AS I read ‘Half of a Yellow Sun’, I could not stop thinking about its genial young Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. This 30-year-old woman is a brilliant and refreshing voice on the African literary scene and one that is already making a difference. Chinua Achebe himself has praised this “new writer endowed with the gift of ancient storytellers.”
In this second novel, following the bestselling “Purple Hibiscus”, Adichie tackles a bleak subject, the Nigeria-Biafra War of 1967-1970, with love, compassion and intelligence. Heartbreaking pictures of people dying of hunger are an awful reminder of this civil war but the author takes us beyond those sickening images on a cathartic journey: “I wanted to engage with my history in order to make sense of my present, because many of the issues that led to the war remain unresolved in Nigeria today.”
The growing importance of MASSOB, the Movement for the Actualization of the Sovereign State of Biafra, highlights a number of unsettled problems for many Igbo people who fought against Nigeria.
The novel “Half of a Yellow Sun” is infused with ‘emotional truth’, a term coined by Adichie, herself, while she was teaching a creative writing class at Princeton. She admits she was keen to be true to the spirit of the time and did not interfere with the historic events of that period although she enjoyed playing with minor things: “Putting a train station in a town that has none, placing towns closer to each other than they are, changing the chronology of conquered towns.”
Two couples and Ugwu, a houseboy from a poor village, dominate the narrative. The women, Olanna, and her twin sister, Kainene, come from a wealthy family in Kano. Driven by their feelings, they engage in unlikely relationships: The beautiful Olanna gives up a life of privilege to join Odenigbo, a charismatic professor in the university town of Nsukka and the enigmatic Kainene ends up with Richard, a withdrawn Englishman who embraces the Igbo cause and considers himself Biafran. Odenigbo is the passionate spokesman for tribalism. In the first pages of the novel, he emphatically declares that the tribe is the only authentic identity for the African: “I am Nigerian because a white man created Nigeria and gave me that identity. I am black because the white man constructed black to be as different as possible from his white. But I was Igbo before the white man came.” The author herself worries that education devalues culture and that middle-class parents do not care if their children cannot speak their native language or have a sense of their history.
The novel includes fragments of a book “The World Was Silent When We Died,” an account of the events described in Half of a Yellow Sun, written after the fact. The author is identified on the last page and he is not who the reader expects: “I wanted a device to anchor the reader who may not necessarily know the basics of Nigerian history. And I wanted to make a strongly-felt political point about who should be writing the stories of Africa,” explains Achidie.
Chimananda Ngozi Adichie was not born at the time of the war. She based her research on books, photographs and talking to people: “In the four years that it took to finish the book, I often ask older people I met where they were in 1967 and I would take it from there. It was from such stories that I found out tiny details that are important in fiction. My parents’ stories formed the backbone of my research. Still, I have a lot of research notes that I did not use because I did not want to be stifled by fact, did not want the political events to overwhelm the human story.”
Despite its depressing subject, the book is a joy to read and some parts are excruciatingly funny. I laughed until I cried when I pictured Ugwu ironing his master’s socks and discovering with horror that marmalade is made with orange peel which to him “was like choosing the hairy skin of a goat rather than the meat”!
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has begun graduate work in African Studies at Yale but she is already thinking about her next book. My last thoughts are about her: I imagine her writing at her desk, in the silence of the night, her favorite time, engrossed in her new story and I can hear her say: “I write because I have to. I write because it is the only thing I truly care about doing.”
