Book Review: Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - Page 3

I read Half of a Yellow Sun and marveled, too, at the disconnections Adichie so expertly explored: the separations from family; the emotional crises in a marriage; the loved ones lost to the military or to bombings or to brutal massacres; the loved ones simply lost. And yet hope prevails, because where there are disconnections there are also struggles to reconnect, and sometimes — even for a brief while — those efforts make a difference. The extent to which people often are forced to go — or choose to go — to establish connections (or to bridge the painful void when a disconnection is forced upon them) says something about our innate need to bond and draw strength from one another. All this is mined throughout the pages of Half of a Yellow Sun. While revealing intimate details of individuals affected by war and personalizing war in a creative, memorable manner, Adichie lays it all out — the despair experienced when a loved one is lost to us, the rage that overwhelms when a loved one is taken from us — and insists the international community acknowledge wrongs of the past and address the suffering that persists in Africa and elsewhere.

In her Author’s Note at the book’s conclusion, Adichie reflects on the way her father "ended his many stories with the words agha ajoka," which she translates as "war is very ugly." Adichie notes that "he and my defending and very devoted mother…have always wanted me to know, I think, that what matters is not what they went through but that they survived." So many survived, and so many will survive the conflicts of today and tomorrow. The fact remains that we as a world continue to fail to find peaceful resolutions to what ails us. It’s this simple, confounding fact that makes books like Half of a Yellow Sun weighted with meaning and crucial to our feeble attempts to comprehend the human condition:

The siren did not go off early in the morning, and so when the fierce wah-wah-wahsounds of the bombers appeared from nowhere, as Olanna dissolved corn powder to make Baby’s pap, she knew this was it. Somebody would die. Perhaps they would all die. Death was the only thing that made any sense as she hunched underground, plucked some soil, rubbed it between her fingers, and waited for the bunker to explode. The bombing was louder and closer. The ground pulsed. She felt nothing. She was floating away from inside herself. Another explosion came and the earth vibrated, and one of the naked children crawling after crickets giggled. Then the explosions stopped and the people around her began to move. If she had died, if Odenigbo and Baby and Ugwu had died, the bunker would still smell like a freshly tilled farm and the sun would still rise and the crickets would still hop around. The war would continue without them. Olanna exhaled, filled with a frothy rage. It was the very sense of being inconsequential that pushed her from extreme fear to extreme fury. She had to matter. She would no longer exist limply, waiting to die. Until Biafra won, the vandals would no longer dictate the terms of her life.

The original version of this review was written for the Third Day Book Club hosted by author Patry Francis on her blog, Simply Wait. Refer to Patry’s November 3, 2006 archived post for links to many other lively and insightful discussions of Half of a Yellow Sun.

Article Author: Karen DeGroot Carter

Karen DeGroot Carter, author of the novel ONE SISTER'S SONG, "a lyrical challenge to common assumptions about love, race, and respect," also edits the diversity blog BEYOND Understanding.

Visit Karen DeGroot Carter's author page — Karen DeGroot Carter's Blog