With Half of a Yellow Sun, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie presents her readers with a gorgeously wrought story set in horrific times. I don’t remember the Nigerian-Biafran civil war, but I do recall the time for my first exposure to television pictures of starving children. Adichie provides context for those memories. In this novel, war and class, foreign policy indifferent to human suffering when oil is involved, malnutrition and prejudice, arrogance, dependence and corruption, and genocide serve as the backdrop for stories of love and loyalty, childhood and morality and identity, belonging and exclusion, forgiveness and betrayal, vibrancy, hope and grief, survival and resilience, family and friendship.
The characters are full-bodied and dynamic. We meet kind, bright, innocent Ugwu at age 13 as he leaves his village to work as a houseboy. He discovers the comparative opulent lifestyles of city-dwellers with their running water and daily eating of meat. Over a brief period of time, his role expands from houseboy to student, teacher, army conscript, and writer.
It is through Ugwu’s observations of the visitors to Odenigbo’s house that we begin to learn about the move to secession and the personalities involved in Biafra’s formation. Odenigbo treats Ugwu with kindness and, in congruence with his revolutionary socialist ideals, promotes the boy’s education. But this represents Odenigbo’s only success in bringing his political theorizing to fruition.
Odenigbo’s mistress is the beautiful, London-educated Olanna. She abandons her parents’ lavish and privileged lifestyle, declining the opportunity to wait out the war with them in favor of supporting of Odenigbo’s social principles. Olanna’s gentleness, compassion, and sense of self are tested as the war progressively claims those around her through chaos, massacre, and starvation. We are witness to her realization that: “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. 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.” And so she rises above and learns to survive.
In contrast to Olanna’s naïveté, her non-identical twin sister Kainene responds to the struggle with clear-eyed determination. Kainene recognizes that, at heart, this war is ultimately not a struggle for self-determination but a bid to control resources (namely oil). She describes Nigeria’s ruling elite as “a collection of illiterates who read nothing and eat food they dislike at overpriced Lebanese restaurants and have social conversations about one subject: ‘How's the new car behaving?’” She has no illusions about where this attitude will lead, and when war breaks out turns her shrewd mind from running her father’s factories to assuring the survival of those dear to her. Improbably, Kainene takes as her lover Richard, a British expatriate writer who is enamored with ancient Igbo-Ukwu art and is desperately seeking to be seen as Biafran.
Article comments