regrettably due to certain emergencies, my bike test is cancelled for tomorrow. hopefully i will be able to take it next thursday, the 5th of november. i am disheartened by this. i think i have almost perfected the bridge and was hoping to come back home with a pass. sigh!!!
when i travelled to chennai in february this year, i visited a cottonite, an ex classmate, someone i am so happy to be connected with again..sheila. on her shelf rested this book called half of a yellow sun. we spoke of books and she suggested this one in particular, speaking of its excellence.
the first nigerian i have read was chinua achebe, however i have never read an african female writer before this, so i had decided that on my way back home i would pick up adichie. from chennai i took a flight to delhi, where i met up with someone i have admired ever since our first contact, someone i have learnt a world of knowledge from, raja. we walked into this bookstore where he asked me if i wanted a book and i said yeah adichie. so chimamanda ngozi adichie's half of a yellow sun was a gift from him.
to sheila and raja, thank you.
adichie was 29 when she wrote this book. to possess that kind of skill and maturity in one's writing at this age is a total incredulity. i don't know if i was captivated immediately and i am not sure if i was really delighting with everything she wrote, but one cannot fail to notice how brilliantly she had crafted the characters, narrated the war through them, twined together each event and allowed us to embrace them with all their faults and contradictions.
the ease with which she uses the language to describe and convey cynicism, racism, infidelities, desires, inconsistencies and starvation is a mark of admiration, that which very few authors can achieve at this young age.
olanna and kainene, the twin sisters who are like chalk and cheese, seem to be the main characters in this book and also the 13 year old boy ugwu, who works for odenigbo. dissimilar twin sisters portray a vehicle for parallel and different lives, providing basis of similarities and metaphors of contrasts. even though odenigbo and richard, the partners to the twins seem to be important people, much is left out about their work and ideas. i personally feel that odenigbo is endowed with knowledge that is never explored. and richard, a radical never seems to be offering any opinion, which is pretty strange. perhaps adichie meant them to exist as a background to bring forth and express the characters of the twins.
half a yellow sun talks of the civil war that broke out in nigeria during the late 60's.. the narration of the war-torn nigeria includes famine, poverty, starvation, food camps, refugee camps and other stark realities of any war. historically, shortly after gaining their independence from britain, several parts of nigeria were left competing for political and central control rights. nigerians began to massacre their northern igbo people who dominated most of the country's civil services. as a result the igbo people formed their own independent biafra which eventually led to a three year civil war in nigeria. biafra was forced to surrender but not before enduring violence, famine, and death of millions.
adichie starts with the peaceful period before the war, the beginning 60's introducing the main characters and then she alternates the sections of the book with the war, taking the characters through it, redrawing their identities and describing vivid scenes of the war's brutality. as their lives intersect, they have to question their own response to the unfolding events. destruction spreads like wild fire. during this fight against their oppressors, olanna becomes a volunteer imparting education to the famished biafran children. she explains to them their flag's symbol, the colour red is for the blood of their brethren massacred in the north, black for mourning them, green for the prosperity that biafra will achieve, and half of a yellow sun for their glorious future.
half of a yellow sun won the 2007 orange prize for fiction in britain and was a finalist for the national book critics circle award. this extraordinary novel is about love and war, loyalty and infidelity, truth and a desperate optimism amidst all the crisis. it is about the end of colonialism, about ethnic allegiance and it offers us the truth about class and race, about the way in which love can complicate all these things. it is an insightful journey to post independent nigeria, and to understand human emotions through love and despair, hope and truth. adichie excellently indulges in her imagination and blends it with history to provide us an engaging tale that keeps us reflecting long after we have finished the book.
