Marxism In Purple Hibiscus

On reading Chimanande Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus (2003), I stood still at Papa Nnukwu’s utterance: “But you are a woman. You do not count” (83), and ponder at patriarchy’s unending under-estimation of the woman. Papa Nnukwu’s voice entangles with Aunty Ifeoma’s hearing and she retorts “Eh? So I don’t count? Has Eugene ever asked about your aching leg? (83). One would ask Papa Nnukwu when last did Eugene visit you or respond to your greetings in spite of his being at Abba town with you? Has he not warned you never to step your feet within the boundaries of his home? Papa Nnukwu’s echoes represent the reverberations of patriarchal past, a trans-historical phenomenon prior to, or deeper than other sources of oppressions. Gayle Rubin

For Engels, the patriarchal family emerged with the development of agriculture, where the males began to develop private property in animals, tools, and land, and attempted to control more of the surplus. In order to "ensure the legitimacy of their heirs" (31), and to control women 's sexuality, men established dominance within the household and society, and established patrilineal lines of inheritance. This according to Engels results in the "world historical defeat of the female sex … and women were reduced to servitude and instruments for the production of children” (31), actions and thought patterns which feminists seek to correct. In spite of Papa Nnukwu’s deep seated hurt at Eugene contempt of him in his long years, his abstracted mind still privileges the ‘patrilineal linage’ of son/father relationship over

The central character Kambili Achike, a fifteen year-old girl who unwittingly dots on her time-bomb father Eugene Achike otherwise called Papa. Papa is a fanatically staunch Catholic with a many-sided personality that can only be expressed in a chain of oppositions: an affluent businessman, a philanthropist to the churches and a stooge to the white Priest Rev. Father Benedict, but a tyrant to his family members; he disdains and neglects his father Papa Nnukwu for his “heathen” religious inclinations and also offers scant or no help to his only sister Aunty Ifeoma, a widow with three children, and a lecturer at the University of Nigeria Nsukka, presently without pay in several months, because long strike action embarked upon by the students. Eugene speaks up against the Nigerian military dictatorship with its attendant arbitrary arrests, detentions, extra-judicial killings and other vices in his “Standard Newspaper” yet he is a despot at home: he reduces his wife Beatrice (Mama) to a domestic slave and handles his children; Kambili and her brother Jaja by hand, by frequently brutalizing them physically, spiritually and psychologically, thereby viciously imposing his extremist religious obsessions on them. He organizes his family on an unbending time-table basis thus placing the household perpetual gruesome