In Which I Make Connections

I just read this poem, "The Victims" by Sharon Olds. I'll copy it here:

When Mother divorced you, we were glad. She took it and
took it, in silence, all those years and then
kicked you out, suddenly, and her
kids loved it. Then you were fired, and we
grinned inside, the way people grinned when
Nixon's helicopter lifted off the South
Lawn for the last time. We were tickled
to think of your office taken away,
your secretaries taken away,
your lunches with three double bourbons,
your pencils, your reams of paper. Would they take your
suits back, too, those dark
carcases hung in your closet, and the black
nonses of your shoes with their large pores?
She had taught us to take it, to hate you and take it
until we pricked with her for your
annihilation, Father. Now I
pass the bums in doorways, the white
slugs of their bodies gleaming through slits in their
suits of compressed silt, the strained
flippers of their hands, the underwater
fire of their eyes, ships gone down with the
lanterns lit, and I wonder who took it and
took it from them in silence until they had
given it all away and had nothing
left but this.

I'm fascinated by her imagery in the last sentence of the poem--comparing bums to sunken ships... The contrast of the remaining fire and the death underwater is a powerful metaphor. This says a lot about people--the way they treat each other, and the way that resentment can build up. There are people who suffer in silence and let anger fester... This reminded me of the Chimamanda Adichie novel I just finished, Purple Hibiscus. The main character, Kambili, does finally get away from her father. She and her brother find love and support with her aunt and come home changed. Her father discovers a picture of her grandfather--who still follows the traditional ways of ancestor worship--and beats her almost to death. She does not go back to live with her father. And a few months later, her father dies. Her mother deliberately poisoned him. With rat poison. And her brother goes to jail for it. The end is tragic and bittersweet. Kambili escapes her father only to be thrust into crippling responsibility--for her now mentally unstable mother and imprisoned brother. Her aunt and cousins move to America and are unhappy there. There is only the strength that she found--that she was able to pull from deep within herself.
I see so many parallels between this poem and the novel. He father did wonderful things for his country but stifled his family. I wonder how Olds would have portrayed him...