Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie strives for a holistic vision in her novel, Purple Hibiscus, one that integrates Igbo customs and language with Catholic ritual. It is a vision which incorporates men into her gender politics and embraces the literary traditions of her elders – Chinua Achebe, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o and Alice Walker. Adichie represents this syncretised world through the material culture and everyday realities of life in modern Nigeria. Tables and chairs, grains of rice and ceramic ornaments are syncretised with bodies and infused with spirituality. They create multiple universes, where the boundaries between the living and the dead, the animate and the inanimate are breached.

In the Igbo world that Adichie is depicting, constructing and transforming, the spirits live inside the mundane objects of everyday life. If Moses Isegawa's Abyssinian Chronicles took ordinary, solid objects that had become toxic fetishes and reduced them to size in order to expose the workings of dictators, the Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie takes similar, everyday things and ‘re-enchants’ them, in order to heal the society which has abandoned its past. We saw in the introduction what Harry Garuba called ‘a continual re-enchantment of the world’ (2003: 265, his emphasis), which relates to animist thought in which the spiritual is manifested in material, everyday things (267). This is nowhere better illustrated than in Purple Hibiscus where Adichie is, as she puts it in an interview, ‘interested in colonized religion, how people like me can profess and preach a respect of their indigenous culture and yet cling so tenaciously to a religion that considers most of indigenous culture evil’ (in Anya, 2003: 15).