University of Cape Town – ELL1013F

‘Half of a Yellow Sun’ Essay

‘After Sunset’:
The evocation of Memory and Closure in Half of a Yellow Sun’s ambiguous ever after

Can the good old ‘Intentional Fallacy’ ever not be, well, fallacious? I’m asking off the bat here because I’m quite sure I’m about to commit it a fair few times throughout this essay, and I hope whatever empathetic approximations those moments entail won’t ultimately end up being a disservice to the literary understanding I’m otherwise aiming to convey. Well, I guess it’s up to the assiduous reader to choose whether or not to absolve me of my critical sins in the end, so, for now, I’ll just state that my intention is strictly not to second-guess Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s supposed authorial manifesto on Biafra’s memorialization. Instead, I will simply extrapolate from a crowd of complementary perspectives on the lost nation’s traumatic inheritance (as succinctly expressed in the three pages of Half of a Yellow Sun’s(HOAYS) final chapter) as a means of reflecting on the insights she most openly attempts to intimate in summation of her fictional history of the conflict. I don’t think it’s necessarily presumptuous to name these collected conclusions ‘the author’s agenda’ in this case. Certainly given the explicitly non-fictional foundations of the novel, it’s no task of the common reader’s imagination to interpret the ambiguities of the story’s ending(s) as being part and parcel of Adichie’s own stated intention “to engage with [her] history in order to make sense of [her] present”. (440) The crux of this fictional project then, to my mind, is the representation of what Olanna, in the novel, names a ‘grief’ “stranger than grief.” (431) One which has consequently lasted for decades, entangled, as it is, in a lament for both the image of Biafra and the inexplicable personal loss of a sister and fiancée. What hope that’s left to round out the novel appears in two contrasting forms of belief both evidenced in its last lines: firstly, Olanna’s conviction in the redemptive ‘reincarnation’ of history and, secondly, Ugwu’s present gratitude for the part his master (and the Biafran dream) played in his rise to literacy. And if the latter isn’t a clear example of an author advocating her own belief (in the innate positivity of the page), I don’t know what would be…

So, we can only begin- as any form of real-life reflection would- in the immediate aftermath of the conflict in question. To set the context, I would claim there’s a palpable sense of ‘strange grief’ in the last pages of HOAYS, actually irrespective of Kainene’s recent disappearance. War, like a malevolent spirit unto itself, has displaced the former pieces of Olanna and Odenigbo’s residence in Nsukka, and consumed the hollow time between the regularity of their pre-war days and the tired peace of 1970. Odenigbo, in response to the goodwill book packages of his old international colleagues, can only half-heartedly lament his lost collection of first editions- presumably now the “blackened paper crisps” (433) littering his study. Olanna, taking occasional walks through the university settings that once hosted nationalist rallies, just observes “how quick leaving [their home] had been and how slow returning was.” (432) Yet, the return process is still steady: features of the old times, like a dependable water supply and the ‘butterflies in the front yard’, gradually make their reappearances and the war’s temporary scars begin to fade away, just as Baby’s hair regains its lost “jet-black” colour with the passing weeks. (ibid.) Odenigbo does try to defy the process, hiding away his rising-sun flag as a keepsake of the cause, but we, the reader, can sense an inexorable disappearance of the war’s material traces, even so soon after its decisive end. At this point, memory steps into the breach in official history, not as a survivor’s neutral function, but as a particular contextualization of personal grief. Olanna’s fear that her store of Biafran currency might be discovered and destroyed by Nigerian soldiers is immediately juxtaposed with a short scene of her ‘pre-empting the loss’ by committing the very same destructive act. While Odenigbo, horrified, accuses her of “burning memory”, Olanna insists it’s only a re-consecration of the memories she already keeps safe “inside [herself].” (ibid.) Her enigmatic fortitude here is interesting to analyse: her anxiety is not that her remembrances will be taken from her by time or entropy, but that the wrong people (Biafra’s enemies) will deny her the rite of erasing the vestiges of the past that remain in the present. It is as if Olanna requires this form of control over her history in order to make any settlement with the world’s current continuation, as well as, in my opinion, to ‘seal off’ the mystery of her sister’s vanishing. As such, it acts as a partial cure for the strain of desperate denial that haunts the novel’s last chapters (the kind that’s caused Olanna to sense hopeful signs of Kainene’s return even in her husband’s “disapproval” of her search for such hopeful signs. (ibid.)) It seems like Adichie is touting this form of ‘internal memorialisation’ throughout the last chapter of HOAYS, seeing in it a method of surviving the influence of the past without forgetting its importance. In fact, Odenigbo openly reveals this effect (out of context) when he says, in consolation to Olanna. “[t]he war has ended but hunger has not…” (433) For both of them, a necessary acceptance of the war’s resolution has come with the price of the traumatic grief of an inexplicable loss, a ‘hunger’, we can claim, which persists without a foreseeable end.

But what does Adichie actually mean to express by leaving us with this peculiar kind of grief in the place of any regular closure to the story? In keeping with the novel’s defining pattern of interwoven personal and political Biafran histories, I’d say we’re (all too) easily able to equate Kainene’s disappearance with the simultaneous loss of the grander national dream at war’s end. Not that Adichie is just transferring the grief of one kind of loss onto another more ‘novelistic’ kind, but that these two contrasting ‘disappearances’ are ultimately inextricable in any of the characters’ subjective reckonings of Biafra- especially considering that Kainene’s unknown fate came as the result of a last-ditch afia attack at almost the very moment of the nation’s defeat. This intermediate category of grief, entailing both ‘inexplicable’ losses, is what I feel Adichie attempts to evoke in her conclusions to both Olanna and Richard’s accounts. The characters share a strange affliction of ‘dark swoops’ in the novel, though Richard’s only first “descends” at the end of his story, at the moment he realizes “he [will] never see Kainene again” and that the rest of his life will be experienced “only in shadow, only in half glimpses.” (430) In contrast, Olanna’s pain is simply “raw”, engendering a “downward slide” that leaves her “weeping” while “crumpled on the floor.” (431) Her last moments in the novel though, do offer the hope of some measure of respite, as she bows to a traditional metaphysical consolation: “Our people say that we all reincarnate, don’t they?”… “When I come back in my next life, Kainene will be my sister.”” she says before beginning “to cry softly.” (433) Presumably then, when the world is repeated, Biafra will also once again be her nation? As such, I read into this hope more the trauma of a perpetually unresolved history than just a conciliatory superstition. The memory Olanna keeps “inside [herself]” (432) is here also a vision of Biafra that is itself waiting to be reincarnated, because neither has it fully disappeared nor did it ever fully ‘rise’ to become more than just the promise of a ‘half of a yellow sun.’ Adichie’s great Nigerian forebear, Chinua Achebe, hints at this condition in the W.H. Auden-quoted title of his own ‘personal history of Biafra’: “There Was a Country”. The truth of this plain declaration, despite most of the world’s attempts to deny it during the civil war, is what, in retrospect, Adichie is seemingly attempting to revive and re-enforce in the course of HOAYS.

Of course, her (and anyone’s) only means to do so is the written word, a form she also endorses, but only openly, admirably, in the novel’s last ten words. In revealing Ugwu- despite his former illiteracy- as the author of the story’s accompanying non- fictional inserts, Adichie accomplishes an entire perspective-shift in the space of a sentence. For the first time, the reader realizes the full importance of a storyteller’s identity, having now had to retroactively amend the factual authority of all the previous historical pieces so as to recognize the effects of Ugwu’s experiences in his retelling of the Biafran narrative. The reader is also particularly struck by the twist’s aptness: isn’t it just right that a direct beneficiary of both the best and the worst legacies of the conflict should be the one to write a comprehensive Biafran history? Worst, that is to say, in the sense that Ugwu’s deepest emotional scar- the enigmatic rape he commits as a soldier- was inflicted in one of the Biafran army’s most degraded moments, and ‘best’ in that it was the “good man”, the Biafran nationalist Odenigbo, (433) who occasioned his rise to literacy as part of the new nation’s dream of Igbo empowerment. Adichie most probably intends this effect, and thus it speaks volumes for the value she places on the necessary subjectivity of the memorialisation process. The story of the civil war is here just as much Ugwu’s inheritance as any other Nigerian’s, so by giving him the liberating responsibility of its authorship, Adichie emphasises the innate importance of history’s retelling from multiple ‘unofficial’ perspectives. Her reference to the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave- Ugwu’s initial inspiration to start writing- is also an implicit endorsement of this kind of storytelling: how would we understand slavery today as an historical phenomenon if it weren’t for such personal accounts of its conditions? Equally, it is Ugwu’s ability to objectively and subjectively record the Biafran experience that defines the value of both the grand project of universal literacy and Ugwu’s continuing life as a now empowered ‘child of Biafra.’

Half of a Yellow Sun can therefore be seen as an explicit example of just this kind of subjective historicism. I feel its existence is owed to the very ‘unresolved’ quality of the Biafran past that Adichie seeks to portray in the book’s last chapter, and that, to some extent, its conclusion is consequently meant as a form of self-justification for the fictional liberties it takes from the factual closure of more official histories. As much as the story is itself a memorialization of the personal experience of the Nigerian Civil War, it is also (in its last chapter especially as has been shown) a self- reflexive treatise on the endemic grief and undying hopes that encourage such returns as its own to the underwritten perspectives of history. By now, of course, I’ll readily stake my opinion on this being Adichie’s intention, whether she herself happens to know so or not…

Word Count: 1636

All page references in this essay have been to the text and appended interviews of the edition:
Adichie, C. 2009. Half of a Yellow Sun. London: 4th Estate.