Breaking Gods: An African Postcolonial Gothic Reading of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichies Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun

university of Missouri-Columbia
LiLy G. N. MABuRA

ABSTRACT
This article examines Chimamanda Ngozi Adichies Purple Hibiscus (2003) and Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) through an African Postcolonial Gothic lens. it begins by tracing the historiography and manifestations of Gothic attributes in precolonial and colonial Africa as exemplified in novels such as Chinua Achebes Things Fall Apart (1959), Mongo Betis Poor Christ of Bomba (1971), and Bessie Heads A Question of Power (1974). it then discusses Half of a Yellow Sun, which explores postindependence ethnic strife in Nigeria, particularly the Biafra War, and situates it as the historical precedent of the contemporary haunted setting in Purple Hibiscus. Adichie, i argue, participates in an ongoing reinvention and complication of Gothic topography in African literature. She teases out the peculiarities of the genre on the continent; dissects fraught African psyches; and engages in a Gothic-like reclamation of her igbo heritage, including igbo-ukwu art, language, and religion.

othic as a literary term emerged in the later eighteenth century and has been thought by some to have hardly anything to do with the European Goths who sacked Rome in 410 AD. Some revisionists like Robin Sowerby, however, note that Edward Gibbon wrote the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire about the time Gothic fiction emerged on the literary scene. Such revisionism links the word metaphorically to its origins by intimating that Gothic fiction tells tales of invasions, which embody transgressions of all sorts, including those across national, social, sexual, and identity boundaries (Heiland 23). Eighteenth-century Europe evoked the Goths fierce avowal of the values of freedom and democracy. REsEaRch in afRican litER atuREs, Vol. 39, No. 1 (Winter 2008). 2008

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During this time and on to the French Revolution, the Goths were remembered and admired for their opposition to the tyrannical expansionism of the Roman Empire, an expansionism that was subsequently identified with the Catholic Church (Botting 5). Similar opposition to empire and church emerged in twentieth-century African novels that predate Chimamanda Ngozi Adichies Purple Hibiscus (2003). in Mongo Betis The Poor Christ of Bomba (1971), the people of Tala, in colonial Cameroon, are set in direct contestation with Catholicism much like the Goths and subsequent eighteenth-century protagonists of Gothic novels. in the novel, Fr. DrumontFather Superior of Bomba missionabandons Talas residents for three years for failing to convert to Catholicism or for backsliding to their indigenous religion and cultural practices, including polygamy. While visiting the village of Timbo in Tala country, Fr. Drumont asks the local catechist what the people there think of religion. Father, the catechist answers, they say that a priest is no better than a Greek trader or any other colonialist. [. . .] They say that you must be hiding things from them. What about all the whites who live in concubinage with loose women in the town, do you ever rage against them? (Beti 20). Fr. Drumont does not rage about this, not to mention the fact that he refuses to believe that Zacharia is really bad (Beti 10). Already married and with two sons, Zacharia takes sexual advantage of the sixa girls who live in the mission for two to four months [doing] manual work for more than ten hours a day, all in the name of being prepared to be mothers of Christian families (Beti 5). Denis, a fifteen-year-old mission boy under Fr. Drumonts care, narrates Zacharias affair with Catherine, one of the sixa girls. in addition, Denis reveals his own seduction by Catherine and provides readers with an insight into the eventual collapse of the mission of Bomba, whose sixa turns into a brothel raging with syphilis. Seen through a Gothic lens, Denis is reminiscent of the sexually nave priest Ambrosio who is seduced by Matilda in Mathew G. Lewiss The Monk (1756). According to Steven Blakemore, [T]hematically and allusively, Matilda is the Lovelace-like seducer protesting his innocent intentions, and Ambrosio is like the damsel whose virtue is threatened (524). Blakemore argues that Lewiss point is that Catholic vows of chastity feminize monks whose sexual ignorance makes them vulnerable to temptation and hypocrisy (522). This is the same point that Beti seems to be making, especially in regard to Denis, whose seduction is filled with lamentation: Oh God, what shall i do?Denis asksim so unhappy. And all because of that cursed girl, that Catherine. Ah! She is Satan herself [. . .]. i should have watched out, indeed i should. But how could i have done? How could i suspect that she wanted to make me do that? (Beti 81). The parallels between the initially innocent Ambrosio and Denis and the demonic Matilda and Catherine enhance the thematic similarity between these two novels and their anti-Catholic subtexts. Further, Lewiss novel posits that cloistered feminine virtue is easily seduced (Blakemore 524), a point that Beti demonstrates in the seduction of Denis and the sixa girls. in The Monk and The Poor Christ of Bomba, Catholicism is depicted as having perverted pure religion and produced deviant sexual practices originating from unnatural vows of chastity, which violate nature. Geographic locations aside, novels like Lewiss and Betis reveal that Gothic fiction is imbued with a nostalgic relish for a lost era of romance and adventure, for a world that, if barbaric, was [. . .] also ordered [and that in] this respect Gothic

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fiction preserves older traditions (Botting 5). From this it might be argued that most, if not all, African literature, by virtue of its effort to preserve and reclaim older traditions and cultures, is imbued with Gothic trappings and demonstrates varying degrees of commitment to the genres topography and stock features. indeed, such literature in the twentieth century has contributed to the emergence of the postcolonial Gothic. As Gina Wisker argues, the history of postcolonial peoples is one that reeks of the elements of horror: silencing, hauntings of repressed past histories, ghosts, abjection and the split self, [and] colluding with the ruler (174). As African novelists like Beti demonstrate, however, colonized peoples attempt to maintain and revive indigenous or exiled homeland conditions, belief, and ways of looking at the world [and] the imaginary (Wisker 174). Undoubtedly, the boundaries of the Gothic novel/fiction have widened over time to include the Postcolonial Gothic novel among others. That said, Gothic fiction has retained certain stock features; it, for example, usually has a castle setting that is sometimes surrounded by wild and desolate landscapes and dark forests. Such landscapes, present in early Gothic fiction like Horace Walpoles The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story (1764), immediately emerged as well in the modern African novel like Chinua Achebes Things Fall Apart (1959). Here the village of Umuofia stands surrounded by a large forest imbued with both good and evil. On one hand, the village is host to the sacred python, revered shrines, and sacred caves like that of Chielothe priestess of Agbala. And on the other, it is partly the Evil Forest, a cursed landscape where people who die of evil diseases are buried. it is also the dumping ground for twins (who are considered evil) and the site for ritualistic killings such as the oracle-stipulated murder of Okonkwos adopted son, ikemefuna. Other stock features of Gothic fiction include apparitions, curses, and other notions of evil; an atmosphere of overwrought emotions, fear, and doom precipitated by various notions of evil, ancient prophesies, or the sublime and supernatural; and women in distressfemale characters that are often terrified, oppressed, and driven to psychological disintegration by a powerful tyrannical male who embodies patriarchal oppression. indigenous sexism and patriarchy, which were no strangers to precolonial Africa, were further compounded in the colonial and postcolonial settings where color and gender served as dual oppressors for women. This Gothic feature is well exemplified in Bessie Heads A Question of Power (1974). in this novel, Elizabeth, exiled in Botswana, is driven to a psychological hell by her abusive lover, Dan. Heads novel can also be read as a tale of a romance gone bad; indeed, Gothic fiction, from its early beginnings, was a tale of romance. Walpoles novel The Castle of Otranto has been described as a gruesome tale of passion, bloodshed and villainy (Cuddon 356). Elements of Gothic romance include a sudden and passionate love; tension between the female protagonists true love and patriarchal control; a painful parting of the lovers; and the threat of illicit love or lust, usually emanating from some other evil mans desires for the woman or one of her multiple suitors. These stock features of Gothic fiction, as already seen, are not a novelty in African fiction, and writers like Beti, Achebe, and Head are significant when tracing the historiography and manifestations of the genres attributes on the African continent. That said of Adichies African literary predecessors, i deem her novel Purple Hibiscus as encompassing a larger palette of these Gothic stock features than

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is found in many preceding texts. Hers is, on the whole, a more faithful rendition of the genre. Further, i argue, Adichie teases out the peculiarities of the Postcolonial Gothic in continental Africa as she dissects fraught African psyches and engages in a Gothic-like reclamation of her igbo heritage, including igbo-ukwu art, language, and religion. In the following pages, I flesh out this thought in greater detail by closely examining Gothic topography and elements in Purple Hibiscus and their historical roots, which i trace to her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun (2006). These two novels have been published to wide international acclaim but have so far generated hardly any significant criticism. By showing Adichie as participating in an ongoing reinvention and complication of the African Postcolonial Gothic topography, i also hope to attract further scholarly attention to her works. Purple Hibiscus is set in the South Eastern Nigerian towns of Enugu, Nsukka, and Abba, which are predominantly igbo in ethnicity. The main protagonist, Kambili Achike, almost sixteen, narrates her familys life and history in modern day Nigeria. She brings the reader into her familys palatial homes in not only the coal mining town of Enugu, where her father Eugene Achike runs various businesses, but also in Abba, her paternal ancestral home that the family visits every Christmas. Kambili is extremely close to her mother, Beatrice, and her older brother and only sibling, Jaja (possibly named after a historical Nigerian figure, Jaja of Opobo). A fanatically religious patriarch, Eugene overexerts his children academically, and his character generally reads like the proverbial oppressive Gothic patriarch. Kambili and Jaja often seek refuge from him in Nsukka, a university town, where their paternal aunt, ifeoma, and her children live. ifeoma, a university lecturer, tries to counterbalance Eugenes excesses and often urges an entrapped and abused Beatrice to leave him. Beatrice, however, is reluctant to do so, afraid to leave the security Eugenes immense wealth and social status affords her and the children. in the end, though, Eugene pushes Beatrice to the limit and she, in turn, poisons him. To protect his mother, Jaja, admits to the crime of poisoning his father. The novel ends with Jaja in prison, but with the prospect of freedom in the near future. This circumvented igboland setting in modern day Nigeria resounds with the Gothic subtexts of invasion and trauma, which confine the novels characters to this particular region of country. As Adiele Afigbo notes in Ropes of Sand: Studies in Igbo History and Culture, there have been only two times a foreign army has marched right through all the individually autonomous villages of Igboland: first, in the late nineteenth century when British imperialism systematically subjugated the villages by war and gunboat treaty, and, second, in the abortive postindependence Biafra secession war of 196667 when Nigerian government forces occupied the region. Afigbo contends that colonial rule was a stunning and crucial experience for the igbo, partly because of its aims and partly because of its methods both of which occasioned far-reaching changes in the economic, social, and psychological aspects of igbo society (283). Adichies novels Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun support this claim by Afigbo; however, they also place great emphasis on the implications of igbo loss of political, juridical, and sovereign powers under, first, the colonial government and, second, the Nigerian federal state. This is the world that Adichie explores in Half of a Yellow Sun. The novel focuses on the lives of two igbo adult fraternal twins, Olanna and Kainene, who have grown up in Lagos where they received an elite private school education

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before attending college in England. Their father, Chief Ozobia, owns half of Lagos (HYS 59), but, like his wife, has no formal education. The novel commences as Olanna, who has just returned from England, is planning to move to Nsukka to join her Igbo fianc, Odenigbo, a lecturer at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. Olanna, whose name means Golds Gold (58), has smooth skin with the lush color of rain-drenched earth and a curvy, fleshy body (23), while Kainene, whose name means Lets watch and see what next God will bring (58), is the older twin and the complete opposite of Olanna. Richard Churchill, an Englishman who falls in love with Kainene, describes her as almost androgynous and with boyish hips (60). Kainene plays the role of the son in the family, expanding the family business in Port Harcourt, brokering military contracts during the Biafra War, and running an Igbo refugee camp. Chief Ozobia and his wife flee Nigeria during the war and seek refuge in England while Kainene and Olanna stay and witness the horror and chaos that ensue. The novel closes at the end of the war when their parents return to find Olanna alive, but Kainene missing and her fate unknown. Half of a Yellow Sun sheds light on postindependence ethnic strife in Nigeria, which is the historical precedent of Purple Hibiscus. As Olu Oguibe asserts, The crisis of the Nigerian state reflected long-standing geographical, religious, and ethnic divisions [often promoted by the British during the colonial era] between the predominantly Muslim North and the largely Christian South, as well as between feudal yoruba in the West and republican igbo in the East (88). There are those, in Half of a Yellow Sun, for example, who feel that the igbo people want to control everything in the country and wish that they would stay in their East (HYS 227). Susan, a British expatriate and Richards former lover, feels that the igbo are uppity, clannish, and controlling of markets and describes them, in that regard, as being very Jewish (154). The igbo, on the other hand, feel discriminated against and insecure outside igboland. The largely islamic Northerners, for example, refuse to admit igbo children into Kano schools, forcing the igbo union to construct an igbo union Grammar School (38). When the Biafra War erupts, the igbo lose thousands of lives and their property and bank accounts are confiscated or destroyed. The Ozobias, for instance, lose their family house in the predominantly yoruba capital city of Lagos, and after the fall of Port Harcourt, Kainenes house. During the war, the igbo are beaten back to interior igbo towns like Abba, Odenigbos hometown, where he and Olanna seek refuge from advancing government forces. it is in towns like Abba, incidentally the Achike familys hometown in Purple Hibiscus as well, that the igbo regroup and commence postwar reconstruction. As such, homes are built in inland towns like Abba, refuges from the haunting memory of the war and its hurriedly built dirt bunkers. After the war, some igbo venture back to larger igbo towns like Enugu, but the North and Lagos, a historically bloody and haunted landscape for the igbo, is mostly skirted in Adichies Purple Hibiscus. Chinua Achebes own wartime memories of Lagos reveal that the people were jeering and saying, Let the igbo go, food will be cheaper in Lagos. That kind of experienceAchebe saysis so powerful. it is something i could not possibly forget. i realized suddenly that i had not been living in my home; i had been living in a strange place (225). Thus, in Purple Hibiscus, the harmattan blows and brings with it the smells of the North and the Sahara, but the igbo in this novel do not venture back, due to memories akin to those voiced by Achebe:

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gone is the real essence of the North like Olanna in Half of a Yellow Sun experiences while visiting relatives and her former boyfriend, Mohammed, in Kano. There, the sand was fine, gray, and sun-seared, nothing like the clumpy red earth back home [igboland]; the trees were tame, unlike the bursting greenness that sprang up and cast shadows on the road to umunnachi [her paternal hometown]. Here, miles of flatland went on and on (37). Adichies literary emphasis of Igbo reluctance to leave the confines of their ethnic homeland after the Biafra War seems to counter early reports, such as those by John de St. Jorre, who in his Nigerian Civil War Notebook, contended that the igbo elite, plumb, even sleek, would often pitch up in Lagos in their own cars and shop at the Kingsway department store before looking for their old jobs (37). in his 1971 article, which appeared in Transition, St. Jorre claimed that these formerly fanatical Biafrans appeared to have adjusted themselves to the prewar situation with remarkable speed (37). The circumscribed world of Purple Hibiscus, like Achebes haunted war memories, contests this generalized opinion of the igbo elite. Olu Oguibe, an igbo who was caught in the midst of the war as a child, speaks of his feelings on the matter in a 1998 article, Lessons from the Killing Fields, in a manner congruent with both Adichie and Achebe. in retrospect, Oguibe says that he was raised under the blanket of silence that Nigeria draped over Biafra at her defeat, and that he grew up inside that silence believing in the idea of Nigeria that many easterners had originally fought for during independence from the British until it became increasingly apparent that he was surrounded by people who were not his own, people who, at a moments notice, trade the idea of unity for personal or sectarian gain. it is on this bloody history of a two-and-a-half-year secession war that is claimed to have caused over a million deaths from military action, disease and starvation (Nixon 473); a suppressed nostalgia for the North; and the effects of imperial and mission expansionism, that the Achike family in Purple Hibiscus is psychologically grounded before things [start] to fall apart (PH 3). Eugene and Beatrice, who have most likely experienced both Nigerian independence from the British and the Biafra War as young adults, are raising their two children as Oguibe was raisedunder a blanket of silence. They, as Oguibe, are Biafras children. The setting, Eugenes house, is a crucial Gothic element, and i wish to spend some time locating it within the Gothic tradition. As in a typical Gothic plot where the castle serves as the major locus, the Achike family house in Enugu is gloomily predominant (Botting 2). Kambili describes the house as spacious but suffocating (PH 7) in a standard Gothic metonymy of gloom and horror: the yard is wide enough to hold a hundred people dancing atilogu, spacious enough for each dancer to do the usual somersaults and land on the next dancers shoulder, but like the generic Gothic castle it is imbued with a sense of entrapmentthe compound walls, Kambili notes, are topped by coiled electric wires and were so high she could not see cars driving by on their street (PH 9). According to Botting, Gothic landscapes are desolate, suggestive of violence and menacing (2). The labyrinthine nature of these spaces, which are sometimes occupied and sometimes abandoned, is as well exemplified in the Achike family house in Abba. This four-story white house, with a spurting fountain in front (PH 55), has wide hotel-like passages, and is riddled with the impersonal smell of doors kept locked most of the year, of unused bathrooms and kitchens and

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toilets, of uninhabited rooms and two upper-level floors that have not been used for years (58). Alluding to the significance of such Gothic settings to the plot, Botting sees them as signaling the spatial and temporal separation of the past and its values from those of the present, and it is from the reappearance of figures long gone, in these spaces, that the Gothic pleasures of horror and terror emanate (PH 2). Further, the labyrinthine quality of the Gothic castle is assumed to mirror the fraught psyches of its inhabitants, and point to the genres concern with psychological and social disintegration (Botting 7). Eugene Achike and his family present an ideal case study for Bottings premise. The familys two castle-like households are domestic sites of contestation between the past and the present. As a Gothic setting on the igbo landscape and much of the rest of Africa, the Achike castle-like house is a progression from the wild sublime forest setting, like we find in Achebes Things Fall Apart. As Kambili describes it, this is a modern opulent space housing wealthy African elite. Preceding it on this Gothic landscape was the intermediary middle-class house, a medium-sized stone structure, usually with two or three bedrooms, housing a rising African middleclass mainly composed of teachers. We see one such setting through ugwus perspective in Half of a Yellow Sun:
ugwu [Odenigbos household servant from the village] had never seen a room so wide. Despite the brown sofas arranged in a semi-circle, the side tables between them, the shelves crammed with books, and the center table with a vase of red and white plastic flowers, the room still seemed to have too much space. [. . .] He looked up at the ceiling, so high up, so piercingly white. He closed his eyes and tried to reimagine this spacious room with the alien furniture, but he couldnt. He opened his eyes, overcome by a new wonder, and looked around to make sure it was all real. To think that he would sit on these sofas, polish this slipperysmooth floor, wash these gauzy curtains. (45)

ugwus counterpart in Purple Hibiscus is the longtime Achike housemaid, Sisi, who procures poison from her uncle, a powerful witch doctor (PH 290), and gives it to Beatrice. This is the poison Beatrice uses to eliminate her husband. Poisons, bad medicine, and witchcraft evoke terror, a powerful and emotive element of the horror story (Cuddon 399)the horror story itself being a literary form that derives from the Gothic novel (Cuddon 394). The horror story, Cuddon says, explores the limits of what people are capable of doing and experiencing [. . .]; all that lies on the dark side of the mind and the near side of barbarism; what lurks on and beyond the shifting frontiers of consciousness [. . .] and where, perhaps, there dwell[s] ultimate horrors or concepts of horror and terror (389). This notion of the horrific that is found in Purple Hibiscus is also explored in Half of a Yellow Sun. Here Odenigbos mother, for example, calls Olanna an abnormal woman and a witch who did not suck her mothers breasts, as if alluding to Olannas twin birth, which was once considered an evil phenomenon within igbo tradition. She is against the idea of Olannas marriage to her son and claims that she comes from a family of lazy beggars in umunnachi and that her father, formerly a tax-collector, amassed his wealth by stealing from hardworking people (HYS 9697). in defense of his mother, Odenigbo tells Olanna that she is merely an uneducated victim of their postcolonial world. He argues that she had no say in whether or not [she]

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wanted this new world and had not been given the tools to negotiate it (101). it is the ever superstitious ugwu, however, who seems to see beyond Odenigbos modern reasoning and feels that his mother is up to something evil, that perhaps she wants to tie up Olannas womb or cripple her or, most frightening of all, kill her (98). His worries are realized when he sees more than a hundred fat greenish flies by the kitchen sink, a sign of bad medicine from the dibia (215). it later emerges that Odenigbo, under a spell of his mothers making, impregnated Amala, the young village girl that she brings to his house. Amala bears a girl, Chiamaka. it is this child, nicknamed Baby, whom Odenigbo and Olannaunable to bear any children themselvesadopt as theirs. The clash between dibia medicine and the modern postcolonial world as exemplified in Adichies novels has its roots in the late nineteenth century when the two worlds came in contact for the first time in Igboland. While Odenigbo is right in claiming that the old world, such as that of the dibia, has not been given tools to negotiate the new world, so too is ugwu in his suspicion that this past is resentful of the new world and consistently raids or haunts it in a bid to reverse the status quo. Felix K. Ekechi in his paper on Roman Catholic missionary strategy in igboland says that the combined force of missionary evangelism and European colonial power dealt a considerable blow to the social status and prestige of nde dibia [medicine men] and that the dibias, in turn, exhibited relentless hostility toward Christian elements (225). Ekechi, drawing from M. M. Greens Ibo Village Affairs (1947), reveals that in times of sickness, death, or an unforeseen crisis, dibias were expected to make gw, (medicine) either for group protection or for individual cures and protection (224); the igbo, however, were drawn to European medicine particularly during the dysentery epidemic of 1890, which the local dibias were unable to stem (221). This, according to Ekechi, forced the igbo to recognize the potency of the white mans medicine (224). in such a manner, Christian missions challenged the influence of dibias, eroded some of their traditional roles in society, shrank their economic resources, and at times created outright disbelief in their supernatural powers (22425). It is the possible Gothic reappearance and influence of this Igbo past that Eugene Achike, in Purple Hibiscus, fights in his modern Igbo householda setting that, after the manner of the Gothic castle, represents possible desubjectification. Expounding on this central Gothic motif, David Punter and Glennis Byron in The Gothic posit that herein one may be subjected to a force that is utterly resistant to the individuals attempt to impose his or her own order (26162), as happens to Eugene. Despite Eugenes eventual demise, we cannot help but marvel at the Catholic fort he has erected against his igbo cultural past. The novels very structure is reflective of this. That form complements function towards this goal is discernable in Adichies decision to divide the novel into the following four sections: Breaking GodsPalm Sunday; Speaking with Our SpiritsBefore Palm Sunday; The Pieces of GodsAfter Palm Sunday; and A Different SilenceThe Present. Gods day of rest, the Sabbath or the Christian Sunday, is both a literal and metaphorical device serving as the novels structural linchpin. The metaphorical significance of the Sabbath can be found in various religious texts, including Aelred of Rievaulxs Speculum Caritatis. Aelred was a twelfthcentury Cistercian monk who noted that the Sabbath had no morning nor evening

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and that it stood outside Creation and belonged to the divine order alone. Linked to this was Aelreds idea of the connectedness of Sabbaths, each leading to the next as the soul rose ever higher, each Sabbath a stepping stone, as it were, to the Sabbath of Sabbaths, which brings with it the vision of God (Chevalier and Gheerbrant 81718). Seen in this light, the structure of Purple Hibiscus and the world that its characters inhabit acquire a deeply religious significance. The characters live in a cloistered Catholicism partly of Roman-colonial making and partly of Eugenes making, and they aspire to Aelreds idea of Sabbath of Sabbaths. The Achike family, for example, is practically monastic in regard to prayerthey say the rosary even while traveling (PH 54) and listen to Ave Maria on cassette (31). in addition, the children, Jaja and Kambili, are strapped with a rigorous academic schedule reflective of a Catholic work ethic that demands serious and constant effort (Ekechi 226) from its igbo converts. Kambili reveals that their schedules have meticulously drawn lines, in black ink, cut[ting] across each day, separating study from siesta, siesta from family time, family time from eating, eating from prayer, prayer from sleep (PH 2324). As the Holy Ghost Fathers argued in their early mission ideology, a life any less demanding would hardly distinguish them from pagans (qtd. in Ekechi 226)a label that the Holy Ghost Fathers generally associated with traditional igbo religion and, increasingly, to Protestantism as well. in this progressive Sabbath of the Achike family, Eugene looms as large as God. His almost omnipotent influence even extends to their local church, St. Agnes, where Father Benedict refers to him in the same context as the pope and Jesus. During his sermons, Kambili says, Father Benedict usually referred to the pope, Papa, and Jesusin that order. He used Papa to illustrate the gospels (PH 4). Eugene makes the biggest donations to Peters pence and St. Vincent de Paul; almost single-handedly funds St. Agnes in Enugu; is the publisher of the Standardthe only newspaper that dares speak the truth about a corrupt and poorly governed Nigeria; and is the recipient of a prestigious human rights award from Amnesty World (5). But for all its divine intentions, this Sabbath-like world is riddled with the remains of the empire in the form of British missionaries like Father Benedict whom Kambili notes still looked newhe would not tan, not even after the fierce heat of seven Nigerian harmattans. Father Benedict deems igbo unacceptable; it can never be the language in which the liturgy is said, and he insists upon a Latin recital of the Credo and Kyrie. When he does concede to the use of igbo, in the form of offertory songs, he calls the songs native [with] his straight-line lips turned down at the corners to form an inverted u (PH 4). Kambili reveals that Eugene acquiesces to Father Benedicts views of igbo language and even makes the point of speaking with a British accent when around white missionaries: 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 (46), Kambili says. From this we see that while the actual colonialists have seemingly left the postindependence scene, the language[s] of colonization have not. These languages have, instead, attained vehicular status as bureaucratic languages of the state and robbed many indigenous languages like igbo their cultural, religious, commercial and educational functions. Afigbo traces the dilemma of the Igbo language and culture to colonialism, Catholicism, and nationalism.

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Afigbo says that the colonial government did not and could not show enough interest in promoting the study of the language in view of the limited and selfish objectives of colonialism. it was not one of the aims of colonialism to preserve the cultural identity of subject peoples. [. . .] Hence there were powerful individuals and interests in colonial circles who felt that the igbo language should be allowed to die a natural death as this would promote the spread of English (384). The crisis of the Igbo language, Afigbo continues, was further exacerbated by the CatholicProtestant conflict in Igboland, a factor that was lacking in other parts of Nigeria like the yoruba territory, where the British-based protestant Church Missionary Society (CMS) chose yoruba as the language of instruction, and in the North where Christian missions were restricted while encouraging traditional Koranic education and [the use of] Hausa as the second language of administration (381). inevitably, there are those who argue that the CMS had hidden motives for this, like hindering their trainees from moving to English-speaking Government appointments and enterprises or the likelihood that they were white supremacists who wanted to deny Africans competence in English (Afigbo 379). In the end though, Afigbo notes, the Catholic approach was more popular: Bishop Shanahan, the premier missionary of the Catholic Mission in igboland, went all out to bring home to the people the overwhelming advantages of knowledge of the English language and therefore, by implication, that it was a waste of time and resources to attend Protestant schools (379). Shanahan argued that the principal impetus for their [Catholic] aggressive education policy was the desire to destroy the citadel of satan [sic] in the country, but records indicate that the Roman Catholics were actually deeply anxious to outdo the Protestants (Ekechi 257). Afigbo asserts that this down-to-earth, if also cynically materialistic, argument [. . .] carried more weight than whatever the C.M.S. authorities could present as the advantages of reading the Holy Writ in igbo (380). Presently, with this material-successoriented psychology few came to give any thought to proficiency and competence in igbo language since this would lead nobody anywhere. in fact any attempt to emphasize the teaching of igbo came to be looked upon as a satanic waste of time [and] an imperialist plot to delay the prompt arrival of the igbo nation (383). To avoid losing their converts, the CMS, which had up to about 1913 resisted a complete diet of English programs in their schools, was forced to give in (380), paving the way for what Afigbo calls an English deluge in Igboland (381). This is the Colonial-Romanist project that Father Benedict fosters and Eugene Achike embraces in Purple Hibiscus. The appearance of a young newly ordained reformist igbo priest, Father Amadi, reintroduces past anxieties and fears for people like Father Benedict and Eugene as they are against his reclamation of igbo language and song. Fr. Amadis Gothic nostalgia for a lost era and his intentions of preserving an older tradition set him in contestation with prevailing postcolonial values. invited to say Mass at St. Agnes, Father Amadi breaks into an igbo song halfway through his sermon: Bunie ya enu . . . , he sings. in response, Kambili notes, the congregation drew in a collective breath, some sighed, some had their mouths in a big O. They were used to Father Benedicts sparse sermons, to Father Benedicts pinch-your-nose monotone. Slowly they joined in. i watched Papa purse his lips. He looked sideways to see if Jaja and i were singing and nodded approvingly when he saw our sealed lips (PH 28).

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Following the sermon, Eugene, on his way to visit Father Benedict in the parish residence with his family like they always did after Mass, inadvertently launches an attack on Father Amadi: That young priest, singing in the sermon like a Godless leader of one of these Pentecostal churches that spring up everywhere like mushrooms. People like him bring trouble to the church. We must remember to pray for him (PH 29). in a single mouthful, Eugene, without really pointing to the real crux of the issue, which is the use of igbo language and song, tags Father Amadi as Godless, Pentecostal, and trouble. To eliminate the threat Father Amadi poses, he resorts to the old satanic (Afigbo 383) rhetoric that was used against the language during colonialization. Father Amadis threat, however, is not that easily done away with and despite Eugenes efforts, it lodges itself in Kambili and Jaja and can be said to contribute to their ensuing revolt. His threat is not only leveled against linguistic imperialism, but materialism as well, both of which Afigbo traces to colonialism and Roman Catholicism in igboland. Father Amadi, Kambili notices, did not say how beautiful our St. Agnes altar was [. . .] with its steps that glowed like polished ice blocks. Or that it was one of the best altars in Enugu, perhaps even in the whole of Nigeria. He did not suggest, as all the other visiting priests had, that Gods presence dwelled more in St. Agnes, that the iridescent saints on the floor-to-ceiling stainedglass windows stopped God from leaving (PH 28). By refusing to acknowledge St. Agness material opulence, Father Amadi undercuts the value placed on such possessions in the postcolonial igbo society of which Eugene is a leading member. Further, by not affirming that God lives in this space, he essentially undermines its sanctity. From this, one may deduce that Father Amadi is actually anti-Catholic, at least in regard to the brand of Catholicism introduced in igbolanda threepronged brand that mainly consisted of evangelization, education, and provision of health services, and a brand that many scholars have noted was specifically formulated to outdo the thirty years or so of a CMS head start in igboland. By the time the Catholic Holy Ghost Fathers arrived in Onitsha in 1885, the CMS was firmly established in the region, having started missions at Calabar in 1846 and in Onitsha in 1857 (Ekechi 218). unlike Father Amadi, Eugene seems to reject or ignore the calculated maneuvers and historical short comings of the Catholic Church in igboland. His failure to adequately examine these shortcomings and their consequences leaves him vulnerable to a seemingly vanquished igbo past: bad dibia medicine. His blind refusal to acknowledge any of these Catholic flaws is apparent from the very beginning, a situation that enhances the novels standing as a Gothic cautionary tale against absolutism. When the novel opens, for instance, Eugene confronts Jaja over his refusal to take communion and Jaja explains himself by saying that the priest, presumably Father Benedict, keeps touching his mouth and that nauseates him (PH 6). Eugene ignores this charge of licentiousness and threat to Jajas virtue and angrily flings the missal at him: this Kambili notes, is when things started to fall apart (3). A similar charge is also leveled against the Catholic Church in Adichies Half of a Yellow Sun. During the Biafran War, Kainene is instrumental in turning a former primary school into a refugee camp (HYS 347). Assisting with relief food distribution and other camp duties are two Holy Ghost priests, Father Marcel and

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Father Jude. When a small girl, urenwa, is discovered to be pregnant, it unravels that Father Marcel f***s most of them before he gives them the crayfish that Kainene slaves to get into the refugee camp and that Father Jude does nothing about it (398). in this traumatic igbo landscape of naked and starving war children with taut globes for bellies, buttocks and chests [that] were collapsed into folds of rumpled skin and spurts of black hair gone red from kwashiorkor (348), we find a Catholicism gone profane in a manner not unlike that of The Monk. Catholic priests such as Purple Hibiscuss Father Amadi, are depicted as breaking away from this Gothic perception of Catholicism as perverted. Father Amadi, who belongs to the order of The Fathers of the Blessed Way (unlike Fathers Benedict, Marcel, or Jude, who belong to the Holy Ghost Fathers), seems to advocate for a new direction or an amendment of Catholic evangelical strategy in igboland. He seems symbolically set up for this role from his seat at St. Peters Catholic Chaplaincy, university of Nigeria, Nsukka. His association with the name St. Peter connotes that he is the rock on which the new is to be founded. The location of Father Amadis chaplaincy and the university of Nigeria in Nsukka adds to this Gothic revivalist sentiment. To this day Nsukka, unlike most of Igboland, has remained a cultural stronghold. Afigbo, in Ropes of Sand, notes that The Nsukka areawith its aggressively alive Odo and Omabe masquerades, guilds of titled men swinging [. . .] happily to village meetings and markets (and almost to church), its child marriages and puberty ritesdoes not fit into the usual, picture of an igboland that lost its social and cultural identity with colonial conquest (351). This is something that Kambili and Jaja immediately sense of Nsukka and something of which their father, Eugene, is wary. While visiting St. Peters, Kambili notes that it did not have the huge candles or the ornate marble altar of St. Agnes. The women did not tie their scarves properly around their heads, to cover as much hair as possible. i watched them as they came up for offertory. Some just draped see-through black veils over their hair; others wore trousers, even jeans. Papa would be scandalized. A womans hair must be covered in the house of God, and a woman must not wear a mans clothes, especially in the house of God, he would say (PH 240). Even more surprising for Kambili, Father Amadi displays extreme concern for her grandfather, Papa-Nnukwu, with whom Eugene has cut ties and consistently refers to as a pagan and a heathen. Father Amadi, in contrast, inquires after Papa-Nnukwu as though [he] were his own relative (PH 16364). On her part, Aunt ifeoma offers Kambili the following explanation of Papa-Nnukwu: [She] said Papa-Nnukwu was not a heathen but a traditionalist, that sometimes what was different was just as good as what was familiar, that when PapaNnukwu did his itu-nzu, his declaration of innocence, in the morning, it was the same as our saying the rosary (166). Thus, the likes of Aunt ifeoma and Father Amadi affect what could be seen as a Gothic reformist change in Kambili and Jaja. And this is not only in regard to traditional igbo religion and customs, but igbo language as well. As Afigbo notes in Ropes of Sand, the main danger to the igbo language is the belief that proficiency in it cannot bring one material success or visible influence and power or reveal to one the wonderful world of the atom (383). Afigbo envisions a solution to the problem by proposing to replace that system with another which will inculcate a balanced vision of life as it really is or demonstrate

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that the man proficient in Igbo language and versed in Igbo culture can also attain to as much (383; emphasis in original). Aunt ifeoma, who teaches at the institute of African Studies at the university of Nsukka, and Father Amadi embody such characters for Kambili. While they are not as materially successful as Eugene Achike, they are visibly influential in their defiance of prevailing negative perceptions of igbo language and culture and are critical of government autocracy and failures. Indeed, it is defiant academics like Ifeoma who partly fueled the raiding of Nsukka during the Biafra War. Adichies novel perceives the university as a microcosm of the country (PH 224) and defiance within it is symbolic of defiance within the very state of Nigeria. it comes as no surprise, therefore, when in Half of a Yellow Sun Adichie writes that ugwu had heard that the Nigerian soldiers had promised to kill five percent of Nsukka academics (HYS 422)this percentile, by insinuation, being igbo. The two heroines of Half of a Yellow Sun, Olanna and Kainene, also embody this defiant Gothic prototype that goes against prevailing Igbo social norms. These sisters are fluent in both English and Igbo. Ugwu, upon meeting Olanna, remarks that her igbo words were softer than her English, and he was disappointed at how easily they came out. He wished she would stumble in her igbo; he had not expected English that perfect to sit beside equally perfect igbo (HYS 23). This Gothic-like reclamation of igbo language and culture, which the recent [Biafra] war had done so much to blast further (Afigbo 383), is underscored in Half of a Yellow Sun by the character of Richard Churchill. Richard learns igbo against all odds and is nearly fluent (136). Richards novel, intertextually fragmented and interwoven in the main narrative, is titled In the Time of Roped Pots. Apart from documenting the horrors of the Biafra War, the book celebrates igbo-ugwu art. Richard reveals that he is very interested in igbo-ukwu art and that he wants to make it a central part of the book: ive been utterly fascinated by the bronzes since I first read about themRichard tells Okeoma, a Nsukka academicThe details are stunning. its quite incredible that these people had perfected the complicated art of lost-wax casting during the time of the Viking raids. There is such marvelous complexity in the bronzes, just marvelous (HYS 111). in her article on the Treasures of Ancient Nigeria exhibit, Suzanne P. Blier notes that the earliest of the cire perdue castings were those from igbo-ukwu (ninth through tenth centuries). These castings, stylistic anachronisms in African art, include a number of vessels and staff heads decorated with a profusion of insects and interlace and many are without peer (234; emphasis in original). Her observations are very much in line with Richards and the Gothic cultural reclamation that Adichie seems intent on in both Half of a Yellow Sun and Purple Hibiscus. Afigbo notes that the cultural renaissance which from the beginning had been an essential aspect of African nationalism had by and large passed igboland by (383). Present-day writers like Adichie seem to have taken Afigbos observations to heart and made an obvious effort to readdress the matter. indeed, Adichie sets up this Gothic cultural reclamation project at the very heart of the conflict between Eugene Achike and his children. When a sickly Papa-Nnukwu arrives at Aunt ifeomas house in Nsukka so that he might get medical attention at the university hospital, Kambili and Jaja, who are visiting too, get to spend more time with him than is usually allowed by their father fifteen minutes each Christmas in Abba (PH 63) and with strict orders not to eat

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or drink anything given to them least desecrate their Christian tongue[s] with food sacrificed to idols (69). It is during this period that Kambilis cousin, Amaka, declares her intention to paint their grandfather on the verandah (169). Watching them, Kambili notes Amaka and Papa-Nnukwu understood each other, using the sparest words, and that she felt a longing for something that she knew she could never have (165). Admiring Amakas artistic skills, Papa-Nnukwu tells Kambili that her cousin paints well and that in the old days, she would have been chosen to decorate the shrines of [the] gods (164). From the very onset of the novel, Kambili confesses that she was prone to examining Papa-Nnukwu for signs of difference, of Godlessness and that even though she did not see any, she, like her father insisted, was sure they were there somewhere (63). in Nsukka, however, this opinion of Papa-Nnukwu as godless changes when Kambili sees him performing his itu-nzu. in this scene Kambili acknowledges that she was surprised and radically affected by the realization that her grandfather prayed for her own father with the same earnestness he prayed for himself and Aunt ifeoma (168). in PapaNnukwu, therefore, Eugene faces the real threat of his childrens Gothic devolution to the pagan stage he perceives himself to have escaped. indeed, Kambili acknowledges that Papa-Nnukwus death, which occurs soon after this scene, had overshadowed everything [and] pushed Papas face into a vague place (187). Eugene makes matters worse when he appears in Nsukka in favor of a Catholic burial and inquires if ifeoma had called for a priest to give Papa-Nnukwu extreme unction (188). ifeoma rejects the offer, insisting that Papa-Nnukwu would be buried according to Igbo tradition. It is during this conflict that Amaka offers Kambili the unfinished painting of Papa-Nnukwu as a memento. inevitably, this painting engenders the dramatic climax of the novel. When Kambili and Jaja return to Enugu with their father, he scalds their feet with hot water as punishment for sharing a house with a pagan and not informing him of it. Regardless of the terror that Eugene metes and the day long novenas he begins to say with Father Benedict as if in response to things gone badly on the family and business fronts (the government shuts down his factories in retaliation to anti-government rhetoric in his newspaper), Kambili and Jaja hold on to Papa-Nnukwus painting. When Eugene, eventually, discovers the painting he flies into a terrible rage and rips it apart. Kambili then reveals that perhaps that is what she and Jaja had wanted to happen without being aware of it, that perhaps they had all changed after Nsukkaeven Papaand things were destined to not be the same, to not be in their original order (PH 20809). With the painting now in shreds, Kambili realizes that it already represented something lost, something that she never had and would never have (210). in desperation, she rushes to the dashed pieces of the painting on the floor, as if in saving them she would be saving Papa-Nnukwu (210). it is then that Eugeneswearing against Godlessness, heathen worship and hellfirekicks her with the metal buckles on his slippers until she is unconscious and has to be admitted to hospital (21011). Eugene, who has hitherto, relied on a blanket of silence to keep his violent outbursts from leaking out, suddenly finds himself with an unprecedented challengethat of Father Amadi, who appears on the scene as Kambilis champion. in congruence with Gothic tradition, Father Amadi is cast as the Gothic lover disapproved of by the father figure, and as tradition demands, is fated to be separated from his love. This happens at the end of the novel when the church sends him to

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Germany. Before his departure, however, Father Amadi is instrumental in helping Kambili [and Jaja] break the blanket of silence over their lives and grasp life by the horns, so to speak. Father Amadi, in his charming, gregarious manner, instills in Kambili the notion that she can do anything she wants (PH 239). He is somewhat reminiscent of the dashing Father Ralph de Bricassart in Colleen McCulloughs The Thorn Birds. As Father Ralph draws little Meggie from Drogheda, an embodiment of Mary Carsons own particular brand of imperial malevolence (McCullough 51), so does Father Amadi draw Kambili from her silent and mute existence. He had a singers voice, Kambili says, a voice that had the same effect on my ears that Mama working Pears baby oil into my hair had on my scalp. i did not fully comprehend his English-laced igbo sentences at dinner [in Aunt ifeomas house] because my ears followed the sound and not the sense of his speech. [. . .] Father Amadi included Jaja and me in the conversation, asking us questions. i knew the questions were meant for both of us because he used the plural you, unu, rather than the singular, gi (PH 13536). To Kambili, Father Amadi seems to depart from Fr. Benedicts protocol-laced ways. unlike Father Benedict, whose interaction with his congregation seems very formal, Father Amadi, with skin of a fired-clay shade (PH 221), is informal, outgoing, and generally lives an uncloistered, antimonastic lifestyle. Arriving at Aunt ifeomas early one morning to bring her the petrol she needs to fetch a sickly Papa-Nnukwu from Abba, Kambili notes that he looked even more unpriestly than before, in khaki shorts that stopped just below his knees. He had not shaved, and in the clear morning sunlight, his stubble looked like tiny dots drawn on his jaw (150). Kambilis love for Father Amadi comes swiftly: i had seen [his] small Toyota hatchback only twice before, but i could point it out anywhere (PH 163), she says. Even in the priestly garb, his loping, comfortable gait pulled my eyes and held them (163). Father Amadi, Kambili reveals, is like blue wind, elusive (176) as he dashes up and down the football field, daring Kambili to use her good running legs, and provoking laughter in a Kambili who says that she was not sure she had ever heard herself laugh (17679). Conversely, Father Amadis love for Kambili is no secret, and it is common knowledge that she is his sweetheart in Aunt ifeomas household, which he visits frequently (PH 225). When Kambili is admitted in hospital, Father Amadi voices his intention of speaking to Father Benedict, who he hopes will pressure Eugene to put Kambili and Jaja in a boarding school and, consequently, out of harms way (269). Amaka, Kambilis cousin, tells her that Father Amadi was really worried during her hospitalization and it wasnt just priestly concern (219); he sounded like a person whose wife was sick (220). in this manner, Purple Hibiscus is imbued with an intoxicating element of Gothic romance. Father Amadi is cast as Kambilis true Gothic love and can hardly be viewed in the same light as the corrupting love of cloistered Catholicism as embodied in Mathew Lewiss Ambrosio or Father Marcel in Half of a Yellow Sun. Within the Gothic novel, the later end in desecration of feminine virtue, and in Ambrosios case, even death and bloodshed. With Father Amadi, it is different: their unconsummated love gives her grace, Kambili says, and they achieve such a spiritual union, such a higher love, that Obiora, Kambilis cousin, remarks on it. Kambili offers the reader a window into her heart:

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REsEaRch in afRican litER atuREs Amaka [her cousin] says that people love priests because they want to compete with God, they want God as a rival. But we are not rivals, God and i, we are simply sharing. i no longer wonder if i have a right to love Father Amadi; i simply go ahead and love him. i no longer wonder if the checks i have been writing to the Missionary Fathers of the Blessed Way are bribes to God; i just go ahead and write them. i no longer wonder if i chose St. Andrews church in Enugu as my new church because the priest there is a Blessed Way Missionary Father as Father Amadi is; i just go. (PH 303)

Such thoughts reveal that the hierarchy of power within Kambilis ultimate Sabbath at the end of the novel (the section labeled A Different SilenceThe Present) has changed: where God and other smaller or metaphorical gods, like her father and Fr. Benedict, formerly reigned supreme, they now no longer do so; where the priest is formerly a figure solely avowed to God, his loyaltiesas with Father Amadiare now split; where the apple of Gods eye and, hence, his congregations, is the priest with a British accent and white skin, the African priest with an Igbo accent and skin the color of fired clay, like Father Amadi, has taken his place; where God was to be found only in St. Agnes, Kambili now seeks him in St. Andrews. God, in Kambilis new Sabbath, not only shares his power, but has been decentralized from his elitist seat at St. Agnes to other churches as well. in this ascent from the old Sabbath to the new Sabbath, Kambili finds voice and agency. in Kambilis present, the god that was Eugene has been broken by the Gothic-like invasion of his past African heritage. But looking close at his relationship with his wife, Beatrice, we see that Eugene has also fallen prey to a deeper underlying and irreconcilable battle between his sexuality and Catholicism. in African societies, John M. Mbiti claims in African Religions and Philosophy, sex is not used for biological purposes alone. it has also religious and social uses. [. . .] There are African peoples among whom rituals are solemnly opened or concluded with actual or symbolic sexual intercourse between husband and wife or other officiating persons. This is like a solemn seal or signature, in which sex is used in and as a sacred action, as a sacrament signifying inward spiritual values (146). According to Mbiti, Marriage is, therefore, a sacred drama in which everybody is a religious participant, and no person may keep away from this dynamic scene of action (148). Alienated from his African heritage and traditions, which firmly situate sexuality within religious and social life, Eugene faces a peculiar psychological dilemma similar to that explained by Cyndy Hendershot in The Animal Within: Masculinity and the Gothic. Hendershot notes that sexuality is coded as a sign of the original sin within Christianity while within Darwinism it is coded as a sign of the animal origins of man because man copulates in a manner similar to animals (103). Just as Darwinism and Christianity converge in the tortured clergyman, Jennings, of J. S. Le Fanus tale Green Tea (1869), so they do in Eugene Achike. Jennings, who as part of his religious duties has been working on a book on pagan religion, notes that this particular subject matter is not good for the mindthe Christian mind. Jennings sees pagan religion and art as a degrading fascination and a sure nemesis for the Christian mind (qtd. in Hendershot 103). This degrading fascination, Hendershot explains, is the licentious nature of pagan religion and literature, and is likely to undermine a Christians chastity. Eugene, like Jennings, is afraid of this degradation, not only for himself, but for his

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offspring as well. in addition, he is unable to accept the implications of Darwinism: that the history of man is of a difficult and extensive family network which takes in barnacles as well as bears, an extended family which will never permit the aspiring climbermanquite to forget his lowly origins (Gillian Beer, qtd. in Hendershot 11819). Eugenes distortion lies in his inability to accept that both the human and the animal/primitive, as Henderson puts it, shade into each other (110), that there is the pagan in the Christian, even a saintly Christian as he, and the uncivilized in the civilized. To expose this peculiar imperial trauma in her father, Kambili enacts the Gothic trope of what Punter and Byron term as going down to the cellar (57) in a prolepsis examination of his relationship with her mother in the section titled Speaking with Our SpiritsBefore Palm Sunday. Beatrice as a Gothic character embodies the spectral presence of the mother [figure] representing the problems of femininity that the protagonist [Kambili] must confront to fully attain her own psychic individuation (Byron and Punter 280). Kambilis ghosting, as it were, reveals the profundity of Beatrices problems and the violence she endures in Eugenes hands:
I was in my room after lunch, reading James chapter five because I would talk about the biblical roots of the anointing of the sick during family time, when i heard the sounds. Swift, heavy thuds on my parents hand-carved bedroom door. i imagined the door had gotten stuck and Papa was trying to open it. if i imagined it hard enough, then it would be true. i sat down, closed my eyes, and started to count. Counting made it seem not that long, made it seem not that bad. Sometimes it was over before i even got to twenty. (PH 3233)

The full extent of Eugenes physical violation of Beatrice manifests itself in the number of miscarriages she has had. While we could read Eugenes behavior as an act merely aimed at subjugating his wifes body and keeping his family under iron-clad patriarchal control, it goes beyond that. His violent relation to Beatrice not only reveals a general obscured fear of sexuality as previously explained, but of heterosexuality as well. Hendershot claims that heterosexuality is a problematic coded with epistemological issues of nature and man [. . .] because in the sexual act feminine nature may master them rather than vice versa, [and] this fear is redoubled when read within the context of Darwinian science [for] it threatens to remind the male subject of his helplessness in the face of a feminine nature who created him through natural selection and who, in the popular imagination at least, holds the power to eliminate him and his species through further processes (10304). using Hendershots premise, one may deduce that Eugene seeks to destroy the product of his weakness (the sexual act with Beatrice) in order to regain his sexual mastery over her and to also take over her feminine power of natural selection. As such, he eliminates her unborn, devolution-prone species because they are unlikely to stick to the straight and narrow and might, like Kambili and Jaja already have, seek a hybridization path with his conceived notion of paganism. Thus when Beatrice poisons Eugene, she is not only doing so to protect herself from physical harm or to escape entrapment, but, in a way, to resist control over her feminine nature and protect her endangered offspring. Her act also, figuratively, allows her female gothic narrative, sandwiched between Eugenes and Kambilis, to be heard.

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Despite its inevitability, the apocalyptic breaking of the god that is Eugene comes as a surprise to Kambili. Her fathers death, she explains, is unbelievable: i had never considered the possibility that Papa would die, that Papa could die. [. . .] He had seemed immortal (PH 287). Despite this declaration, Kambili is nonetheless consciously aware of Eugenes waning power. According to Botting, a character like Eugene could serve in this context as a Gothic trope in the manner of the cursed wanderer or outcast. Such tropes, within the Gothic tradition, are depicted as being alienated from their language and culture and only free to die if other people take their place and cursed conditions (Botting 107). using Bottings paradigm, we see that Eugene is metaphorically free to die because Jaja is ready to take his place and exchange his cursed conditiona product of everyday life and the corruption of social and religious institutions (Botting 107)for his own suffering. Jajas sacrificial role is anticipated at the beginning of the novel when he refuses Father Benedicts communion and Eugene throws the missal at him. From this moment on, Jaja systematically challenges the status quo, as shown in the scene when he refuses to offer compliments for a bottle of cashew juice from his fathers factory (PH 1314). This turn of events is particularly significant when one considers the terror Eugene has previously wielded over Jaja. When he was ten, Kambili reveals, he had missed two questions on his catechism test and was not named the best in his First Holy Communion class. Papa took him upstairs and locked the door. Jaja, in tears, came out supporting his left hand with his right, and Papa drove him to St. Agnes hospital (145). This moment is etched on Jajas body in the form of his deformed finger, the very finger he runs over Papa-Nnukwus painting. The Nsukka experience is crucial because it transforms and empowers Jaja; while there, Kambili notes, his shoulders seemed broader, and she wonders if it was possible for a teenagers shoulders to broaden in a week (PH 154). As with Kambili, Nsukka enables Jaja to break the blanket of silence, embrace defiance, and initiate a cultural reclamation of his igbo roots. it is hardly surprising, therefore, when Jaja, at the end of novel, identifies himself as his fathers murderer in order to protect his mother. Jajas sacrifice has a twofold significance: he metaphorically frees his father by taking his place in the family and literally frees his mother by taking her place in jail. When Kambili visits Jaja in prison, she knows that he is her hero as well: i want to hold his hand, but i know he will shake it free. His eyes are too full of guilt to really see me, to see his reflection in my eyes, the reflection of my hero, the brother who tried always to protect me the best he could. He will never think that he did enough, and he will never understand that i do not think he should have done more (PH 305). As siblings united under Eugenes monstrosity and excesses, Kambili and Jaja are somewhat reminiscent of Olanna and Kainene who, in turn, are united by the monstrosity of the Biafra War. As Jajas imprisonment is unbearable for Kambili, so is Kainenes disappearance unbearable for Olanna. As the novel closes, Olanna consults a dibia, who instructs her to throw a copy of Kainenes photo into the River Niger and walk around Kainenes house in Orlu three times so that she may come back home. Even though Kainene does not appear, Olanna is convinced that

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she shall come back again and that they shall reincarnate (HYS 433). Olanna, in tears, declares, Uwa m, uwa ozo. When i come back in my next life, Kainene will be my sister (433). This desire is seemingly fulfilled in the subsequent world of Purple Hibiscus, where much of Olanna is embodied in Kambili and much of the boyish, androgynous Kainene is embodied in Jaja. This, of course, is a peculiar situation since Purple Hibiscus was written after Half of a Yellow Sun. in real time, though, this makes sense since the sixties world of Half of a Yellow Sun predates that of Purple Hibiscus. This notion of reincarnation is no stranger to the Gothic tradition, where ghosts frequently return [. . .] to continue alongside loved ones (Wisker 165). However, as Adichie suggests in Olannas consultation with the dibia, reincarnation has its origins as well in African traditions and culture. According to Mbiti, Belief in reincarnation is reported among many African societies. This is, however, partial reincarnation in the sense that only some human features or characteristics of the living/dead are said to be reborn in some children [. . .] and without regard to the sex of the living/dead (164). The twins, Olanna and Kainene, and the siblings, Kambili and Jaja, seem reunited under this peculiar Gothic phenomenon. Further, this intergenerational bond seems inextricably linked to Nsukka, with its experimental purple hibiscus growing in Aunt Ifeomas yard. Purple hibiscus signifies the state of Kambili and Jajas present, and, inadvertently, that of Olanna and Kainenes future. This purple hibiscus is contrasted with the startling red hibiscus of the past (PH16). Bright red is symbolically associated with the male and a vast irresistible strength (Chevalier and Gheerbrant 1792 and 794). The emergence of purple hibiscus in a formerly startling red space speaks to the presence of a new balance of powera purple hibiscus that is fragrant with the undertones of freedom, [. . .] a freedom to be, to do (PH 16). Juxtaposed against the palms of Palm Sunday [which not only] prefigure Christs resurrection after the tragedy of Calvary (Chevalier and Gheerbrant 734) but also reestablish his power, this experimental purple hibiscus prefigures the eventual triumph of Kambili and Jaja on the haunted Igbo landscape, which is perpetually threatened by the scepter of the past. in this respect, Adichies two novels pay homage to the silent children of Biafra. in addition, they reflect the persistence of a cluster of cultural anxieties to which Gothic writing [continues] to respond (Riquelme, qtd. in Davison 136). Their existence, however, goes beyond that of mere Gothic texts: they embody that curious new life which emerges from the need to assert continuity where the lessons of conventional history and geography would claim all continuity has been broken by the imperial trauma (Punter and Byron 5758). One might even conclude that they are proof of Afigbos argument that colonial rule and the Biafra War transformed Igbo society, but they did not destroy igbo identity or cultural soul (283), because this reader departs Adichies Gothic writing in Half of a Yellow Sun and Purple Hibiscus with a heightened sense of cultural identity.

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Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. New york: Fawcett Crest, 1959. . interview with Rajar Neogy. On Biafra. Transition 75/76, The Anniversary issue: Selections from Transition, 19611976 (1997): 22231. Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. Purple Hibiscus. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2003. . Half of a Yellow Sun. New york: Knopf, 2006. Afigbo, Adiele Eberechukwu. Ropes of Sand: Studies in Igbo History and Culture. eHRAF Collection of Ethnography 38. Ann Arbor: u of Michigan Library, 2002. Beti, Mongo. The Poor Christ of Bomba. Trans. Gerald Moore. African Writers Series. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1971. Blakemore, Steven. Mathew Lewiss Black Mass: Sexual, Religious inversion in The Monk. Studies in the Novel 30:4 (1998): 52136. Blier, Suzanne Preston. Treasures of Ancient Nigeria. Art Journal, Earthworks: Past and Present 43:2 (1982): 23446. Botting, Fred. Gothic. London: Routledge, 1996. Chevalier, Jean and Alain Gheerbrant. The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols. Trans. John Buchanan-Brown. London: Penguin, 1994. Cudon, J. A. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms & Literary Theory. London: Penguin, 1998. Davison, Carol Margaret. Burning Down the Masters (Prison)-House: Revolutions and Revelation in Colonial and Postcolonial Female Gothic. The Empire and the Gothic: The Politics of Genre. Ed. Andrew Smith and William Hughes. New york: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Ekechi, Felix K. The Holy Ghost Fathers in Eastern Nigeria, 18851920: Observations on Missionary Strategy. African Studies Review 15:2 (1972): 21739. Head, Bessie. A Question of Power. London: Heinemann Educational, 1974. Heiland, Donna. introduction. Gothic and Gender: An Introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004. Hendershot, Cyndy. The Animal Within: Masculinity and the Gothic. Ann Arbor: u of Michigan P, 2001. Mbiti, John S. African Religions and Philosophy. London: Heinemann, 1969. McCullough, Colleen. The Thorn Birds. New york: Harper Row, 1977. Nixon, Charles R. Self Determination: The Nigeria/Biafra Case. World Politics 24:4 (1972): 47397. Oguibe, Olu. Lessons from the Killing Fields. Transition 77 (1998): 8699. Punter, David, and Glennis Byron. The Gothic. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. St. Jorre, John de. Nigerian Civil War Notebook. Transition 38 (1971): 3641. Wisker, Gina. Horror Fiction: An Introduction. New york: Continuum, 2005.

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