Half of a Yellow Sun

Extraordinary and Unforgettable Books

Every few days as I scroll through my Facebook feed, images of a starving child or hands outstretched and grasping for food relief give me pause.  Thanks to persistent reporting, we have a documented history of the ongoing Saudi war on Yemen and U.S. complicity in its effects on the people of Yemen.  We cannot deny the inhumanity of weaponizing starvation as a tool of war.  But wait, haven’t I heard this story before?

Biafra is an indistinct memory from the late 1960s.  Back then I didn’t know exactly where Biafra was on the globe or the source of the conflict there.  I remember it more as a symbol of suffering people than as an historical event.  While America seethed with confusion over the Vietnam War, Biafra was one more fight for liberation.  From my memory I pull out strands of conversation at a faculty party Steve and I attended at Millikin University in 1969.  Perhaps we talked with other young professors about Biafra?  Perhaps I recall Newsweek cover stories or posters of starving children around campus?  It barely registered in a world gone crazy.

A couple of years ago a friend whose reading tastes are similar to mine recommended Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.  I devoured the book and craved more of Adichie’s writing and ideas.  Last year I discovered her earlier novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, which told a story of war as important today as it was in the novel’s time period of the 1960s.  This book peels away the superficial glory of fighting for a cause and reveals modern war in all its exhausting, sickening, degrading ways.  The terror invoked by an air raid siren, bombs aimed at civilian targets, forced movement of peoples from their homes and villages, mass starvation as a weapon of war, these were real tactics of the Nigerian civil war of 1967-1970.

The racist ideas of white America shape our expectations of what a novel set in Africa will describe:  a continent of largely illiterate, backward and superstitious ebony-colored people living in mud huts and preying on each other in modern adaptations of a primitive society.  Adichie’s Nigeria is populated with all classes of people from extremely wealthy to impoverished, living complex lives in the largest, most diverse, and best educated African nation.  Half of a Yellow Sun changed my thinking about the lives of the people who constitute the nation of Nigeria in the same way that Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns altered and enlarged my perception of the black experience of America.

The novel’s plot line nudges us along, from the comfortably smug lives of the educated professional class in the early 1960s to the rapid  deterioration into chaos, brutality and mass killing brought on by the civil war and its fight for liberation of the Igbo people.  The terrible truth of the story is that the utter chaos of war could happen anywhere, and has and still is.  But perhaps the more profound truth is that at the end of the story there is hope, and that too can happen anywhere, even in Biafra.

The best caption for what happened in Biafra was created by Adichie:  The World Was Silent When We Died.  The novel’s cast of characters includes Richard Churchill, an Englishman who comes to post-colonial Nigeria without a purpose, other than to write something.  His emotional distance from the events taking place there prevents him from actually writing anything, but he cannot forget the plea of a Biafran army colonel:  “The world has to know the truth of what is happening, because they simply cannot remain silent while we die.”  At the end of the war Richard bequeaths to Ugwu, a houseboy turned soldier turned writer, the right to name his book with the title Richard had planned to use, “The World Was Silent When We Died.”  As Richard explains to Ugwu, “The war isn’t my story to tell, really.”

But it is Adichie’s story to tell.  Of Igbo lineage, she grew up in a post-colonial Nigeria torn apart by competing interests and religious divisions.  Her family supported the liberation movement of the Igbo people from the larger and stronger nation of Nigeria, which had both British and Russian support, and members of her family suffered for their belief in a free Biafra.  Her novel can almost be read as a memoir, its emotional clarity bearing truth beyond any factual events or persons.

The story Adichie tells is one of movement.  Bodies move from one place to another, at times only moments ahead of the advancing Nigerian army.  The arc of life in Biafra moves from plentitude to bare survival.  Emotions sweep across the page and hearts move together and apart.  The reader, too, is moved from curiosity at a distance to the realization of witnessing a tragedy, one that is all but forgotten now.  We can avert our eyes from the worst of it, but it is still there in today’s Nigeria, birthed from colonialism and Western capitalist exploitation.  And yet we also see the pride and optimism of those who called themselves Biafran.  Their flag with its half of a yellow sun sewn into the center of black, red and green fields flew briefly, defiantly, and with hope.

Notes:

A movie based on the book was released in 2013.  Although Adichie worked on the adaptation of her book, the film is primarily a love story and minimizes the breadth and depth of the book’s essential message about war, liberation, and hope.

For a 50-year follow-up to the Nigerian civil war and its destructive remnants, view this video:  https://www.france24.com/en/20170901-revisited-biafra-nigeria-civil-war-landmine-famine-humanitarian-aid-obudu