Adichie's Purple Hibiscus and Issues of Ideology in the Constitution of the Nigerian Novel (Report‪)‬

Introduction With her two novels to date, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has distinguished herself as one of Nigeria's more prominent new generation female writers. This status was confirmed with her emergence in 2007 as winner of the prestigious Orange Prize for fiction for her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun. Her novels, Purple Hibiscus (2003) and Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) are animated by attempts to engage traditional constructs of the woman. In this regard, she shows that for women to rise above these traditional constructs, especially as 'good women,' they need to understand themselves and, having done this they equally need to express their peculiar experiences. Accordingly, self-knowledge and self-expression become sine qua non for action. In this essay, therefore, we will examine how her first novel becomes a paradigm for demystifying forms of patriarchal violence. Our guiding thread is that self-knowledge and self-expression form the basis for demystifying patriarchal authority and violence in Adichie's work. Within the broad attempt to constitute the novel in Nigeria we will examine how Adichie's Purple Hibiscus adopts the issues of ideology especially that of the subject and interpellation in order to achieve self-knowledge and self-expression.