Book Review: Half of a Yellow Sun

By Dibussi Tande

“We do not usually associate wisdom with beginners, but here is a new writer endowed with the gift of ancient storytellers.” Chinua Achebe

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Half of a Yellow Sun. Fourth Estate: London. 2006. 433 pages. [UK Edition]. [US edition available in stores September 15, 2006]

I have just finished reading Half of a Yellow Sun, the second novel by highly-acclaimed young Nigerian writer, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. I have to agree with critics that with this novel, Adichie has confirmed, if need be, that that she is one of the best writers of her generation, and that she is indeed “the 21st-century daughter of Chinua Achebe,”  as the Washington Post enthused in a review of her debut novel Purple Hibiscus.

Set in Nigeria before and during the secession of Biafra, Half of a Yellow Sun revolves around five very different characters; Thirteen-year old Ugwu, the fiercely loyal houseboy to Odenigbo, a revolutionary professor at the University of Nsukka and an unapologetic Biafran nationalist; the compassionate and sensitive Olanna, daughter of a wealthy Igbo businessman, who abandons the nouveau-riche lifestyle of post-independence Lagos for a more sedate, intellectual and passionate life in Nsukka with her lover Odenigbo; Richard, a pro-Biafran British idealist who has a passion for Igbo traditional art and is in love with Olanna's twin sister, the placid, distant and enigmatic Kainene.

The lives of these characters is masterfully woven into the events of that tumultuous decade in Nigeria’s history which was marked by the first military coups in the country’s history, the anti-Igbo pogroms in Northern Nigeria, the Biafran secession, and the ensuing civil war.

Although the Biafran secession and civil war serve as a backdrop to the novel, Half of a Yellow Sun is not a history of those events. Neither is it a classic war novel. Although the Biafran story is ever-present in the novel, it does not intrude, distort, or overwhelm the central story. Even when the characters are caught in the maelstrom of war, it is still their individual stories that are at the forefront. This is a story of love, betrayal, infidelity, forgiveness, hope, loss, grief, survival, resilience and broken dreams.

As we get to know the principal characters, we cannot stop ourselves from bonding with them – even in their most flawed moments - and wistfully hoping that their dreams would come true. Alas! This is fiction which solidly anchored in history – immutable history. So we know how the outcome of the civil war; the Land of the Rising Sun shall never come to be; the half of the yellow sun (emblem on the Biafran flag) will never grow full-blown, but will wither under the unrelenting attack of federal forces. Nonetheless, we hungrily read on because we desperately want to know whether our protagonists make it out of the war unscathed, and whether their relationships survive the war.

With Half of a Yellow Sun, Adichie has delivered a compelling book on love and war, on family and friendship, and on ethnicity and national identity. In this regard, the Los Angeles Times review is right on the mark when it observes that:

“…with searching insight, compassion and an unexpected yet utterly appropriate touch of wit, Adichie has created an extraordinary book, a worthy addition to the world's great tradition of large-visioned, powerfully realistic novels.”

Adichie’s vibrant and fresh, brash and unfettered style reminds me of Wole Soyinka, although she is always compared to the more conservative Achebe. Either way, Adichie is a writer in her own right who is already blazing a unique trail for herself on the Nigerian, African and world literary scene.
Adichie is one of the few emerging African writers who have the potential to be universally recognized as a great novelist and not just an “African writer” (with the literary Ghettoization that this term invariably entails in some parts of the world).

Visit Half of a Yellow Sun's Official Website to learn more about the novel and its author.

Click here for Adichie’s BBC Radio interview.

Biography: CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born in Nigeria in 1977. She is from Abba, in Anambra State, but grew up in the university town of Nsukka. After starting a degree in medicine at the University of Nigeria, she went to the United States to Eastern Connecticut University where she earned a degree in Communications and Political Science, and then to Johns Hopkins University where she obtained a Masters in Creative Writing.

She was a 2005-2006 Hodder Fellow at Princeton (Hodder Fellows are individuals who have demonstrated exceptional promise, have published one highly acclaimed book, and are undertaking significant new work that might not be possible without the "studious leisure" afforded by the fellowship ). She is presently pursuing graduate work in the African Studies program at Yale. She divides her time between the United States and Nigeria.

Her short fiction won the International PEN/David Wong award in 2003. Her first novel, Purple Hibiscus, won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. It was also short-listed for the Orange Prize and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. Her short fiction has appeared in Granta and the Iowa Review among other literary journals, and she received an O. Henry Prize in 2003.

Adichie is a contributor to the recently released paperback, This Is Not Chick Lit: Original Stories by America's Best Women Writers (August 2006). Her short story titled "The Thing Around Your Neck", is described as “a tale of a young Nigerian immigrant's challenges in finding her place in the United States.”

Additional Reviews of Half of a Yellow Sun

Top fare from a Nigerian gem
The Master and his houseboy
It's off to war she goes
The birth and death of an African nation

Comments

[Onyeka]

Chimamanda on writing Half of a Yellow Sun:

"Successful fiction does not need to be validated by "real life"; I cringe whenever a writer is asked how much of a novel is "real". Yet, I find myself thinking differently about the war novels I admire. I have often wondered how much of the character Benjamin in Harvest of Thorns mirrors Shimmer Chinodya, how much of the muted defeat in "Girls at War" is in fact what Chinua Achebe himself felt about the loss of Biafra. Perhaps it is because to write realistic fiction about a war, especially one central to the history of one's country, is to be constantly aware of a responsibility to something larger than art.

While writing Half of a Yellow Sun I enjoyed playing with minor things: inventing a train station in a town that has none, placing towns closer to each other than they are, changing the chronology of conquered cities. Yet I did not play with the central events of that time. I could not let a character be changed by anything that had not actually happened. If fiction is indeed the soul of history, then I was equally committed to the fiction and the history, equally keen to be true to the spirit of the time as well as to my artistic vision of it.

I wanted to write - I had to write - about this period because I grew up in the shadow of Biafra, because I wanted to take ownership of a history that defines me, because I lost both my grandfathers in the war, because many of the issues that led to the war remain salient, because our history makes me sad, because the brutal bequests of colonialism make me angry, because I do not ever want to forget."

Culled from The Guardian
http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,,1873583,00.html

[Lotus]

So happy to have discovered your blog. I was at the Toronto Book Launch last night and I was so impressed with Chimamanda Adichie. She's articulate, interesting and a very engaging speaker. I can't wait to read the book now.

[Safiyyah]

The Rule of Western Journalism

"Is it possible to see where the Biafran soldiers shot the Italian oil worker?" the readhead asked. "We've done something on that at the Tribune, but I'd like to do a longer feature."

"No, it's not possible," Richard said sharply.

"The readhead was watching him. "Okay. But can you tell me anything new?"

"Richard exhaled. It was like somebody sprinkling pepper on his wound: Thousands of Biafrans were dead, and this man wanted to know if there was anything new about one dead white man. Richard would write about this, the rule of Western journalism: One hundred dead black people equal one dead white person..."

Half of a Yellow Sun, Chimamanda Ngozi
***************************************
I finished reading this novel this weekend! But when I read this passage, it reminded me of the Iraqi casualties.

According to the website, Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, www.icasualties.org, the US military death toll as of 10/07/06, is 2,744.

According to the website, Iraqi Body Count Database, www.iraqbodycounty.org, the Iraqi civilian death toll as of 10/05/06, is estimated to be between 43,799 and 48,639.

Nightly, on shows like Lou Dobbs (CNN), Americans are told, "Today in Baghdad, insurgents killed one of our coalition forces," or "two of our soldiers were killed in so-and-so province." In numbers of one, two, or three - drip, drip, drip - like Chinese water torture. In October of 2005, Western media and politicians provided non-stop coverage and spin when the death toll for US military forces reached 2,000.

Don't get me wrong, I am not saying that the death of Americans in Iraq is trivial. But what I am saying is that reading this passage from this novel reminded me again that the military death toll is disproportionate to the death toll of Iraqi civilians.

Inna li-lahi wa inna li-layhi raja'un.From Allah we come, and to Him is our return.