Father Benedict Omelora Sparknotes

Father Benedict brought the White Man’s practices along when Africa was colonized and carries out his masses exactly as indicated by European societies. He had “changed things in the parish, such as insisting that the Credo and kyrie be presented in just Latin; Igbo was not acceptable." Although he “allowed offertory songs in Igbo,” he calls them “native” and “his straight-line lips turned down at the corners to form an inverted U” whenever he mentioned the word. This structures an illustration of how the colonizers executed European societies on the colonized country through such mediums as religion and disseminated ideologies that subdued the presence of the native culture.

Papa looks down on the local traditions and calls believers of

“During Christmas, he fetes the whole village of Abba but gives only a paltry sum of money to his father (because he is a heathen who wouldn’t leave his gods to serve the Whiteman's God). So hard-hearted is Papa that when his father died he refused to attend the funeral and only gave money to his sister, Ifeoma, to organise the funeral, yet his respects transcend reverends and Igwes.” This suggests an attempt to portray his religiosity and beliefs, which are products of colonial rule, in a more balanced light that is not something purely negative. Papa is a character beloved in his community but estranged from his own father and traditional African culture. This seems to be where Adichie inserts her expositions and evoke questions again; showing the impact of colonization, its influences and its consequential effects, especially highlighted here through notions of identity. More specifically, she presents notions of an estrangement from one’s origins, and by extension, one’s identity.

With the binaries present in Papa’s characterization and abundant ironic displays of contraries between what happens on the surface and what really goes on inside, Papa embodies the wave of fundamentalism that pervaded Nigeria and carries a critique of how it corrupts faith and notions of one’s

They are shown to blur the lines of identity and cause a sort of identity crisis. The human condition isn’t merely divided by clear-cut lines anymore because they create an ambiguous space in-between for some children as they fall into a middle-space of colonizer and colonized. Kambili is not accepted by her peers, outcast and misunderstood by her classmates as arrogant and snobbish even though she is really just shy. Even her cousin thinks the same way. What makes things worse is how she is not like the typical African girl of her age: she does not indulge in “common activities” like listening to pop music, etc. The natives’ impression of her is one associated with the superior race through her father’s apparent superior status. She therefore grows up in an environment that attempts to associate itself with superiority. However, she is in fact just a native African. As a growing child, she suffers from a confusing and frustrating inability to grasp at a stable identity.

This is complicated through her anxiety to relate back to her tradition instead of being taken over by colonial language and their associated. Again, there is a sense of the search for her roots.

What really complicates the narrator’s stand and gives readers a heightened sense of oppression, is when such displacement is confrontation with an additional sense of helplessness while facing inherent conditions of a conspicuous