Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Review)

A couple of weeks ago, Zadie Smith, in the series 'What Makes a Good Writer?', referred to some authors' dream of writing the Perfect Novel (my capitals). Although later on in the same article she explained why the attempt to accomplish this deed is nothing but a chimera, I was left with the impression that indeed many writers do set out to trascend the literary realm in which they inhabit. They want their novels or short stories to be the sole and ultimate authority on the politics, social thinking and economic trends of their time and in order to achieve this they apply an almost mathematical precision to their work.

At the other end of the spectrum, you have writers who effortlessly write jolly good, entertaining books without too much fanfare or razzmatazz and yet capture a country's historical moment with such accuracy that unwittingly they contribute to that nation's collective awakening.

A case in point is the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. In 'Half of a Yellow Sun', Ngozi deftly weaves the convoluted stories of two couples into one of the most terrible conflicts to befall that African country: the Biafran war. The novel's name is taken after the emblem that symbolised this state in eastern Nigeria.

Odenigbo is an academic with very strong political views. As a member of the nascent intellectual middle-class of 60s Nigeria he hosts soirées in his house where current world events are discussed amongst glasses of wine and heated, nationalistic poetry. His lover and future wife Olanna, a western-educated woman, returns home from Britain to contribute to what she considers to be her duty: building a better society. She takes up a post as an instructor at the Department of Sociology. Her twin sister Kainene, in the meantime, moves to Port Harcourt to manage her father's business. Richard, Kainene's eventual lover, is a British man recently arrived in the country with the intention of writing a book about Nigeria. However, underpinning these four characters we find one of the most enigmatic and interesting members of the cast: Ugwu, Odenigbo's teenage houseboy.

And it is mainly from Ugwu's point of view that we travel through many of the cultural, linguistic and political issues that 'Half of a Yellow Sun' addresses. From Ugwu's desire to speak English like his master - until Olanna arrives in the scene with her 'luminous language' -, to his ardent sexual longing for Eberechi, the girl whose body he craves. The latter is used effectively by the author to depict how quickly human beings can fall into savagery. When Eberechi confesses to Ugwu that she is sleeping with an army officer, following the outbreak of war and the penury into which the whole country is thrown, Ugwu's reaction is one of disgust and repulsion. How hypocritical, then, that a few pages later we find the same teenager, now nicknamed 'Target Destroyer' participating in the gang-rape of a young woman.

Symbolism is abundant in 'Half of a Yellow Sun'. Odenigbo betrays Olanna with a countrygirl with whom his mother has set him up, albeit against his will. Reluctant to accept Odenigbo's defense that his mother has tricked him into sleeping with the innocent girl, Olanna takes her revenge and beds Richard, her twin sister's boyfriend, unleashing in the process a maelstrom of such magnitude that it's not until the last few pages of the book that Kainene's pardon is finally granted, and even this acquittal is not complete. Parallel to this, the whole country slowly starts to break down, this unrest highlighting sectarian divisions within Nigeria. Odenigbo and Olanna's relationship resembles the country in which they live.

Another symbol can be seen in Kainene's transformation from a sang-froid person into almost a Mother Theresa figure following her close brush with death. At the beginning of the novel Olanna comes across as the idealistic sister whilst her sibling has both her feet firmly planted on earth. But by the end of the book, Kainene, like her country, or at least the Republic of Biafra, has undergone a radical change and her critical approach is replaced by a quixotic nature.

'Half of a Yellow Sun' is a rich bilingual map on which both Igbo and English get equally starring roles, even if the novel is written in the latter. Igbo phrases are interspersed in dialogues and one is never sure whether they are translations of their English equivalents or semantic additions. Either way, it does not matter because it is all conducive to making the reader feel more at home with the book's narrative. But this linguistic duality has other functions. Whereas in the first part, early 60s, language serves to convey class and social interaction, in the second and last chapters, lexicon becomes a matter of life and death literally. Anyone caught speaking Igbo by the insurgents meets an untimely and horrible end.

Another element that stands out in this book is the sex scenes. Chimamanda deftly navigates that difficult Bermuda Triangle of intimacy, carnal desire and love. For instance, I giggled at a scene where Ugwu eavesdrops on Odenigbo and Olanna making love. The naiveté of this passage does not detract from the sensuouness of the actual act.

'Later, after dinner, he tiptoed to Master's bedroom and rested his ear on the door. She was moaning loudly, sounds that seemed so unlike her, so uncontrolled and stirring and throaty. He stood there for a long time, until the moans stopped, and then he went back to his room.'

However, to me personally, one of the most enjoyable moments of this novel is when Ngozi reveals the identity of the author of the 'other book', The World Was Silent When We Died. This work, snippets of a piece written by one of the characters of 'Half of a Yellow Sun', is Chimamanda's strongest political point about who should write the stories of Africa. And as her exquisite, literary landmark shows it should be African themselves.

Copyright 2009

Next Post: 'Sunday Mornings: Coffee, Reflections and Music' to be published on Sunday 22nd November at 10am (GMT)

What Makes A Good Writer? By Zadie Smith (11th Part)

Individual vs General, or Uniqueness against Mass Production? For parts 1-10, click here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

System readers, system writers

"A work of art," said Nabokov, "has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual, and only the individual reader is important to me."

A writer with such strong opinions would find it hard to survive in the present literary culture, the idea of the "individual reader" having gone into terminal decline. In writing schools, in reading groups, in universities, various general reading systems are offered - the post-colonial, the gendered, the postmodern, the state-of-the-nation and so on. They are like the instructions that come with furniture at IKEA. All one need do is seek out the flatpack novels that most closely resemble the blueprints already to hand. There is always, within each reading system, an ur-novel - the one with which all the other novels are forced into uncomfortable conformity. The first blueprint is drawn from this original novel, which is usually a work of individual brilliance, one that shines so brightly it creates a shadow large enough for a little cottage industry of novels to survive in its shade. Such novels have a guaranteed audience: an appropriate reading system has been created around the first novel and now makes room for them.


This state of affairs might explain some of the present animosity the experimentalist feels for the realist or the cult writer or the bestseller - it's annoying and demoralising to feel that readers are being trained to read only a limited variety of fiction and to recognise as literature only those employing linguistic codes for which they already have the key. The upshot of this is that the intimate and idiosyncratic in fiction is everywhere less valued than the ideologically coherent and general. When the world is nervous, state-of-the-nation novels bring great comfort. The Nobel went to Pasternak, not Nabokov. But then how should we read? What does one tell a young reader struggling to choose from the smorgasbord of theoretical reading "systems" that are put before him or her in an average undergraduate week? Soren Kierkegaard has a useful piece of analogous advice, given to sceptical youths approaching philosophy for the first time: "The youth is an existing doubter. Hovering in doubt and without a foothold for his life, he reaches out for the truth - in order to exist in it."

That's how young readers are, too, when they start out. They are doubters and seekers. They are living in a negative, as Kierkegaard explains it, and so naturally are very susceptible to those who come offering positives like - in the case Kierkegaard is considering - the overwhelming positive of Hegel's "System". But, he warns, whole systems that concern themselves with the experience of being a self will not lead us to truth, for the cogent reason that we cannot fully exist in systems, but only within our own skins. "A philosophy of pure thought," he argues, "is for an existing individual a chimera, if the truth that is sought is something to exist in. To exist under the guidance of pure thought is like travelling in Denmark with the help of a small map of Europe, on which Denmark shows no larger than a steel pen-point - Aye, it is still more impossible."

When we are confronted with a delicate, odd little novel, that pretends to no encyclopaedic knowledge of the world, that offers no journalistic signposts as to its meaning, that is not set in a country at war, or centred around some issue in the papers, we seem to have no idea how to read it. We have our map of Europe and this novel is Denmark, maybe even just Copenhagen. But we've forgotten how to walk round Copenhagen. Frankly, it seems a pointless activity. If fiction is going to be this particular and inimical, we'd rather give it up and read something useful and real like a biography of Stalin.

Image by Garrincha. To visit his online shop, click here

Copyright 2009

Next Post 'Half of a Yellow Sun' (Review), to be published on Thursday 19th November at 11:59pm (GMT)