FICTION
Tragic drama
SHEBA THAYIL
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Set against the Biafran war of independence, the book evokes horror and empathy.
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The book’s people are addictive; once the story is told, we need to meet them again, and listen to them...
Half of a Yellow Sun; Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Harper Perennial
When a writer wins the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction 2007, you don’t review the book in the usual sense. It’s good, obviously, the only question is: Should you read it? If you’re fresh from ploughing through Kiran Desai’s
Booker-winning The Inheritance of Loss, you’ll understand that question.
There’s no arguing the fact that Desai is a writer with perception, imagination and style, the holy triumvirate when it comes to the written word. There is no arguing, either, that Inheritance… is a deadly dull novel. Wh
at Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has that Desai doesn’t, in her Half of a Yellow Sun, is the ability to capture the human drama with characters and story that send needles of horror, anger, disillusion and empathy through the reader&#
8217;s heart.
Backdrop
It’s the casual cruelty of Africa that sinks in, an unthinking bestiality that brings to mind the Holocaust, something we will never comprehend, in any decade. Adichie’s backdrop is the Biafran war of independence in the late 1960s.
For those of us growing up at that time, the word Biafra was as evocative as the word Che (who was killed in the same year that Nigeria’s Igbo people briefly formed the Biafran nation in 1967), and flower children chanting peace to the world used them as punctuation before and after throwing petals at American troops going off to fight in Vietnam.
To Adichie, it wasn’t a tale told in the wind, although she was born 10 years after the war her parents lived through; Biafra still resounds in her country. So much so that Half of a Yellow Sun, an emblem of the short-lived but soul-deep concept of a new nation is revisited graphically, (much from stories that are still being shared among the people Adichie knows), and we connect at once. Ironically, it’s always the tiny true details that work so well in fiction. Harrison, the older houseboy with his scorn for any but English food comes from the real world, as does Igbu who was based on Mellitus, Adichie’s parents’ houseboy; the ebb and flow of the dialogue also teaches you African rhythms and phrases in a fluid manner.
Characters
The book’s people are addictive; once the story is told, we need to meet them again, and listen to them, and disagree with their notions or protect them from harm, or know what happened to each later on. There’s Olanna, spirited and beautiful, lusty and flawed, whose embracing of ideals doesn’t prevent her from sleeping with her sister’s English lover, a man so emasculated by that sister’s crisp, so-bright-it-hurts personality that he can hardly perform anyway; he is a man whose “life would always be like a candlelit room”.
There’s Odenigbo, who begins as he does not go on, the political activist who forgets moral equivalents; Ugwu, the houseboy who threads the story together and symbolises the good, bad and ugly of what war does to a young mind. It is his attachment to the fighting brigade, recently seen on film in “Blood Diamond” that shows us what young African boys were brainwashed to do, to rape and kill as though it was as desultorily as learning ABC.
There are the obnoxious rich parents of the twins, Olanna and Kainene, we well recognise because we find the obnoxious rich in India, too, steeped in their own selves to such a degree that they will drive a Mercedes on third world streets. But it is Kainene that is the most interesting character. She is not all that interested in the war, and yet commits to helping those who suffer in its wake. She is truthful and strong-willed, yet, as the ugly sister, knows bitterness and solitude.
It would be facile to see her as the negative to Olanna’s affirmative nature, but when she disappears at the end of the book, it is as though the untainted must vanish to survive, there is no question of living in this world with scorched standards.
It’s estimated that one million people died of starvation and illness during the Biafran war but there are other stats that tell us history teaches nothing.
The Hutu and Tutsi war in central Africa reached a memorable point when Hutu extremists took half a million lives in Rwanda in 1994. Religious strife continues in Nigeria as lately as 2006. As for Biafra, The Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra, Massob, keeps the fight alive.
Who knows but one day Adichie’s child may write another Biafra novel and echo her mother’s words: May we always remember.
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