Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I believe the purpose in Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was to unveil mass societal and interpersonal relationship dilemmas. The Author shows the growth and movement in the characters and plot through the sustaining amount of drama, tension, conflict, and other forms of resolution. For Kambili, the novel shows the reader her journey into adulthood and in turn, how she finds herself and her voice. The Author also shows a great deal of oppression, from inside Kambili’s family to in the outside world around them. Through showing the reader the struggles that and her family went through from their father/husband, the Author also shows collisions between cultures: rich to poor, different forms of spirituality and religions, and even education. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, in my opinion, was very successful in making all of this happen and also understood. In the beginning stages of my creative pieces I had struggled with possessing and maintaining a strong and meaningful purpose. In Shattering Temptations, this was more painfully true. However, I was able to fix it after the piece being work shopped in class. In the end though, I was able to find its purpose; to show the struggles that existed inside the mind of someone who was unstable and mentally abusive to themselves to the point of suicide and other physical self-harm. I feel like I showed this in very successful ways.

Adichie has the efficacy to use all of the techniques such as tone, word selection, and sentence structure to establish style and to even make it grow on the readers. For me, the used style was one of the things that impacted me. I am now more aware of those things and actively look for them in my writing. These elements that Adichie uses that also contri...

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...ectively in my stories. I feel that I could do better to utilize the tool to make my stories that much better and to reach even deeper.

I found the events that took place challenging. It was not that I could not understand, but that the content was difficult to swallow. Prior to reading this novel, I had never before thought of this kind of oppression in any context other than what was given to me in the news. I of course new of this kind of abuse from simple history books and in the news, but it didn’t have any “life”. This book brought “life” to an abusive and oppressive situation. It became very personal to me as the reader as I read through it. This book strongly impacted me, and me relook and rethink parts of our worlds history and to try and imagine the unimaginable.

Works Cited

Adichie, C. N. (2003). Purple Hibiscus . New York: Workman Publishing.