Half of a Yellow Sun: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Narrative of War-ridden Biafra

Half of a Yellow Sun is a landmark novel in which the novelist brings an exquisite blending of history and memory. The novel, published in 2006, is set before and during the Nigeria-Biafra war of 1967-70. Adichie hoped that emotional truth would be its major recognizable trait. The novelist’s objectives are quite clear when she says: “I wrote this novel because I wanted to write about love and war, because I grew up in the shadow of Biafra, because I wanted to engage with my history in order to make sense of my present . . . . because the brutal bequests of colonialism make me angry, because the thought of the egos and indifference of men leading to unnecessary deaths of men, women and children enrages me, because I don’t ever want to forget.” A pre-planned masterpiece, Half of a Yellow Sun was started after Adichie approached the subject with little steps like a melodrama play For Love of Biafra and some short stories like “That Harmattan Morning” and “Ghosts.”

The Nigeria-Biafra war is still a potent political issue and it is mostly talked about in uninformed and unimaginative ways. Adichie’s attempt is to give an objective account of what happened in Nigeria during the war. The book focuses on the experiences of a small set of people who are experiencing the conflict from entirely different points of view. In the 1960s, Nigeria was a country blighted by civil war and three lives intersect – Ugwu, a poor boy from a poor village, works as a houseboy for a University Lecturer – Olanna, a young woman, has abandoned her life of privilege in Lagos to live with her charismatic new love, the Professor. The third is Richard, a shy English man who has made Biafra his home and is captivated by the charm of Olanna’s enigmatic twin sister, Kainene. When the shocking horror of war engulfs them, their loyalties and convictions are severely tested as they are pulled apart and thrown together in ways none of them imagined. The many sided nature of this conflict is graphically realized in this novel where English is infused with robust poetry.

This is Adichie’s second novel and like the first one Purple Hibiscus, this too explores the complex entanglement of personal and national identities, particularly within the context of a national mythology. There is a sense through out the novel of a double perspective: that of the contemporary, omniscient narrator or author casting a critical eye on the proceedings and that of the two characters, Richard and Ugwu.

There is also a conflict in the story between what is traditional and tribal versus that which is modern and bureaucratic. The question is often raised: “Who should be writing the stories of Africa?” Through this novel Adichie makes a strongly felt political point about this issue. The book within the book, we find in the novel – snippets of a book written by a character – an account of the conflict depicted in Half of a Yellow Sun, written after the fact is a device to anchor the reader who may not necessarily know the basics of Nigerian history. Thus this novel is a heartfelt plea against the conflict within ethnic culture.

Jewish American Poetry

The question is whether there is something uniquely Jewish about the poetry of Jewish Americans. An examination of this issue would probably lead us to the possible themes in Jewish-American Poetry – angst, irony, self-doubt, nostalgia, parental ligature, a reverence for the text, for the word, for clarity etc. But what lies at the bottom of Jewish American Poetry is the question of marginalized exilic chosenness.


The ambivalent American Jew is now at the cross roads, caught in a confusion and a clear and apparent need to chose between integration and survival. This is especially so because the cultural community such writing must draw from and speak to has vanished as early as in the 1970s. After the immigrant years, the real Jewish heritage has become the memory of a memory for people, born after 1930. Nor could the historic, moral and religious weight of Judaism help them. There are the times when they are becoming more and more conscious about the incompatibility of integration and survival. There may be an exhaustion of Jewish content in their literature, but the generation of writers and poets who define post war American literature which includes names of Arthur Miller, Tillie Olsen, Bernard Malamud, Allen Ginsberg, Cynthia Ozick, Philip Roth, Art Spiegelman, Jacqueline Osherow, Melvin Bukiet, Allegra Goodman, makes clear that Jewish American Literature continues to thrive. A chronological study of Jewish American Literature would reveal how it has chronicled and paralleled the Jewish American experience. It depicts the struggles of immigrant life, the stable, yet alienated middle-class existence that followed and finally the unique challenges of cultural acceptance, assimilation and the reawakening of tradition. Caught in a no man’s land between the universalism of American Culture and the particularism of Jewish Culture, Jewish American writers have in recent years, opted for the latter. Their recent strategies include negotiation between feminism and Judaism, the depiction of the Holocaust as a dominant force in American Jewish fiction and poetry have also become geographically diverse. The varied settings of contemporary Jewish American fiction and poetry have also become geographically diverse. The varied settings of contemporary Jewish American Literature reflect the geographical dispersion of Jewish Americans.

While Jewish American fiction has long been recognized as a fit subject for critical inquiry, Jewish American poetry has largely been overlooked in the past. But from Emma Lazarus to Allen Ginsberg, Jewish American poets have long been a presence in American poetry. Recent studies show that some attempts have been made to redress this silence. Once a group of isolated voices, their number and range has grown in the last 50 years to reveal a distinct American poetic transition.