The current blossoming of fiction in contemporary Nigeria is, as many critics have pointed out, creating a ‘third generation’ of Nigerian literature. This study argues that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus, a text in this new dispensatio n, begins a discourse on childhood as ‘a set of ideas’ that engages, through alternative memory and the father figure, with what can be described as postmodern identities. Adichie’s contemporaries, children spawned by literary and literal fathers, struggle with these fathers as critical memories ijn an attempt to delimit and transcend the symbolic boundaries carved out by identification with the father figure. In Purple Hibiscus , childhood equivocates its relation with this figure and problematizes it in a manner that gives this childhood power, agency to consume hybridity , third spaces. The novel is a story of the corruption and religious fundamentalism that grips Adichie’s native country . Told from the point of view of a child, overt political messages are held at an arm’s length, but they inform Kambili’s coming of age. In spite of the corrupt military rule that comprises Nigerian politics through various characters, the importance of the woman character is brought throughout the novel