Purple Hibiscus

"There are people, she once wrote, 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."

"We did that often, asking each other questions whose answers we already knew. Perhaps it was so that we would not ask the other questions, the ones whose answers we did not want to know."

"Being defiant can be a good thing sometimes," Aunty Ifeoma said. "Defiance is like marijuana - it is not a bad thing when it is used right."

"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 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."

"People have crushes on priests all the time, you know. It’s exciting to have to deal with God as a rival"

"...he did not want me to seek the whys, because there are some things that happen for which we can formulate no whys, for which whys simply do not exist and, perhaps, are not necessary."

"I was stained by failure"

"She seemed so happy, so at peace, and I wondered how anybody around me could feel that way when liquid fire was raging inside me, when fear was mingling with hope and clutching itself around my ankles."

"There was a helplessness to his joy, the same kind of helplessness as in that woman’s despair"

"Eugene has to stop doing God's job. God is big enough to do his own job. If God will judge our father for choosing to follow the way of our ancestors, then let God do the judging, not Eugene."

"Sometimes life begins when the marriage ends"

"To call him humble was to make rudeness normal. Besides, humility had always seemed to him a specious thing, invented for the comfort of others; you were praised for humility by people because you did not make them feel any more lacking than they already did. It was honesty that he valued; he had always wished himself to be truly honest, and always feared that he was not"

"I cannot control even the dreams that I have made"

"One day I said to them, Where is the God you worship? They said he was like Chukwu, that he was in the sky. I asked then, Who is the person that was killed, the person that hangs on the wood outside the mission? They said he was the son, but that the son and the father are equal. It was then that I knew that the white man was mad. The father and son are equal? Tufia! Do you not see?"

"Mama had greeted him the traditional way that women were supposed to, bending low and offering him her back so that he would pat it with his fan made of the soft, straw-colored tail of an animal. Back home that night, Papa told Mama that it was sinful. You did not bow to another human being. It was an ungodly tradition, bowing to an Igwe. So, a few days later, when we went to see the bishop at Awka, I did not kneel to kiss his ring. I wanted to make Papa proud. But Papa yanked my ear in the car and said I did not have the spirit of discernment: the bishop was a man of God; the Igwe was merely a traditional ruler"

"His letters dwell on me. I carry them around because they are long and detailed, because they remind me of my worthiness, because they tug at my feelings. Some months ago, he wrote that he did not want me to seek the whys, because there are some things that happen for which we can formulate no whys, for which whys simply do not exist and, perhaps, are not necessary. He did not mention Papa—he hardly mentions Papa in his letters—but I knew what he meant, I understood that he was stirring what I was afraid to stir myself."

"Things started to fall apart when my brother, Jaja, did not go to communion and Papa flung his heavy missal across the room and broke the figurines on the étagère."

"I meant to say I am sorry that Papa broke your figurines, but the words that came out were, ‘I’m sorry your figurines broke, Mama.’"

"Imagine what the Standard would be if we were all quiet.’"

"It was a joke. Ade Coker was laughing; so was his wife, Yewande. But Papa did not laugh. Jaja and I turned and went back upstairs, silently."

"I looked at Jaja and wondered if the dimness in his eyes was shame. I suddenly wished, for him, that he had done the ima mmuo, the initiation into the spirit world. I knew very little about it; women were not supposed to know anything at all, since it was the first step toward the initiation to manhood. But Jaja once told me that he heard that boys were flogged and made to bathe in the presence of a taunting crowd. The only time Papa had talked about the ima mmuo was to say that the Christians who let their sons do it were confused, that they would end up in hellfire."

"I thought the Igwe was supposed to stay at his place and receive guests. I didn’t know he visits people’s homes,’ Amaka said, as we went downstairs. ‘I guess that’s because your father is a Big Man.’"

"When she made a U-turn and went back the way we had come, I let my mind drift, imagining God laying out the hills of Nsukka with his wide white hands, crescent-moon shadows underneath his nails just like Father Benedict’s."

"We will take Jaja to Nsukka first, and then we’ll go to America to visit Aunty Ifeoma,’ I said. ‘We’ll plant new orange trees in Abba when we come back, and Jaja will plant purple hibiscus, too, and I’ll plant ixora so we can suck the juices of the flowers.’ I am laughing. I reach out and place my arm around Mama’s shoulder and she leans toward me and smiles.Above, clouds like dyed cotton wool hang low, so low I feel I can reach out and squeeze the moisture from them. The new rains will come down soon."

"Of course God does. Look at what He did to his faithful servant Job, even to His own Son. But have you ever wondered why? Why did He have to murder his own son so we would be saved? Why didn’t he just go ahead and save us?'"

"Kambili is right,’ she said. ‘Something from God was happening there.’"

"That night when I bathed, with a bucket half full of rainwater, I did not scrub my left hand, the hand that Father Amadi had held gently to slide the flower off my finger. I did not heat the water, either, because I was afraid that the heating coil would make the rainwater lose the scent of the sky. I sang as I bathed. There were more earthworms in the bathtub, and I left them alone, watching the water carry them and send them down the drain."

"She picked up an enterprising snail that was crawling out of the open basket. She threw it back in and muttered, ‘God take power from the devil.’ I wondered if it was the same snail, crawling out, being thrown back in, and then crawling out again. Determined. I wanted to buy the whole basket and set that one snail free."

"Rain splashed across the floor of the veranda, even though the sun blazed and I had to narrow my eyes to look out the door of Aunty Ifeoma’s living room. Mama used to tell Jaja and me that God was undecided about what to send, rain or sun. We would sit in our rooms and look out at the raindrops glinting with sunlight, waiting for God to decide."

"This cannot go on, nwunye m,’ Aunty Ifeoma said. ‘When a house is on fire, you run out before the roof collapses on your head.’"

"Morality, as well as the sense of taste, is relative.’"

"Things started to fall apart at home when my brother, Jaja, did not go to communion."

"I knew that when the tea burned my tongue, it burned Papa's love into me."

"The old silence had broken and left us with the sharp pieces."

"We did not scale the rod because we ... could, we scaled it because we were terrified ... we couldn't."

"It was hard to turn my head, but I did it and looked away."

"The painting ... represented something lost, something I had never had, would never have."

"Kambili, Part 2, Section 6"

"He was gracious, in the eager-to-please way that he always assumed with the ... white religious."

"We did that often, asking each other questions whose answers we already knew."

"Things started to fall apart at home.”"

"A love sip, he called it, because you shared the little things you loved with the people you loved The tea was always too hot, always burned my tongue.”"

"“Jaja’s defiance seems like Ifeoma’s experimental purple hibiscus: rare, fragrant with the undertones of freedom, a different kind of freedom from the one the crowds waving green leaves chanted at Government Square after the coup. A freedom to be, to do.”"