Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

 

Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (author of the previously reviewed Purple Hibiscus) is the story of the Nigerian Civil War, also known as the Biafran War, that happened between 1967 and 1970.  We follow several characters from the antebellum period until immediately after.  We have Olanna, a spoiled daughter of a rich man who takes on a revolutionary professor as her lover; Ugwu, a village boy who has been recruited as a houseboy in the professor's household, a boy who is smart and kind, loves to read and learn, and does his best to do his duties as capably as he can; and Richard, an Englishman in love with both Olanna's sister and the art of the region.

I thought this book was much better than Purple Hibiscus. It was such an interesting look at all the divisions in Nigeria before the revolution - tribal, class, language, and family divisions.  We start with the middle-class revolutionaries, dreaming big dreams in the professor's study while his houseboy is just relieved to be able to eat regular meals every day.  We see Olanna visiting her aunt and uncle in a village, shamed by their poorly made home and the cockroach eggs in the seams of the kitchen table. We see people falling in love, simple jealousies, but there's a looming war.

When the war comes, each of them flees, but they're all touched by the fighting and violence that they witness. The novel does a masterful job of weaving in how the characters deal with the aftermath of the trauma while still keeping on.

I always struggle with reading books in which colonialization plays such a big role because they never seem to underscore the role of empire building, but I think it's because I'm used to American stories in which slavery is an underlying foundation of every story and I don't need that to be brought to my attention, but as an American, I can regularly forget about colonization in other countries. Anyway, it's my issue as a reader because I can see how Adichie would get accused of pandering or patronizing if she talked about it too much.  But the inter-tribal fighting and violence, in this particular case against the Igbo, would not be present without the encouragement of the original oppressors and seeing how the entire civil war's root cause was not within tribes themselves, but because of a power play in London years before, was stark.

The descriptions of violence in the book are fairly graphic and I admire that Adichie doesn't just allow those things to go by.  Characters has flashbacks and all you can do at the end of the book is hope that in their futures they learn some coping mechanisms because the tragedy they lived could never be undone.  I am struck by a particular scene in which one of the characters rapes a stranger and he suffers over and over again.  Of course, the woman he raped suffered, too.  How do we deal with this tension? Do we hope he "learns" from his "mistake"?  Was his situation so that he was coerced, too?  Do we "forgive"?  I found these questions to be vitally important and yet impossible to grapple with.  

This was a very good book.  I liked that I had some grounding in Nigerian culture and history with the author's earlier book and I'm excited to read Americanah, her most recent book, soon.

Things I Bookmarked:

1) "She was used to this, being grabbed by men who walked around in a cloud of cologne-drenched entitlement, with the presumption that, because they were powerful and found her beautiful, they belonged together." (page 33) 

It must be very hard to be an attractive woman. As a perfectly average-looking woman, this is not my lived experience.  It reminds me of a probably apocryphal story of Elizabeth Taylor saying something about how she couldn't wait until her looks go so that she would be taken more seriously.

2) "'And on top of it, her parents sent her to university. Why? Too much schooling ruins a woman; everyone knows that.  If gives a woman a big head and she will start to insult her husband. What kind of wife will that be?'" (page 98)

This is a line of dialogue from an older woman. My parents always wanted me to do well in school, but they resented me whenever I would come back from college or grad school.  

3) boubou (page 100) - An article of clothing worn by women and men that consists of a single piece of fabric. I have seen boubous, but never knew the word for them.

4) "'Because of too much Book, you know longer know how to laugh.'" (page 130)

There is a definite anti-intellectual bias in the early parts of the book.  It's interesting to see how this was right before a civil war and thinking about the anti-education and anti-intellectual elements of American society today.

5) harmattan (page 140, among others) - A dry, dusty easterly or northeasterly wind on the west African coast, occurring between December and February.

6) kwashiorkor (page 338, among others) - A form of severe protein malnutrition characterized by edema and an enlarged liver with fatty infiltrates. There is generally not a lack of calories, but a lack of protein. Marasmus is malnutrition because of nutrient deficiency (could be calories, carbs, or other necessary dietary ingredients).