Feminist Matters: The Politics of Eating in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus

Abstract

Using food as a narrative device in her critically acclaimed debut novel Purple Hibiscus (2003), Adichie offers a markedly feminist critique of the legacies of neocolonialism on Africa’s ability to choose its own destiny. Indeed, Adichie’s exploration of food as the locus of hospitality and hostility and the dining table as a fraught and shifting site of power and its contestation yields a commentary on the domestic arena as a metaphor for the national sociopolitical and economic situation. More specifically, Adichie links notions of food control and tyrannical power to prevailing patriarchal systems that expose women and children to violent injustices and to material and spiritual want. She depicts colonial and fundamentalist religious institutions as inimical to women’s participation in political and economic processes.