Countries of the mind: Space-time chronotopes in Adichie's Purple Hibiscus

In foregrounding the literary chronotopes of space and time, this essay examines the place of Nsukka in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus as a significant toponym of meaning. As part of the narrative cartography of meaning informed by authorial nostalgia for childhood, the material cultures that inform postcolonial migrant writing are depicted via the attention paid to the topoi of compounds, houses, furniture, and other material objects that define a sense of (non)belonging. In Purple Hibiscus, the character of the teenage narrator Kambili is defined by a precocious attention to her environment, which is constructed through the intersection of the axes of space and time, represented by the trajectories of movement between Enugu, home as a "gothic topography," and Nsukka, the place of dialogue, "polyvocal speech," and a liberating topography. Kambili's idea and emerging experience of freedom is negotiated through the contrasting of the two topographies of Enugu and Nsukka - places that provide layers of meaning from which she is able to forge a composite self. Simultaneously, Kambili's narrative is informed by an authorial diasporic consciousness reflected in Adichie's actual early years spent at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. The literary Nsukka becomes an aesthetic, a "country of the mind," in Adichie's novel, in which the images, figures, and memories of the protagonist's childhood form the substrata of textual meaning.

Duke Scholars

Author Christopher Ernest Ouma English