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Look at Brother Eugene. He could have chosen to be like other Big Men in this country, he could have decided to sit at home and do nothing after the coup, to make sure the government did not threaten his businesses. But no, he used the Standard to speak the truth even though it meant the paper lost advertising.
In Father Benedict’s sermon in Part 1, Breaking Gods, he singles out Eugene as a brave defender of democracy. One of the central complexities of Eugene’s character is his ability to so clearly recognize tyranny in the government but not his own tyrannical behavior. In many ways, Eugene is incredibly brave and defiant, using his financial wealth and privilege to support democracy. But though he wholeheartedly believes in this cause, he is still privately an abusive monster to his family.
Papa liked order. It showed even in the schedules themselves, the way his meticulously drawn lines, in black ink, cut across each day, separating study from siesta, siesta from family time, family time from eating, eating from prayer, prayer from sleep.
In this quotation from Part 2, Speaking with Our Spirits, Kambili reveals the shocking extent of Eugene’s control of the household. The way this passage is worded, describing Eugene separating parts of the day from the other, mirrors the phrasing in Genesis when God separates light from dark, land from sea. Eugene is almost more than a father to Kambili—she sees him as a kind of God who dictates Kambili’s time, the spaces she’s allowed to inhabit, and the values she holds.
“I committed a sin against my own body once,” he said. “And the good father, the one I lived with while I went to St. Gregory’s, came in and saw me. He asked me to boil water for tea. He poured the water in a bowl and soaked my hands in it.”
This confession comes in Part 2, Speaking with Our Spirits, after Eugene burns Kambili and Jaja’s feet with boiling water for allowing themselves to stay in the same house as Papa-Nnukwu. Here, it becomes clear that Eugene’s abuse is a continuation of the same abuse he received from the Catholic missionaries in the name of love. Eugene learns from the missionaries that true, fatherly love, the love of God, is painful and not, in practice, unconditional. While this doesn’t make his abuse any less horrific, it becomes clear here that Eugene, too, has suffered horrors he doesn’t know how to process.
“I should have made Ade hold that story,” Papa was saying. “I should have protected him. I should have made him stop that story.”
In this moment from Part 3, The Pieces of Gods, Eugene blames himself for Ade’s death. This lament prefigures Jaja’s later statement that he should have protected Beatrice. Just as Jaja could not have protected Beatrice, Eugene could not truly have stopped Ade from writing against the regime. This parallel underscores how Eugene is also defiant, has modeled defiance, perhaps passed that defiance onto his son, and nevertheless is a tyrant himself.
