motivated domestic violence, and the narrative draws a parallel between the violent father figure and authoritarian military rule. As kambili’s family begins to resist the patriarch, a similar parallel develops between the growing resistances to violent authority on a national scale. Purple Hibiscus’s opening chapter sets the context for the story by describing the bourgeois furnishings of the home, such as the mother’s porcelain ballet dancer figurines and the “gold-framed family photo”(3), and by contrasting these idyllic elements to the threat of paternal violence and the stressing atmosphere of silence that regins at home. The novel’s father figure, called Eugene, or simply Papa for his children, is a profoundly complex character:
…show more content…
There is a scene in which the father pours boiling water on kambili’s feet and later explains his actions by telling how he had to go through a similar “treatment” in his youth at the missionary school after having “committed a sin against his own body” (196). Ironically enough, the man who is aghast at the idea that military men are torturing the editor of the standard “they put out cigarettes on his back’, papa said, shaking his head. ‘They put out so many cigarettes on his back” (42) does not refrain from justifying the domestic torture he inflicts on his family members. The father remains the most contradictory and, in a way, inscrutable figure of the whole novel. In the words of kambili: “there were stories in his eyes that I would never know” (42). By constructing the father figure in such complex terms, the narrative refuses to portray him as purely evil. The understanding finds its articulation in kambili’s words: “people have problems, people make mistakes”(251). Representing papa in this way draws attention not only to the authoritaria n, hyper-masculine side of the father figure but also to what Gikandi calls the fragility of
There is a scene in which the father pours boiling water on kambili’s feet and later explains his actions by telling how he had to go through a similar “treatment” in his youth at the missionary school after having “committed a sin against his own body” (196). Ironically enough, the man who is aghast at the idea that military men are torturing the editor of the standard “they put out cigarettes on his back’, papa said, shaking his head. ‘They put out so many cigarettes on his back” (42) does not refrain from justifying the domestic torture he inflicts on his family members. The father remains the most contradictory and, in a way, inscrutable figure of the whole novel. In the words of kambili: “there were stories in his eyes that I would never know” (42). By constructing the father figure in such complex terms, the narrative refuses to portray him as purely evil. The understanding finds its articulation in kambili’s words: “people have problems, people make mistakes”(251). Representing papa in this way draws attention not only to the authoritaria n, hyper-masculine side of the father figure but also to what Gikandi calls the fragility of