consider Kambili the novel’s protagonist. In

an ecological reading of the text, however, such as the one I’m pursuing here, the novel’s

primary focus shifts from Kambili to Adichie’s explicit use of “nature imagery,” to an

examination of more dynamic interaction of familial environments, and to a study of the role of

religion and politics in the complex eco-system of the novel.

III. Imagery of the “Natural”

I… let my mind rake through the past, through the years when Jaja and Mama and

I spoke more with our spirits than with our lips. Until Nsukka. Nsukka started it

all; Aunty Ifeoma's little garden next to the verandah of her flat in Nsukka began
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to lift the silence. Jaja's defiance seemed to me now like Aunty Ifeoma's

experimental purple hibiscus: rare, fragrant with the undertones of freedom, a

different kind of freedom from the one the crowds waving green leaves chanted at

Government Square after the coup. A freedom to be, to do. But my memories did

not start at Nsukka. They started before, when all the hibiscuses in our front yard

were a startling red (Adichie 16).

In this early passage, Adichie explicitly employs the hibiscus in particular, and plant life

more generally, as a symbol of freedom. Most of the houses that Kambili’s family drives by on

their way to Aunty Ifeoma’s house in Nsukka have some kind of trees or flowers in their front

yard. Even the inside of Aunty Ifeoma’s house includes “long-stemmed roses in a vase” (114).

With these roses, Aunty Ifeoma symbolically brings some of the vitality of the outside world into

the space of her home, as she mixes the external space of her garden with the internal space of

her house.

Hibiscuses, with their large, dramatic flowers function as a strong symbol of freedom

throughout the novel, representing the kind of personal expression that the Nigerian government

will not allow. Kambili’s Papa owns a liberal newspaper called The Standard; his friend Ade

Coker is the editor-in-chief. Ade publishes a string of rebellious pieces, criticizing the

government of Nigeria and its corruption in its everyday business, and is then killed, when a

letter bomb addressed to him explodes at his breakfast table. When Nigerian government

officials come to interrogate Papa about Ade’s death, they yank off the heads of the hibiscuses in

the family’s garden (200).

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Adichie frequently uses the natural world as a symbol of freedom, easily and explicitly

readable in that register. For example, it rains on the day that Ade dies, “a strange, furious rain

in the middle of the parched harmattan” (206), suggesting that he was a rebel who freely

expressed his views. The constraints placed on nature can also be read symbolically. For

instance, the palm fronds used in the Palm Sunday service during the first part of the novel were

taken out of the natural world, ostensibly from trees in Nigeria (“Where do those palms come

from?”) and then tied into “sagging cross shapes” (3). Symbolically, the contortion of natural

objects into sagging cross shapes seems to represent the constrictions of the Catholic faith, which

serves Kambili poorly as she seeks to develop into a young women with her own agency.

IV.

Dynamism of the Family “Environment”

More interesting than these static representations of the “freedom” of the natural world,

however, are the dynamics of Kambili’s three familial environments, the homes of her parents

(their winter home, Enugu, and their summer home, Abba) and that of her aunt and cousins in

Nsukka, as these direct and guide the action of the story. In the analysis that follows, I begin with

a visit Kambili and her brother Jaja pay (with the resentful permission of their father) to the

home of their Aunty Ifeoma. Here they find the space and support for personal growth; here they

learn about ecological concepts like “amazement, open-mindedness, and wonder,” as well as the

range of “delight, beauty, ugliness, disgust, irony, and pain” (Morton 2). Aunty Ifeoma’s house is

a place of positive development and change for the two siblings. Only when Kambili leaves her

parents’ house is she able to begin a process of personal growth that incorporates both an

evolutionary process and a means of achieving sustainability.

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Aunty Ifeoma’s garden is the most important location for psychological and ecological

growth in the novel. The natural environment allows Kambili to feel comfortable enough to be

herself; she passes many happy afternoons sitting there, reading with her cousins, although she is

not yet at a stage in her development where she is able to assimilate this freer, more natural way

of being into her life at home and at school. Nsukka is the place in which Kambili comes to live

in a more uninhibited way. She gradually becomes more comfortable speaking up for herself and

giving a voice to her own wants and needs. This personal growth is a cultural and psychological

concept, as it involves a relationship to the self and to other people in society. But it is also an

ecological concept. Uninhibited growth is beneficial for an organism in a system to thrive.

Kambili is unable to develop emotionally unimpeded in her father’s house because of his abusive

treatment of her, her bother, and their mother. Kambili experiences a slow transformation from

impeded to unimpeded growth in Aunty Ifeoma’s garden. This environment, read ecologically, is

not a passive setting, or a playing field on which change is enacted, but rather a causal agent,

nudging Kambili and Jaja towards the ability to speak for themselves and express their own

experiences in the world.

Kambili’s environment is an active agent of change as well as an important impetus for

Kambili to defend herself for the first time against her cousin Amaka’s verbal gibes. As

Kambili’s cousins and brother change the environment in which they live through the act of

gardening, Kambili’s environment gives her the bravery to speak up for what she thinks and

believes. When Amaka questions Kambili’s ability to do chores because of her wealth (asking

snidely why Kambili does not help with the soup preparation for dinner and if “…rich people do

not prepare orah leavesi, in their houses”), Kambili responds first internally and then externally

as she looks out at the environment around her before speaking (170). She says. “I watched an
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African lily fall from its stalk in the garden…‘You don’t have to shout, Amaka.’ I said finally. ‘I

don’t know how to do orah leaves but you can show me’” (170). Kambili draws strength from

her environment, which allows her to make positive changes in her own life.

Kambili’s family homes in both Enugu and Abba are also surrounded by obstructive

walls, intended to keep her and Jaja separated from the outside world. In the picture Kambili

paints of a scene from her life in Abba, the separation from the world outside the walls of her

home is stark:

Our yard was wide enough to hold a hundreds people dancing atiloguii, spacious

enough for each dancer to do the usual somersaults and land on the next dancer’s

shoulders. The compound walls, topped by coiled electric wires, were so high I

could not see the cars driving by on our street. It was early rainy season, and the

frangipani trees planted next to the walls already filled the yard with the sickly-

sweet scent of their flowers. A row of purple bougainvillea, cut smooth and

straight as a buffet table, separated the gnarled trees from the driveway. Closer to

the house, vibrant bushes of hibiscus reached out and touched one another as if

they were exchanging their petals. The purple plants had started to push out

sleepy buds, but most of the flowers were still on the red ones. (8-9)

The tall walls of Kambili’s home prevent her from interacting with the vegetation on the other

side. The yard of her home is spacious, but it includes none of the life that Kambili invokes in

her imaginings of a spirited festival celebration with somersaulting dancers. The electrical wires

lining the tops of the walls invoke images of her living situation as a prison. The manmade walls
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obscure the view of anything happening beyond them. Kambili is unable to see other people

driving by in their cars and unable to see or interact with the natural world in any way.

The “coiled electric wires” at the top of the walls demonstrate a paradox of existing

power struggle within Kambili’s life. The electrical wires do (or at some point likely did) contain

man-made power used to operate appliances and lights in houses. These power lines separate

Kambili from the vivacious plant life on the other side of the wall, which possess a different kind

of energy. The wires keep Kambili from physically reaching and interacting with the natural

energy on the other side of the wall. In a life directed almost exclusively by her dictatorial father,

these walls represent the strictures he places on how much of the world Kambili is able to see.

Papa’s harsh disciplinarian attitude starkly separates his daughter’s world into the “natural” and

the “cultured.” Putting up walls to keep out the natural forces is a primary way in which he

chooses to direct his daughter’s growth and development.

Papa equates these walls with discipline: staying inside arbitrary lines that divide human

beings from the natural environment. His attitude about this arrangement is characteristically

practical. Kambili’s school in Abba has similarly sharp walls surrounding it:

…but instead of coiled electrified wires, they were topped by jagged pieces of

green glass with sharp edges jutting out…. Papa said the walls had swayed his

decision when I finished elementary school. Discipline was important, he said.

You could not have youngsters scaling walls to go into town and go wild, the way

they did at the federal government colleges. (45)

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Papa’s stringent commitment to discipline means that he limits his children’s ability to move

freely through the world outside the walls. The literal and metaphorical walls that Papa puts up

between his home life and the outside world both stunt his children’s growth and limit their

understanding of their place in the world outside the walls, since they are not allowed to interact

with it.

Central to all the environments in Adichie’s novel are the boundaries that surround them.

When Aunty Ifeoma shows the children around the University of Nigeria she points to the vice

chancellor's lodge and “to the high walls surrounding it, and said it used to have well-tended

hedges of cherry and ixora until rioting students jumped over the hedges and burned a car in the

compound” (131). Kambili’s cousin Obiora explains to her that students were without light and

water for a month and were denied more time in which to take their exams. This situation is an

example of when physical barriers did not work to keep two parties separated, and both

environments (that of the students and that of the vice chancellor) changed despite attempts by

the vice chancellor to keep both restrained and static. It is also important to compare this scene to

Papa’s imagining of “youngsters scaling walls to go into town and go wild, the way they did at

the federal government colleges,” because in this situation the students are going into an

environment and not out of it as they are at the federal government colleges. Fundamentally, this

jumping over hedges demonstrates the need and ability for the students to scale a wall that

divides them from others politically.

Kambili’s yearning for a connection to the energy and growth of the larger world is

palpable as she observes and smells the trees and flowers. Even the netting outside her window,

meant to protect her from mosquitoes (and the malaria they carry), prevents her from connecting

to the outside world. At one point, after coming home from her Aunt’s house, she wonders what
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it would be like if she tore through the small hole and leaped out (189). Kambili clearly feels

trapped by being kept separated from the world outside of her window.

The separations that Papa enforces between his children and the natural world also entail

a disabling, and unnatural, form of silence. In the poetic language of Tillie Olsen, describing the

gendered restrictions of her own life,

These are not natural silences, that necessary time for renewal, lying fallow,

gestation, the natural cycle of creation. The silences I speak of here are unnatural;

the unnatural thwarting of what struggles to come into being, but cannot. In the

old, the obvious parallels: when the seed strikes stone; the soil will not sustain; the

spring is false; the time is drought or blight or infestation; the frost comes

premature. This book is about such silences. It is concerned with the relationship

of circumstances—including class, color, sex; the times, climate into which one is

born—to the creation of literature…. A passion and a purpose inform its

pages…hatred for all that, societally rooted…slows, impairs, silences writers

(Olsen viii).

As Olsen explains, silence can enable renewal and rejuvenation, but becomes problematic when

it impairs the growth and development of thoughts or feelings. Silence becomes

counterproductive when it impairs individual growth, perhaps by keeping an organism separated

from beneficial stimuli.

Kambili’s father repeatedly thwarts “what struggles to come into being” (viii). Through

excessive, arguably sadistic, discipline, such as pouring boiling water on Kambili’s bare feet in

punishment for opposing him. Papa teaches Kambili to be silent to the point of invisibility,
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stunting her growth and development. Returning from a visit to her Aunty Ifeoma, Kambili

realizes how vastly different her aunt’s house is from that of her parents. Papa’s intense

discipline has created a silence that is “lifeless”:

…our living room had too much empty space, too much wasted marble floor that

gleamed from Sisi’s polishing and housed nothing. Our ceilings were too high. Our

furniture was lifeless: the glass tables did not shed twisted skin in the harmattan,

the leather sofas' greeting was a clammy coldness, the Persian rugs were too lush

to have any feeling. (192)

Kambili and her brother Jaja feel uncomfortable making any noise or occupying any kind of

space in this large, empty house, devoid of any growing things.

Gradually, throughout the novel, Kambili and Jaja learn about the positive associations of

silence. For instance, during the fight in which Kambili first stands up to her cousin Amaka, she

watches a lily fall from its stalk and “crotonsiii rustling in the late morning breeze” (170). This

silence is pregnant with meaning, the metaphorical in-breath before Kambili utters a statement

primarily standing up for herself and beginning the process of self- development, which will lead

to her seeing herself as a human being worthy of love and respect. This is the first time that

Kambili has stood up to anyone, in any capacity, and she is able to do so partly because of the

pause that she took to gather her thoughts. Instead of being “lifeless,” like “twisted skin,” and

“clammy cold,” the silence in Aunty Ifeoma’s garden is filled with life and purpose, producing

new growth and development.

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The “unnatural silence” that Olson describes has the opposite effect. When Papa’s

colleague, Ade, visits Kambili’s family in Abba, for instance, he remarks that Papa’s children are

always “so quiet.” Papa responds, “They are not like those loud children people are raising these

days, with no home training and no fear of God” (57-58). The children are so silent because have

been raised in an environment that stifles them. Their silence is closely tied to fear, and like

plants under stress, they will fail to flourish. Scientists at the Flanders Interuniversity Institute of

Biotechnology have found that crops use a control system that employs genes to trigger the

plant’s “safety mode”: allowing the plant to protect itself against stressors like the presence of

pollutants or a lack of light or water, but it also impedes the plant’s growth (“Plants And

Stress”). Humans work in much the same way. To flourish, they need both “natural” silences and

open spaces, not the cleaned up, cut-off, empty ones in the house of Kambili’s parents, which

shut out all signs of vitality.

A key insight of ecological criticism is that all systems are not only interconnected, but

subject to change. Alteration in any part of the complex system will lead to adaptation in other

dimensions. As John Muir articulates so well: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we

find it hitched to everything else in the universe” (Ingram 11). At the beginning of the novel,

however, Kambili does not understand this process; she is worried that any change will shatter

the family environment as she knows it. When her brother Jaja starts to become rebellious,

Kambili is sure that the compound walls around her house will crumble (14). It takes the literal

shattering of a piece of this suffocating home environment for Kambili to accept the change that

is coming. The tipping point is described in a flashback at the beginning of the novel, when Jaja

refuses to go to church communion. Papa throws a hymnal at him, but instead he hits a prized

possession of his wife:

 Fedorko Macholdt 20

Papa looked around the room quickly, as if searching for proof that something had

fallen from the high ceiling, something he had never thought would fall. He

picked up the missal and flung it across the room, toward Jaja. It missed Jaja

completely, but it hit the glass étagère, which Mama polished often. It cracked the

top shelf, swept the beige, finger-size ceramic figurines of ballet dancers in

various contorted postures to the hard floor and then landed after them. Or rather

it landed on their many pieces. (7)

The shattering of Mama’s figurines foreshadows the end of Kambili’s home life as she

knows it. Although she does not understand the process at the time, this event of breaking the old

silence creates room for new growth and development. Later in the novel Kambili says, “Even

the silence that descended on the house was sudden, as though the old silence had broken and left

us with the sharp pieces” (257). Like the jagged pieces of green glass topping the walls of her

school, the metaphorical pieces of glass from the breaking apart of Kambili’s life as she knows it

represent new beginnings (45). Though painful for Kambili, this new silence, resulting from the

broken pieces of her old life, shows that her old life is morphing into something new. Just as the

seasonal harmattan winds present in the novel kill some plants while simultaneously bringing in

new fertile soil for others, so the novel opening with a moment of profound change clears space

for yet more change to occur. This is ecologically significant because the shattering of Mama’s

figurines is an event that clears space for new growth to occur in Kambili’s life, growth which

actualizes itself during the trip to her aunt’s house.

 Fedorko Macholdt 21

Kambili’s father does not appreciate this process of destruction and resultant new

growth—in part, perhaps, because he was once involved in horticulture. As Michael Pollan

explains in “Weeds Are Us,”

The garden world…today organizes itself into one great hierarchy. At the top

stand the hypercivilized hybrids—the rose, “queen of the garden”—and at the

bottom skulk the weeds, the plant world’s proletariat, furiously reproducing and

threatening to usurp the position of their more refined horticultural betters.”

After much experimentation with allowing weeds into his garden, Pollan comes to the conclusion

that weeds are just as manmade as traditional garden flowers. Neither can thrive without the

involvement of humans; both weeds and flowers are equally “cultivated.” This cultural

categorization of gardening may help to explain the behavior of Kambili’s father, who tells his

daughter that he too “was a gardener for the priests while I attended St. Gregory’s Secondary

School” (47). Perhaps he learned, in that work, an attitude toward the “cultivation” of the

“natural” that strongly influenced his views of how to parent his children, views that involve

“weeding out” the “bad seeds.” Instead of growing plants in soil, Papa chose to devote his life to

the church; instead of embracing the unstructured, chaotic natural world, Papa built large,

exclusive compounds for his family in Abba and Enugu.

Papa almost single-handedly finances his church by buying the cartons of communion

wine, paying for a new oven in which to bake communion wafers, funding a new wing on the

local hospital in which the priests give extreme unction, and generally making huge donations to

the church (5). In this way, Papa uses his wealth to construct his own environment that is
 Fedorko Macholdt 22

narrow-minded, cold, and inflexible. Although he helps the church, he doesn’t try to help

individual human beings in any but monetary ways. For instance, when he sees a beggar

alongside the road while driving his children to school, he simply throws bills at him and drives

away (44).

The environment that Papa has created is artificially constructed, a copy of what the

British have brought to Nigeria, and that artificiality extends even to his speech:

Papa changed his accent when he spoke, sounding British, just as he did when he

spoke to Father Benedict. He was gracious, in the eager-to-please way that he

always assumed with the religious, especially with the white religious. As

gracious as when he presented the check for refurbishing the Daughters of the

Immaculate Heart library. (46)

Changing his accent to fit the circumstance, Papa acts in accord with his social standing: deferent

in the presence of “white religious,” but domineering and inflexible in his own home. His heavy

steps “create turbulence” in Kambili’s head, much the way his attitude towards her creates

turbulence in her life (39).

V. The Religious Environment

Many ecocritics see Judeo-Christian dogma as the ultimate source of our current neglect

and abuse of the natural world, and such an analysis helps to explain both the larger dynamic

motivating Papa’s behavior and his children’s resistance to his teaching. The religious power
 Fedorko Macholdt 23

Papa wields in his family is inherently patriarchal and anthropocentric. Kambili is under intense

pressure to conform to her father’s Catholic beliefs.

But the novel also offers an alternative framing. Kambili’s grandfather, Papa-Nnukwu,

has a more ecologically inclusive view. Papa calls Papa-Nnukwu a “heathen” (a sentiment that

Kambili later parrots to the displeasure of her aunt) and will only let his children go to visit him

because he believes that God, the all-powerful Christian deity, “will protect them” (62). While

Papa tries to ward off the natural world, viewing it as a site of threat and chaos, Papa-Nnukwu

appreciates and even worships nature. Aunty Ifeoma wakes Kambili up early in the morning to

watch Papa-Nnukwu perform his morning prayer, which takes place out of doors. Later in the

afternoon Papa-Nnukwu is again out on the porch enjoying the sunlight (169). He possesses

knowledge about the spiritual dimensions of the natural environment. Amaka reports that “Papa-

Nnukwu used to say that the vultures have lost their prestige…. In the old days, people liked

them because when they came down to eat the entrails of animals used in sacrifice, it meant the

gods were happy” (236). As their religious views shifted from traditional practices to those

guided by Christian belief, so too did the appreciation of vultures’ role in the spiritual and natural

world. The wisdom of the older generations has been replaced by worship for a deity completely

removed and separate from the ecological world. In this revised worldview, vultures no longer

play a part in the spiritual drama; they remind people of “heathen” methods of worship, which

are now out of fashion. But Papa-Nnukwu disregards these modern views and remembers the

importance of the interconnected nature of all living organisms, including the important role

played by the vultures in the cycle of birth and death.

 Fedorko Macholdt 24

VI. Conclusion

The great anthropologist Levi- Strauss famously claimed that “all societies distinguish

between culture and nature” (Glotfelty 41), but contemporary ecocriticism challenges that

distinction with extended study of the complexity of the relationship between humans and their

environment. Nature in Purple Hibiscus manifests in many dimensions. On the most basic level

the purple hibiscus is symbolic of “A freedom to be, to do…” (16). The possibilities

encapsulated in this flower are part of its appeal for Kambili. On a broader level, Aunty Ifeoma’s

house is a space where Kambili and her brother can enact the possibility of freedom and change.

They are able to begin to heal and grow away from the walls that their father has built in every

part of their lives. His fanatical discipline inhibits their development. Kambili tries to be perfect

in everything that she does, studying for hours on end to earn marks that will allow her to

graduate at the top of her class and gain her father’s love. She knows that performing less than

perfectly on an exam will earn her bodily punishment. Her brother Jaja takes up a love of

gardening and brings back to their garden in Abba some stalks of purple hibiscus flowers. This

event is a bridge between the children’s two environments, one cold and devoid of feeling and

the other friendly and welcoming.

Aunty Ifeoma allows her children to not only draw wisdom from the world around them

but also to push the boundaries of their thinking and not confine themselves to familiar ideas.

The environment she creates operates in Purple Hibiscus not only as a symbol but also as causal

agent, a place of transformation and change for her niece and nephew.

Glotfelty and Fromm observe in The Ecocriticism Reader that “Literary studies in

English are in a period of rapid and sometimes disorientating change” (xv), in which ecocriticism

offers a story different from those explicated by other varieties of literary criticism, by bringing
 Fedorko Macholdt 25

to the foreground previously unnoticed aspects of a story. As I have demonstrated, the

environment may be viewed not merely as background for human drama, but also as a place that

dynamically interacts with characters.

An ecocritical vision is not simply a new lens through which to view a story; it offers us a

chance to think and talk about the environment in a personal, familial, national, and international

way. Understanding the environment as more than just a passive space to be acted upon and used

for human consumption may enable us better to face our current dire environmental issues.

Acknowledging how interdependent our relationship is with the natural world may make us less

likely to believe that we can control it, and more wary of polluting and otherwise harming it.

Most importantly, ecological criticism highlights the abuses of power that drive our most

detrimental approaches to the natural world. Kambili’s father is a primary example of this point

of view; highly controlling of his children’s activities, he creates divisions and walls among all

parts of their lives, separating them from other members of the family, and only grudgingly

letting them spend time with their aunt, cousins, or grandfather. He uses strict, violent forms of

discipline to create an unnatural silence in his house. Papa uses his religion to justify his abusive

treatment of his children and wife, bodily punishing his family members if they do something

that he believes would displease God. This abuse stems from a narrow-minded view about what

is “good” and what is “evil,” exclusive binaries which fail to acknowledge the complex

interactions of the wider ecosystem.

Humans have reached a point in history in which our actions are affecting our planet as a

whole, and for the worse. Adichie herself has suggested an alternative way to respond to our

current ecological crisis. In her TED Talk on “The Danger of a Single Story,” she tells the

anecdote of growing up in Nigeria, reading children’s books written by the British and American
 Fedorko Macholdt 26

colonizers. When she began writing herself, she took these books as models for her own stories:

all of her characters were “white and blue eyed, played in the snow, ate apples, and talked a lot

about the weather… this despite the fact that I lived in Nigeria, had never been outside Nigeria,

ate mangoes, and never talked about the weather because there was no need to.” The stories she

had been told were not the stories she needed to tell; they were not the stories about the world

she inhabited. Alternative stories are always available to us, Adichie counsels. Ecological

criticism suggests that (for example) the Christian belief in human “domination” is a story that

now needs to be replaced.

Fiction offers multiple alternatives to the danger of a single story. In The Lives of

Animals, J.M. Coetzee makes the claim that reading fiction makes people more empathic to

situations outside of their own. At the center of his fiction he places a novelist, Elizabeth

Costello, who demands a profound change in the treatment of animals: our radical sympathy for

their “sensation of being.” Along the way, she makes also makes a profound claim for fiction:

that it serves an ethical purpose, in opening our hearts and showing us that “there are no bounds

to the sympathetic imagination” (4). Reading fiction exposes us to situations different from our

own, inviting us to think in new and different ways. Reading ecocritically, in particular,

encourages a broader, more inclusive way of thinking—one that might well increase the

prospects of survival for us all.

 Fedorko Macholdt 27

Notes:
i
“Orah” or “ora” soup is a traditional dish native to South Eastern Nigeria made with orah leaves

that must be torn into tiny pieces using the fingers. (Using a knife causes the leaves to become

dark in color.)
ii
Atilogu, or Atilogu, is an upbeat Igbo dance that focuses on vigorous movement of the body

and often acrobatics. Atilogu translates roughly as “has magic” in the Igbo language. The dance

is often performed during festivals.

iii
A brightly colored shrub or small tree with small glossy or leathery leaves that can reach a

height of approximately 20 feet. Leaf colors can include green, yellow, white, orange, pink, red,

crimson, and purple.

 Fedorko Macholdt 28

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