It is review time again folks, and I am a day behind schedule this time. Partly because I couldn’t tear myself away from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, a novel about love, relationships, heartbreak, and agony, but primarily about war and what it does to people and societies. As Adichie says, it is her attempt to “engage with … history in order to make sense of (the) present.” It is about things the author does not want to forget; it is a book that once read cannot be forgotten, for it brings to the fore all those questions and issues that plague societies with a colonial past, the ravishing of a country’s mind and culture that a colonial power embodies.
The novel posits Nigeria’s power politics and colonial machinations in the conversation of a bunch of intellectuals, seen and heard in turn by a houseboy called Ugwu, from the bush land, thrown into the turmoil and intricacies of urbane society. Do the intellectuals see things as they are? The war proves to be their undoing; their conversation seems to belong to a distant idyllic realm that has nothing to do with the realities of the situation and the demands it exerts on them. The newly independent Nigeria burns, gets divided, and along with it, her people feel the split, right down the middle, an erratic, uneven split that pits tribe against tribe, sister against sister, husband against wife, neighbor against neighbor. And yet, before you turn the last page, the relationships disentangle, the country limps to a modicum of normalcy, and life picks up slowly, limping and sweating under the assault of war and crisis—both emotional and political.
Half of a Yellow Sun won the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction in 2007. It is a fascinating and exciting book from a very young writer, still a student herself. It follows the lives of five people: Ugwu the houseboy, his Master Odenigbo, his companion the beautiful Olanna, Olanna’s fascinating sister Kainene and her lover Richard, the only white man among the Nigerians. As the drawing room discussions and arguments metamorphose into real time war, Ugwu witnesses events up close, giving in and rising up to the occasion as a soldier, returning a changed man, and writing the native Nigerian’s view of the war. His is the book within the book, his the view that replaces Richard, the white man’s view of the tribal and colonial conflicts, his the voice that the writer uses to show the veracity of the native’s experience and understanding rather than the outsider’s.
Want to know what this experience is? Pick up your copy of Adichie’s inspiring novel and read it. I promise you, every page will be worth the time you take to read it. The language is lucid and simple, the narrative brisk without any high wattage symbolism or metaphorical density, the plot moves at an even though angst-ridden pace, and the images of a ravaged country are realistic and rooted. Adichie has delivered a masterpiece that should feature in every book lover’s library.
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