Half of a Yellow Sun, a Novel by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

December 15, 2006 by Articles

by Naomi Jackson

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, set before and during the Biafran War, does what a great novel is meant to do. It engages, capturing the reader’s attention so completely that while reading one asks not whether the stories we engage with are true, but what these truths—suspended in the world the author creates—have to say about our humanity, the lengths to which we will go for love or an ideal or revenge. Or as one of the characters in Half of a Yellow Sun asks, whether the Biafrans will be more or less humane when they have conquered Nigeria.
Adichie succeeds at creating a world that is believable, at creating characters with flaws and admirable traits that make us care whether they live or die. After reading this book, it is easy to agree with Chinua Achebe’s statement about this young talent, “We do not usually associate wisdom with beginners, but here is a new writer endowed with the gift of ancient storytellers…Adichie came almost fully made.”

Like her first novel, Purple Hibiscus, this one offers a rich portrayal of middle-class Nigerian life. The story’s axis turns on the relationships beween Olanna Ozobia and her “revolutionary lover,” Odenigbo, both lecturers at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka in the South East and Olanna’s homelier twin, Kainene, equally at ease squaring away army contracts and running a refugee camp with an iron fist, and her English lover Richard, an aimless expatriate and aspiring novelist, turned Igbo speaking journalist and proud defender of Biafra. Ugwu, the houseboy, transforms into a teacher, soldier, and writer through education, a stint in the Biafran army, and a chance encounter with Frederick Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave. Though in some instances Ugwu’s character seems drawn with a heavy hand, his perspective is a welcome voice from outside of the privilege the other characters wear with varying degrees of pride, self-consciousness, disdain.

Half of A Yellow Sun is a fierce depiction of the massacres that preceded the Biafran war and the air raids, shelling, starvation and grief that defined it. It describes both how the war robbed Biafrans of their normalcy and how they continued to live and love in the midst of the war. Bravely, unlike many accounts of liberation struggles in Africa and beyond, Adichie foregrounds the experiences of women. She writes about the role that sex played in the war, about how women on both sides of the conflict were violated by marauding or bored soldiers, or exchanged sex for safety, favors, food. Not all the female characters are marked by their domination by male force, however. Most are lit with determination to survive and help others do the same. Here there is no “Starving African, who wanders the refugee camp nearly naked, and waits for the benevolence of the West.” There are women who push and elbow in the relief lines, call in favors their husbands are ashamed to, go behind enemy lines to trade for what they need.

More so than Purple Hibiscus, this novel makes bolder attempts to foreground Igbo language, making the reader aware of when the characters are speaking Igbo and when they are not. Shying away from literal, word-for-word translation, Adichie brings to her readers a challenge to wrestle with the idioms, parables, and exclamations that form part of Igbo language and culture, resisting the impulse to do too much work for the English-speaking reader. This is in itself a feat in the face of an imperative to speak and write only the Queen’s English.

The exhaustive research this effort must have required is matched only by the beauty of the prose. Here is Biafra’s and Nigeria’s own daughter knocking on history’s door and finding there mines waiting to be detonated. Let’s take cover then until her next effort, hoping that it too will move and stretch us in ways we had not imagined.

Other Readings

Achebe, Chinua, Girls at War and Other Stories
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi, Purple Hibiscus
Emecheta, Buchi, Destination Biafra
Nwapa, Flora, Never Again
Oguibe, Olu, “Lessons from the Killing Fields.” Transition, no. 77 (1998), 86-99.
Okigbo, Christopher, Labyrinths
Wainana, Binyavanga, “How To Write About Africa.” Granta, no. 92 (2006), 91-96.
Buchi Emecheta, Destination: Biafra

A. Naomi Jackson is a writer and co-editor of Chimurenga Online who lives in New York City.

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