Abstract:
In this article, I offer a reading of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple
Hibiscus (2003) through the lens of the body. References to the body in Purple
Hibiscus are frequent, even excessive. In its insistent emphasis on the body,
I suggest, the novel establishes affiliations with an emergent tradition of
African writing in which various forms of “body writing” are deployed
as part of a destabilizing aesthetic. These aesthetico-political concerns are
developed in a number of ways—in the inscriptions of the body as a site of
physical and discursive violence, in the positive reimagining of the black
body against a history of shame, and in the novel’s refracted critique of the
postcolonial potentate whose body becomes the object of a destabilizing
and satirical gaze. By means of the trope of the bodily grotesque—along
with a repeated gesture of ironic unmasking—the novel asserts the reciprocal
connections between the private violence of the domestic sphere and
the public violence of the postcolonial state. Also important is a pervasive
structure of reciprocity or mirroring in which several unexpected connections
between conventionally bounded conditions are disclosed. Not least
of these, I suggest, are the links between Western enlightenment-democracy
and the violence of the postcolonial state.
