Wisdom IN Literature: Purple Hibiscus and a Growth-Oriented Faith

[This series explores the way some of my favourite novels engage with spiritual things. As much as I will try to avoid discussing major plot points, I will be using quotes from the novels and be discussing how they fit generally into the story. So please take this as a spoiler warning.]

Purple Hibiscus, first published in 2003, was a breakout sensation for Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. I read it in January 2018 and it inspired one of my first posts here on the blog, about the nature of spiritual growth. I thought I’d revisit the book, and that post, for my first post in this new series, Wisdom in Literature. While the book is a coming of age story about a young woman named Kambili, it is also a coming of age story for Nigeria itself, talking openly about its struggles in learning to govern itself well again after its Indigenous power and governance systems were destroyed by colonialism. Thus, maturation is at the book’s heart.

Kambili is the teenage daughter of a wealthy pillar of her region’s Roman Catholic Community. Outside the home, her father is generous and virtuous, personally ensuring hundreds of people are fed and educated. And yet, despite this outward commitment to lifting people up, inside the home, he is a complete tyrant, unyielding, demanding, and fostering continued dependence in his wife and children. Thus, he is shown to embody the same characteristics as both Nigeria’s British colonizers and its current (in the timeline of the book) military government.

Kambili’s life at home stands in contrast to that she finds on a visit to the home of her Aunty Ifeoma, which is filled with laughter, affection, and open debate. Kambili isn’t sure what to make of this until she sees Ifeoma’s charismatic young priest coaching boys in the high jump and slowly raising the bar when they aren’t looking. In this moment, Kambili has an epiphany:

It was what Aunty Ifeoma did to my cousins, I realized then, setting higher and higher jumps for them in the way she talked to them, in what she expected of them. She did it all the time believing they would scale the rod. And they did. It was different for [my brother] Jaja and me. We did not scale the rod because we believed we could, we scaled it because we were terrified that we couldn’t.

I still like what I wrote about this back in 2018, so I’ll repeat it here (links added since I’ve written quite a bit on these themes over the years!):

Kambili and her brother Jaja are well behaved and at the top of their classes academically; they know how to carry themselves in church and to do what is expected of them. They certainly know never to speak of out of turn and to honour their father without question or complaint. But they are also completely helpless and immature. Their cousins, on the other hand, are loud and obnoxious and need to be called out by their mother for being disrespectful. They openly challenge their mother, each other, and their priest. But they are capable. And, unlike Jaja and Kambili, they laugh.

This struck me as fantastic description of the difference between a religious outlook that promotes growth and maturity and one that demands submission to a system of authority. The Christianity of Kambili’s father is rigid, austere, serious, closed, authoritarian, external, and overly simple. By contrast, the Christianity of Aunty Ifeoma is agile, rich, lighthearted, open, questioning, internal, and receptive of complexity. I couldn’t help but be reminded of what Wilkie Au and Noreen Cannon Au write in their tremendous book The Discerning Heart, about eight movements of genuine growth: the movement away from facades; the movement away from ‘shoulds’; the movement away from conformity for the sake of acceptance; the movement away from people-pleasing; the movement toward openness; the movement towards trust in oneself; the movement toward trust in God’s faithfulness; and the movement toward accountability. In all of these movements, growth calls us to move away from the kind of religion of Kambili’s father and toward that of Aunty Ifeoma. Really, this growth calls us to a more genuine life of faith, because faith can only exist in the presence of vulnerability, vulnerability in the face of uncertainty, complexity, and mystery.

This is religion that works, religion that acts, to use Ken Wilber’s metaphor, as a conveyor belt, pushing us forward into more growth and greater maturity. As I hope should come as no surprise, this is also the kind of religion the New Testament call us to embody. My favorite passage about this is found in Ephesians 4, where Paul says that Christ gives us gifts “for building up the body of Christ [that is, the church], until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ.” This bears repeating: the goal of the Christian life is to become mature (literally, “a complete person”), and to grow into “the measure of the full stature of Christ” himself. Paul goes on: “We must no longer be children … but speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ.” And so, let us keep on growing up. Let us keep on moving: moving away from facades, from ‘shoulds’, from conformity, and from people-pleasing, and towards openness, trust in oneself and in God, and accountability. This is to say, let us move toward faith, trusting that God is cheering us on, quietly raising the bar for us and knowing that we will clear it.

Adichie brings this same theme out in her reflection on colonialism and militarism, writing:

There are people … who think that we cannot rule ourselves because the few times we tried, we failed, as if all the others who rule themselves today got it right the first time. It is like telling a crawling baby who tries to walk, and then falls back on his buttocks, to stay there. As if the adults walking past him did not all crawl, once.

Still — and shockingly, increasingly — today we see a similar mentality within much of Christianity, people who think raising good Christian children means sheltering them from the complex realities of the world and mistaking obedience for righteousness and difference for disobedience. But, as Aunty Ifeoma tells Kambili, “Being defiant can be a good thing sometimes… it is not a bad thing when it is used right.” Again the whole point of the life of faith is not blind obedience, but to grow up into the full stature of Christ: to become mature. And the more we become like Christ, paradoxically, the more we become truly ourselves in all our uniqueness, and the more we fulfill our common human vocation to bear the image and likeness of God in the world.

While Purple Hibiscus could never be called a ‘Christian book’, it rightly understands that any Christianity that is authoritarian and controlling, any Christianity that would keep anyone small, is a distortion of the faith, and that the true life of faith always calls us to grow up and bring our whole, mature, self to the world.