Content area
Full Text
As a postcolonial text, Purble Hibiscus critiques the associated violences of Christian religion, colonial forces, and patriarchal domination. Yet it also complicates this indictment through parallel critiques of Igbo culture through contrasting characters whose own beliefs manifest the proliferated possibilities of a secular age: not repudiation of Igbo culture or of Christianity, but a dynamic process of critique and embrace that exemplifies the cultural hermeneutics suggested by West African theologian Mercy Amba Odyoye. To do justice to the text, readers in a Western location must resist the urge to overlook either side of this risky and difficult paradox.
Cynthia R. Wallace
Cynthia R. Wallace begins this summer as Assistant Professor of English at St. Thomas More College, University of Saskatchewan. She has published essays on contemporary literature, religion, and ethics. Her current book project discovers a paradoxical challenge to contemporary poststructuralist, theological, and feminist ethics of redemptive suffering within the literary writings of Adrienne Rich, Toni Morrison, Ana Castillo, and Chimamanda Adichie.
NOTES
1. Scholarly attention to Purple Hibiscus has included readings emphasizing its “de-colonizing” power, its critique of patriarchal Christianity, and its role within a politically-concerned tradition of Nigerian writing. (For example, see articles by Lily Mabura, Madelain Hron, Ayo Kehinde, Sophia Ogwude, Cheryl Stobie, Heather Hewett, and Susan Strehle.) Susan Andrade, an important contributor to the discourse of African women’s writing, provides perhaps the most blatant example of critical disagreements over the novel’s ending, which she argues “suggests a welter of contradictory sentiments in attempting a resolution” (99). Sucha judgment of the conclusion stands in stark contrast to the optimistic reading of Heather Hewett, which emphasizes Kambili’s need to “find her wayforward-slowly, resolutely, indefatigably-into the future” (90).
2. Here and elsewhere Kwok refers to Gayatri Spivak’s famous figuration of “white men saving brown women from brown men” revising it to read “white women saving brown women from brown men” in the missionary enterprise.
3. Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age offers a detailed and compelling account of the causes and effects of Western secularization. For more on the relationship of scholars to religion, see Buley-Meissner, Thompson, and Tan’s The Academy and the Possibility of Belief.
4. In “Reading African Women Readers;’ Cynthia Ward names several challenges of reading African women from a Western...