Half of a Yellow Sun, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
“Abenddämmerung.”
African-American writers have produced many of the world’s great novels (Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, Octavia Butler, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, etc., etc., etc.). Emerging generations of black authors continue to ascend to the apex of American letters (Paul Beatty, Ta-Nahisi Coates, N.K. Jemisin, Coleson Whitehead). Black British authors have cracked the upper echelons among tastemakers too (e.g., Zadie Smith). However, black African writers do not appear on curated “best of” lists as much as they should.
Among sub-Saharan Anglophone authors, Chimamamda Ngozi Adichie perhaps has had the most breakthrough. Growing up in an academic environment, she earned a degree in creative writing from Johns Hopkins University, in addition to a master’s in African art from Yale. She won a MacArthur “genius” award in 2008 and serves a tenured full professor of writing at NYU. In short: she’s a big deal. Her 2013 novel Americanah tends to get the most nods, but her 2006 wartime family saga Half of a Yellow Sun put her on the map. Plus, she wrote it first, let’s go in order.
The cast of characters in our epic—and Half of a Yellow Sun constitutes a huge journey— includes Ugwu, a libidinous though likable village adolescent who has the good fortune to get a job as house boy in the southern-central university town of Nsukka for “Master,” a scholar named Odenigbo. Odenigbo teaches mathematics, though as a political hothead, he prefers to hold forth in his home salon, discoursing about Nigeria’s future with his fellow academics—we only hear about math twice in the book, in fact. He lives with his lover, Olanna Ozobia, a conventional beauty with brains who wants to teach youth rather than climb the official hierarchy. Olanna’s twin sister Kainene possesses a delightful hard edge and takes in interest in their parents’ high flying business dealings with the corrupt government. She partners up with a white Brit, Richard Churchill, a tall, (not dark), handsome Englishman who: a) “goes native,” to the point of becoming fluent in Igbo and later writes propaganda pieces for the doomed Biafran nation (more on this in a minute), and b) suffers from sexual performance issues, an understandable, though low (so to speak) blow as an authorial choice. We encounter dozens of minor characters throughout.
Political upheaval serves as the canvas on which Adichie paints her words. Following a larger pattern, the colonial British installed the minority Igbo group as rulers, who bullied tribal minorities. Decades of grievance exploded into a series of military coups, and also a Hausa massacre of Igbo in the north. In response, eastern Nigeria seceded, forming “Biafra,” whose flag featured half of a yellow sun, hence the novel’s title. A subsequent civil war lasted from 1967-70.
The Biafran experiment in self-autonomy never had a chance. Intellectuals’ flirtation with socialism precluded American support, while fear for disruption of oil reserves stalled other first-world powers from recognizing the fledging nation. Also, Europeans saw “Nigeria” (a fiction that colonial powers drew on a map on a floor) as the best chance among African counties, which is to say a European-style capitalist nation-state. They couldn’t let go of the dream of bringing civilization to peoples they saw as savages. Other African nations feared setting the precedent of fragmentation. The brutal war therefore played out unabated. Somewhere between one to three million Biafrans died from consequences of a Nigerian blockade, most from starvation.
In Half of a Yellow Sun, we watch the failure of the revolution unfold in inexorable, hyper-slow motion. Adichie conveys the enormity of the catastrophe through the banality of evil. A child’s hair falling out from starvation proves more impactful than set battle sequences would have had. We trade a comfortable professor’s house for a shared apartment to a multi-family single room with curtains. Servants go from cooking European desserts to preparing insects. As the noose tightens, the Igbo turn on minority groups in their own region, who they call “saboteurs.” Babies die. One of the main characters participates in a gang rape of a young female bartender. Parents do not comport themselves well, in at least three cases in the novel prostituting their daughters, and one of these daughters unwilling to raise the resulting child of the forced liaison. Horror descends in stages, failure in steps.
The chapters head-hop among Ugwu, Olanna, and Richard, for no clear reason for these POV character choices rather than others, but the technique works. For structure, Adichie covers the span from “The Early Sixties” to “The Late Sixties” for the first half of the novel, eliding key infidelities with nod-nod-wink-wink hints, absent of mystery. The second half retraces the same span, this time filling in the scandalous details, before finishing out the war. Individual chapters dial back time as well, documenting subplots in parallel. While explaining Adichie’s use of time might sound complex, the chronology proves easy to follow, and exact dates prove less important than an overall sense of inevitability of Biafra’s downfall.
Like many contemporary novels, Half of a Yellow Sun favors character development over plot. Although Adichie fills out each personality, none of them have “super-objectives” for which they use tactics to overcome obstacles in the way they would in a movie, for instance. Rather, we become implicated in how relationships fare against the tapestry of a deteriorating background. Much of the action seems quotidian, and therefore real: cooking, cleaning, conversation. In this sense, the novel shares similarities with Alan Hollinghurst’s celebrated The Line of Beauty, which explores gay relationships that take place during the time of Margaret Thatcher’s England, rather than following an audience-friendly three-act structure.
Adichie demonstrates full command over craft. At the same time, I would love to tweak some of her writer tics, a systemic issue I am becoming convinced stems from editorship. She luxuriates in the “Unnecessary It” across her prose, for example. Real people do not say things like, “It was the soldiers who saved us.” Also, Adichie gets hung up on key words. We read that someone wears a “wrapper” every several pages. Okay, but at least describe the color/pattern/style of the garments? Olanna and Kainene “laugh” after saying anything to each other. Someone seems to cook “jollof rice” at least once per chapter. Characters eat their weight in “kola nuts.” When food becomes scarce, we hear about “garri” a lot, and as starvation sets in, the text overuses the term “Kwashiorkor,” (a terrible childhood disease from severe protein deficiency, with a characteristic swollen belly), and also “harmattan” (a cool dry seasonal Saharan wind).
These quibbles aside, Half of a Yellow Sun pulls no punches. In addition to people who perish, we witness the death of a dream. The symbol of half of a sun implies the optimism of sunrise, but also the possibility of stillbirth, a son sinking into the earth instead of a sun. In the denouement, one of the minor characters recalls lines from a fallen compatriot’s poem, “If the sun refuses to rise, we will make it rise. / Clay pots fired in zeal, they will cool our feet as we climb.” The frozen half-sun could just as well indicate sunset as sunrise. The word Abenddämmerung means “evening twilight,” but because the compound comes from German, it carries cataclysmic overtones, and so comes to mind here. The Biafran sun had no other fate than to set midway towards its zenith.
Nigeria has suffered through eight coups from 1966 to 1993. The cycle of half-suns continues. Innocents lie in unmarked graves. The post-colonial artifice of Nigeria’s borders teeter atop the tectonic plates of tribalism. Adichie commemorates fictional characters to stand in for those who have vanished, as well as those who have survived.