The Scars of Memory: Female
Narrative and Postcolonial National Reconstruction in Purple
Hibiscus
Li Qian
ABSTRACT
This paper is intended to examine the relationship
between female narrative and postcolonial national reconstruction in
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus. Situated in the
postcolonial realities of Nigeria, the novel demonstrates how
women’s private experiences of trauma are narratively mobilized as
sites through which the nation’s collective wounds and its fractured
processes of reconstruction are articulated. Drawing on postcolonial
theory, particularly Homi Bhabha’s concept of the nation as
narration and Gayatri Spivak’s reflections on female subalternity,
alongside Jan Assmann’s theory of cultural memory, this paper argues
that Purple Hibiscus reconfigures women’s movement from silence into
an alternative mode of national narration. By analyzing
representations of trauma inscribed within the family, the body, and
enforced silence, and by tracing the transformation of private
memory into a public narrative register, the paper demonstrates how
female storytelling revises fragmented national histories,
intervenes in dominant imaginaries of the postcolonial nation, and
gestures toward the formation of a more inclusive and ethically
responsive national identity.
Keywords: Purple Hibiscus, postcolonialism, feminist narrative,
cultural memory.
