Abigail Dunn, University of Idaho (BA, class of 2019)
Abstract
In “Formal and Content-Based Critiques of Authority: A Narratological Post-Colonial Reading of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun,” I argue that Half of a Yellow Sun critiques authoritative power in both its content and its form. Scholars tend to read Half of a Yellow Sun either as a political allegory for the rise and fall of Biafra or for its intertextuality, arguing that it is a response to earlier novels by Chinua Achebe. I approach the text from a postcolonial narratological perspective and examine not only the content of Adichie’s novel but also its narrative form. (The few scholars who have worked into their commentary any analysis of how the narrative is constructed have focused on how the text privileges polyvocality and an unconventional time scale.) I argue that Half of a Yellow Sun, by communicating space via a projective rather than a topological perspective, gives allegiance to the lived, “on the ground” reality of Nigeria during the Biafran Civil War rather than to a more objective, official perspective. Likewise, the text’s three focalizers’ lived experiences undercut the pro-Biafran message of the narrator—the “official” voice of the text—and the separatist doctrine characteristic of the Biafran War.
Formal and Content-Based Critiques of Authority: A Postcolonial Narratological Reading of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun
In a seminal moment of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2006 novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, an anonymous author states, “Starvation was a Nigerian weapon of war. Starvation broke Biafra and brought Biafra fame and made Biafra last as long as it did” (296-297). It is striking that chapters of a book appear as a metanarrative peppered through the main narrative of Half of a Yellow Sun. The metanarrative suggests a departure from the narrator’s voice and serves to remind readers of two issues central to the text: the devastating nature of the Biafran Civil War and the question of who is privileged to tell Biafra’s story. Half of a Yellow Sun’s heterodiegetic narrator remains committed throughout the novel to propagating the “official” pro-War doctrine of the leaders of Biafra. The metanarrative book chapters, however, deviate from the narrator’s ideology and suggest that the War has far more negative consequences than the narrator will admit. Why would an anti-War metanarrative appear scattered throughout a text whose narrator is so adamantly in favor of the War? The disconnect between what the metanarrative and the narrator each seem to be communicating about the War is especially interesting given the historical context and what we know to be factually true about the Biafran War.
The Biafran Civil War broke out in 1967, seven years after Nigerian gained its independence from British colonial rule. The Southeastern corner of Nigeria—dubbed “Biafra” and the setting for Half of a Yellow Sun—wanted to succeed from the rest of Nigeria for both economic and ethnic reasons. In the ensuing two-and-a-half years of fighting, there were approximately 100 million military causalities and between one-half and two million civilian causalities, mostly Biafrans who died from starvation. The war displaced an additional ten million people. Examining Half of a Yellow Sun, it is important to keep in mind the historic reality of just how devastating the Biafran War (also known as the Nigerian Civil War) was to those living in Biafra. My reading of the text explores the disconnect between this historic reality, which, I argue, the novel communicates implicitly, and what the narrator of Adichie’s novel explicitly says about the Biafran War.
In this paper, I argue that in both its content and its form Half of a Yellow Sun is a critique of authoritative power. By communicating space via projective rather than topological locations, the text gives allegiance to the lived, “on the ground” experience rather than to that of an outsider; likewise, the text’s three focalizers’ lived experiences undercut the pro-Biafran message of the narrator—the “official” voice of the text—and the very separatist doctrine characteristic of the Biafran War. My argument takes shape in two parts: First, I examine how the novel represents space, which is especially interesting given the topic of the text, for the existence (or non-existence) of Biafra and who lays claim to Nigeria are crucial tensions in Half of a Yellow Sun. Then, I shift focus to explore narration and who speaks in the novel, another concern central to the text and one that the passage I discuss at the start of this paper—in which a metanarrative interrupts the narrator’s otherwise continuous voice—foregrounds.
Scholars interested in Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun tend to talk about it in one of three main ways. First, there are those who read the text as an allegory for what was happening politically in Nigeria during the 1960s. In her 2014 article “‘She is Waiting,’” Meredith Coffey interprets Half of a Yellow Sun as a metaphor for the rise and fall of the state of Biafra. She writes, “In this essay, I read Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) as a political allegory, legible within its characters’ personal relationships and historical circumstances” (63). A second group of scholars are those who privilege intertextuality in Half of a Yellow Sun. Many read the text as a response to or in conversation with works by Chinua Achebe. Aghogho Akpome, in his 2017 article “Intertextuality and Influence,” “explores the apparent influence of Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah on Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s award-winning second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, with regard to the literary re-historicization of the Nigerian Civil War” (530). Others read Adichie’s text in light of novels by Chris Abani. For example, Madhu Krishnan, in his 2013 article “On National Culture and the Projective Past,” argues that in both Abani’s Graceland and Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, “the construction of a new communitarian identification is evident. This new identification is one that simultaneously transcends the confines of national consciousness while refraining from discarding the nation, as community, entirely” (187).
Finally, a third trend in scholarship on Half of a Yellow Sun is to argue that the text is quintessentially Biafran, suggesting that the novel is Adichie’s way of writing homage to Biafra, a nation that never could be. Chitra Thrivikraman Nair, in her 2014 article “Negotiation of Socio-Ethnic Spaces,” writes of Half of a Yellow Sun as a text deeply steeped in the pro-separatist doctrine of Biafra during the War. She argues that the novel illuminates and privileges “the attempts of the Igbo population to justify their need to have a separate state for themselves” and concludes that the novel is “an articulation of Biafran and Igbo negotiation of a space for themselves in the geo-political landscape in Nigeria after the Nigeria–Biafra civil war” (Nair 209, 203). Likewise, Akpome, in the aforementioned “Intertextuality and Influence,” writes of “Adichie’s unapologetic defense of Biafra in Half of a Yellow Sun” (539).
What is missing from the repertoire of scholarship on Half of a Yellow Sun, and what my perspective contributes, is a comprehensive narratological reading of the novel. Scholars thus far overlook the formal elements of this text. Narrative theory helps me more deeply understand the novel, for with it in mind I recognize how the novel’s postcolonial themes—power and identity—play out not only in the novel’s content but also in its form. Neglecting to analyze the narrative structures of Half of a Yellow Sun, we fail to recognize how the text’s construction contributes to its message; we miss the formal ways that Adichie’s novel is a critique of authority.
I am not the first to note that scholarship on the narrative form of Half of a Yellow Sun is lacking. Aghogho Akpome too, in his 2013 article, “Focalisation and Polyvocality in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun,” notes the general lack of narratological scholarship on Adichie’s text: “commentary on the issues of structure and narrative technique remains limited…the bulk of criticism of Adichie’s work remains slanted towards ideological and thematic concerns” (25). The few scholars, Akpone included, who have incorporated any narratology into their studies on Half of a Yellow Sun have done so only minimally and have tended to focus on the text’s multiple narrative voices and on its non-linear timeline. In her 2016 article “Sidestepping the Political ‘Graveyard of Creativity,’” Maya Ganapathy, comments on Half of a Yellow Sun’s “polyphonic form” and on its “temporary gaps,” although her essay mainly focuses on intertextuality in the novel (90). Likewise, Akpome mentions the novel’s “decentralized narrative technique” and its “[innovative] temporal structure,” yet the bulk of his essay’s argument concerns recognizing the centrality of Ugwu as a character (“Focalisation and Polyvocality” 25). Evidently, however, a more comprehensive narratological reading of the text is in order.
By addressing not only the formal structures of the text but also its thematic content, I argue that we best understand Half of a Yellow Sun when approached from a postcolonial narratological perspective. Scholar Marion Gymnich, in her 2002 article “Linguistics and Narratology: The Relevance of Linguistic Criteria to Postcolonial Narratology,” defines the field of postcolonial narratology as “the exploration of relationships between narrative structures and those questions, themes, and categories which are of central importance to Postcolonial Studies” (62). She continues: “Postcolonial narratology, thus, shows how concepts of identity and alterity or categories such as ethnicity, race, class, and gender are constructed, perpetuated or subverted in narrative texts” (62). Gymnich outlines the theory behind the approach I take with Adichie’s novel in this essay.
My approach to Half of a Yellow Sun has implications beyond our understanding of this particular text. Postcolonial narratology is a school of thought, as of yet, in its infancy. Narrative scholars tend to analyze “ethnic” literature—that is, literature produced by non-white authors—in the context of its non-white authorship, from what Christopher González, in Permissible Narrative: The Promise of Latino/a Literature, calls an “identity-based, a priori stance” (8, emphasis in original). As such, scholars far too often neglect formal analysis of “ethnic” literature. Noting the absence of non-white texts in narrative scholarship James J. Donahue, in the introduction to Narrative, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States, writes, “there is one major literary tradition that, as yet, has not fully explored issues of race and ethnicity, either as a subject in its own right or as a means by which to challenge the methodological assumptions of that school: narrative theory” (2). Yet even Donahue and González, writing some of the most cutting-edge works of postcolonial narratology, focus on the works of non-white authors residing in the West. Donahue calls upon scholars to “explore how race and ethnicity might force us to reconsider what we know about the nature of narrative” and to ask how “texts from ‘ethnic’ literary traditions force us to rethink the tools of narrative theory” (3, emphasis in original). But the scope of his and González’s texts exclude non-Western writers like Adichie; scholars have yet to apply the ideas of postcolonial narratology to African texts. By approaching Adichie’s work through postcolonial narratology, I diversify and advance the field of postcolonial narratology and draw attention to how issues of identity relate to understandings of space and how narration is a form of power.
Projective Space – Challenging Neocolonial Understandings of Space
The first way in which Half of a Yellow Sun critiques authoritative power is through the novel’s representation of space. The narrator describes space only projectively and never topologically. In this way, the text gives allegiance to the on-the-ground, lived experiences of characters. David Herman, in his 2012 article “Spatial Reference in Narrative Domains,” articulates the difference between projective and topological understandings of space. He writes, quoting William Frawley’s Linguistic Semantics, “Whereas topology ‘is the study of the geometric properties of objects that are invariant under change of the object’; projective locations are ones that ‘vary in value and interpretation depending on how they are viewed’, thus relying on an orientative framework projected by the viewer” (qtd in Herman 528). In other words, while topological locations are objective, static, and “map-like” or “from above,” projective ones are subjective and relative, determined by the viewer’s position.
Consider the following description of space presented in Half of a Yellow Sun through the character Olanna, a young, well-educated woman living in Biafra but originally from farther north: “Olanna chose not to fly up to Kano. She liked to sit by the train window and watch the thick woods sliding past, the grassy plains unfurling, the cattle swinging their tails as they were herded by bare-chested nomads” (Adichie 46). In these lines, Olanna literally is choosing to view the world from the ground. While flying in a plane would put Olanna physically above the ground and give her the ability to see the world topologically, she instead rides the train, which gives her a projective perspective of space. Furthermore, Olanna’s projective understanding of space lends itself to noticing small details. She comments on minute differences between parts of Nigeria, saying, “Here, the sand was fine gray, and sun-seared, nothing like the clumpy red earth back home; the trees were tame, unlike the bursting greenness that sprang up and cast shadows on the road to Umunnachi” (46). These are not the types of details that a topological understanding of space would allow. Thus, by privileging Olanna’s perspective and her projective view of Nigeria, the novel demonstrates its allegiance to the lived, on-the-ground experiences of individual characters.
Furthermore, Half of a Yellow Sun’s use of projective rather than topological locations has political implications; it suggests that the text values the experiences of individuals living through the Biafran War over any sort of “official” (governmental or otherwise) record of the War. We see this most clearly when we recognize that the text’s refusal to use topological descriptions challenges colonial and neocolonial understandings of space, for scholars tend to associate topological, map-like descriptions of space with colonial and neocolonial powers. Mary Louise Pratt, in her book Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, identifies a trope among colonial writers which she coins the “monarch-of-all-I-survey.” Pratt argues that colonizers tend to describe the lands they conquer topologically, with what she calls “promontory descriptions” (202). Colonial and postcolonial foreign elites typically present the places and spaces they are “settling” or “conquering” from above and with a bird’s-eye-view; they “perch themselves to paint the significance and value of what they see” (216). The novel’s refusal to describe space topologically, therefore, is a challenge to colonial and neocolonial authority, which always describes space from above, topologically. Instead, Adichie’s novel privileges and gives voice to the lived, on-the-ground experiences of individuals.
In describing space projectively, the novel demonstrates its commitment to representing the reality of life “on the ground” in Biafra. For example, when Olanna drives from Nsukka to Enugu, she notices how “the narrow roads that ran through Milliken Hill, with a deep gully on one side and a steep hill on the other” and on how “the hibiscuses and bougainvillea took on an incandescent patina over their reds and pinks” (Adichie 32, 40). The details she notices would not be included in a more top-down, topological understanding of space. As readers, such descriptions of space lend insight into what it is like to live in this world. We can imagine the flowers as Olanna sees them, imagine what driving along these narrow roads might be like. What we do not get, however, is a geographical understanding of the path Olanna travels. Olanna drives from Nsukka to Enugu, but the text does not tell us which direction she goes, how far apart these cities lie, or whether or not they are in Biafra, details a topological description of space likely would reveal. That the text describes space projecively rather than topologically suggests its interest in the individual experience, rather more universal understanding, of life in Nigeria and Biafra.
Olanna is not the only character through whom readers gleam a projective understanding of Nigeria; when we first meet Ugwu, he is walking from his village to Nsukka, where he is to begin working as a houseboy for Olanna and her partner Odenigbo. Like Olanna, Ugwu too notes details that a top-down, topographical perspective would not provide, saying, “the bungalows here were painted the color of the sky and sat side by side like polite well-dressed men…the hedges separating them were trimmed so flat on top that they looked like tables wrapped with leaves” (4). Specifically, the use of similes—the way Ugwu compares “bungalows” to “polite well-dressed men” and “hedges” to “tables wrapped with leaves”—demonstrates that the text is privileging an “on the ground” and the unique experience of Ugwu (4). Were the text interested in capturing a colonial or neocolonial perspective on Nigeria, we would expect a more objective, topological (“promontory,” in the words of Pratt) perspective of Nsukka (Pratt 202). However, instead we see Nsukka through Ugwu’s eyes, understanding it through his similes. Therefore, the text, in describing space projectively rather than topologically—according to how characters experience it rather than objectively—challenges colonial and neocolonial authority and its tendency to describe space topologically.
Other scholars have likewise noted how Adichie’s text privileges and foregrounds the experiences of individuals. Akpome, in “Intertextuality and Influence,” for example, compares Half of a Yellow Sun to Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah, and writes that “[Adichie] focuses on the minutiae of the violence of the war, the personal tragedies and their lingering traumas, details which are not included in the broader, ‘bird’s-eye’ account of Anthills of the Savannah” (537). His reference here to the “bird’s-eye perspective” of Achebe’s text alludes to the absence of topological locations in Half of a Yellow Sun. Likewise, Nair and I are in agreement that the text is less interested in the large-scale politics of the Biafran War—what I refer to as the “official” record of the War—and instead foregrounds the lives of individual characters and their experiences. As such, she writes, “Characters like Olanna, Odenigbo, Ugwu and other Biafrans are not concerned with the political implications of the war. The romanticized, exotic images of the war do not attract them; on the contrary, they are more concerned with its practical implications and realities, in particular the matter of sheer survival in a war-ridden society” (Nair 205-206). Akpome and Nair gleam the text’s privileging of the individual over the collective or “official” experience. However, my narratological examination of the text illuminates how the text’s foregrounds individual experiences not only in its content but also in its narrative form, through its representation of space.
Furthermore, we must consider the ideological implications of the text’s refusal to describe space in a topological, or “map-like,” way. The Biafran War was fundamentally a conflict over national borders. Biafrans wanted to redraw the map such that Nigeria and Biafra were two separate nations. By never describing space topologically, Half of a Yellow Sun refuses to represent Nigeria in terms of its national borders, which suggests that the text is interested in challenging the ideology of separatism—and the desire to split Nigeria in two—that underlies the Biafran cause. Thus, in never using topological descriptions of space, the text refuses to describe Nigeria according to its national borders and consequently refutes the thinking associated with the neocolonial authorities who favor the doctrine of separatism and the Biafran War.
Adichie’s use of projective descriptions of space, I argue, is a reaction to and against the colonial and neocolonial focus on Nigeria’s national borders. The postcolonial scholar Dennis Lee, in his essay “Writing in Colonial Space,” writes about the impossibility of writing authentically in the language of the colonizers, asserting, “To speak unreflectingly in a colony, then, is to use words that speak only alien space…your authentic space does not have words” (Lee 349). What Lee suggests is the difficulty of writing about a place—Nigeria, in Adichie’s case—using a language from colonizers. Adichie, thus, in writing about Nigeria—a place fundamentally created by colonizers—using English, a colonial language, navigates complicated politics. If, as Lee suggests, using English means “us[ing] words that speak only of alien space,” then how can Adichie reclaim English as a language appropriate for writing about Nigeria? I argue that one way in which Adichie reclaims English is by describing space only projectivity and never topologically. Because, as Pratt tells us, we associate topological descriptions with colonial powers, Half of a Yellow Sun’s sole use of projective descriptions is a reaction to the way that British colonizers mapped and arbitrarily created boundaries in Nigeria. Thus, when we consider the ideological implications of the text’s refusal to discuss about Nigeria in terms of its national borders, we recognize how the novel challenges the neocolonial authorities who retain power in Nigeria and Biafra by maintaining the structures, such as national borders, during colonization.
Focalization – Challenging the Narrator and the Ideology of the Biafran War
I now shift the focus of this paper from examining the representation of space to examining the implications of focalization in Adichie’s novel. First, I argue that the experiences of the three focalizers—Olanna, Ugwu, and Richard—challenge the narrator’s authority and their explicitly pro-Biafran message. Then, I demonstrate how the structure of focalization itself in the text is a challenge to the separatist doctrine of the Biafran War.
Before I present my arguments, I must clarify what focalization is and how it differs from narration. H. Porter Abbott, in The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, differentiates between the narrator and the focalizer of a text, defining the narrator as the “one who tells a story” and the focalizer as “the position of quality of consciousness through which we ‘see’ events in the narrative” (238, 233). In other words, the narrator is the one who “speaks” while the focalizer is the one through whose eyes readers “see” the story. With Abbott’s distinction in mind, I argue that anything explicitly stated in the text—even lines stated through the dialogue of a character or focalizer—comes from the narrator, the “official voice” of the text. I deem the narrator’s the “official voice” because of the tendency among narrative scholars to attribute to narrators a certain command. Gymnich, for example, calls narrators “those textual speakers who are by default associated with the highest degree of authority by the readers” and says, “heterodiegetic/third-person narrators…are generally associated with even more authority than homodiegetic narrators” (65, 66). The heterodiegetic narrator in Half of a Yellow Sun, has a certain amount of authority in the text and, for this reason, I consider the narrator the “official” voice of the text.
Taken at face value, Half of a Yellow Sun’s narrator explicitly communicates a pro-Biafran and pro-War message. Early on during the War, all Biafrans seem sure their side will emerge victorious, and the narrator privileges their pro-Biafran thoughts and words. Olanna tells Ugwu, “Our soldiers will drive the Nigerians back in a week or two” (Adichie 223). And Odenigbo, says, with “his usual forceful reassurance,” “we’ll get our life back soon, in a free Biafra” (328). He talks frequently “about the great nation that Biafra would be” (328). Even when it becomes increasingly clear that the Biafran cause is doomed, characters continue to propagate the War effort, saying, “Our boys are showing them!” and, “Biafra will win this war, God has written it in the sky” (362). Indeed, the narrator’s foregrounding characters’ confidence that the War is just and that Biafra will emerge victorious suggests the narrator’s pro-Biafran stance. However, despite the text’s explicitly pro-Biafran message, the experiences of the three focalizers reveal how devastating the War is and, as a result, undercut the pro-Biafran sentiment of the narrator, the “official voice” of the text. In this way, through focalization and the disconnect between the text’s explicit and implicit messages are, the text challenges authority by subverting the narrator’s voice.
Olanna’s experience visiting the refugee camp that her sister Kainene helps run highlights the disconnect between what the narrator says and what the focalizers experience and demonstrates how focalization undercuts the narrator’s authority. Olanna describes the refugee children: “They were naked, the taut globes that were their bellies would not fit in a shirt anyway. Their buttocks and chests were collapsed into folds of rumpled skin. On their heads spurts of reddish hair” (437). Nowhere in this description does the text say outright that the children are starving and literally dying. In fact, there is no possibility that the text ever would say that, because anything explicitly stated comes from the narrator, and it would go against the beliefs of the pro-War narrator to show Biafrans struggling. Yet, by reading between the lines, we can intuit what dire circumstances these refugee children face. Through Olanna’s experience, we as readers come to understand the devastation of the Biafran War. Furthermore, Olanna twice asks, “How many die a day?” (438). But nobody answers her. Here, we as readers must literally read for what remains unsaid. For, in not answering, the text refuses to give voice to the focalizers’ experiences. Nobody answers Olanna because the truth about how many refugees die daily would run counter to the narrator’s “official” pro-War message. When we recognize what is unsaid here—the truth about how many refugees are dying daily—we recognize the disconnect between the explicit message of the narrator and the experiences of the characters. Olanna’s time at the refugee camp, implicitly, paints a very different picture than the narrator’s continual confidence that Biafra “will win this thing” (497). Thus, the experiences of Olanna, as a focalizer, begin to undercut the pro-Biafran sentiment of the narrator.
Likewise, despite the narrator’s continual conviction about the righteousness of Biafra’s cause, Ugwu’s experience fighting in the War, once again, serves to undermine the narrator’s authority and pro-Biafran sentiment. Ugwu is conscripted and forced against his will to fight for Biafra, the first indication that the War effort may not be as popular or going as successfully as the narrator’s confidence would suggest. At the training camp, which is located in an old school building, the living conditions Ugwu faces are poor: “The mats and mattresses arranged in the classroom crawled with vicious bedbugs” and the soldiers are underfed, for “the thin soup scooped from a metal basin once a day, left him hungry” (450). Although the narrator retains their explicitly pro-Biafran message, the conditions that Ugwu and his fellow soldiers face suggest otherwise. Furthermore, Ugwu notes that “the commander [was] the only one with a full uniform, sharply ironed and stiff” and describes those around him as “the skinny soldiers—with no boots, no uniforms, no half of a yellow sun on their sleeves” (451, 450). The lack of food and uniforms suggests that, contrary to the narrator’s pro-War sentiment, the Biafran cause is failing. When we thus recognize the disconnect between what the narrator says and what the focalizers’ experiences suggest, we can recognize that these experiences undercut the pro-War message of the narrator and reveal a bleaker, grim picture of the reality of life during the Biafran War.
Furthermore, the structure of focalization in Half of a Yellow Sun—that the story is told through the perspectives of three focalizers—challenges the separatist doctrine that underlies the Biafran War. The Biafran War, waged to divide Nigeria into two, was fundamentally a conflict deeply rooted in the ideology of separatism. The War effort aimed to highlight divisions and differences between people and, ultimately, to geopolitically separate “Biafrans” from “non-Biafran” Nigerians.
Half of a Yellow Sun is focalized through three very different characters, each of whom has one particularly salient identity, a defining aspect of their identity that makes them different and unique when compared to the other focalizers. For Ugwu, it is his class; he is a poor boy from rural Nigeria. For Olanna, it is her gender; she is the only female focalizer. And for Richard, it is his race; while Ugwu and Olanna are both black, Richard is a white British expatriate living in Nigeria. For a text about a War fundamentally interested in divisions and what divides people, we might expect that these three unique focalizers would experience the War very differently; however; this is not so. In fact, Ugwu, Olanna, and Richard, despite their diverse identities, all experience the Biafran War in remarkably similar ways; namely, all three focalizers experience trauma and terror as well as intense loss and grief. In this way, the narrative structure of Half of a Yellow Sun—that it is told through three focalizers whose experiences of the war are so similar—challenges the doctrine of separatism that is at the heart of the Biafran cause. The doctrine upon which the War is based, I argue, is yet another source of authority that the text is interested in challenging.
Ugwu, conscripted and forced to fight for Biafra, experiences near constant terror, always fearing for his life, while at the front. What he sees, what he experiences while fighting, is truly too horrifying for him to comprehend. He describes having to disconnect his actions from his thoughts and emotions in order to witness the brutality and death around him and yet continue fighting: “He unwrapped his mind from his body, separated the two, while he lay in the trench, pressing himself into the mud” (458). Ugwu is so afraid, so terrified that that he copes by turning off and escaping from his mind. He cannot think about the killing and the death of which he is now a part. It is only later, when Ugwu is not fighting and the memories of what he has seen and done return to him, that we can recognize just how traumatizing fighting is for Ugwu: “Back at the camp, his memory became clear; he remembered the man who placed both hands on his blown-open belly as though to hold his intestines in, the one who mumbled something about his son before he stiffened” (458). The horrors of the War haunt Ugwu; in moments such as this when he processes his memories, he relives the distress and the anguish he had previously tried so hard to avoid. More important than what specifically is Ugwu’s experience during the War is how similar his experience is to the other focalizers’, for it is these similarities, despite the focalizers’ decidedly different identities, that reveal how the text uses focalization to subvert the doctrine of separatism underlying the Biafran War.
Olanna too seems to be in a near constant state of terror during the War. She worries incessantly for her daughter, saying that “her greatest fear was that Baby would die” (333). The fear of air raids becomes ingrained in her such that “Olanna jumped each time she heard thunder [because] she imagined another air raid, bombs rolling out of a plane and exploding in the compound before she and Odenigbo and Baby and Ugwu could reach the bunker down the street” (327). Olanna’s identity, we must remember, is nothing like Ugwu’s. She is wealthy and well-educated, a mother. Ugwu comes from a poor, uneducated family and is forced against his will to join the army. And yet these two very different characters both experience deep terror and trauma because of the War. Their common experiences highlight what is the same between these two very different individuals rather than what is different. In this way, focalization serves to challenge the separatist doctrine of the Biafran War.
Like Ugwu and Olanna, Richard too—despite not being a native of Nigeria and despite residing in a different part of Biafra—experiences similar terror as he lives through the Biafran War. When the first air raid hits Port Harcourt, Richard watches his houseboy Ikejide die a gruesome death: “A piece of shrapnel, the size of a fist, wheezed past. Ikejide was still running and, in the moment that Richard glanced away and back, Ikejide’s head was gone. The body was running, arched slightly forward, arms flying around, but there was not head. There was only a bloodied neck” (398). Ikejide’s violent death traumatizes Richard. He becomes unsure how to cope. Likewise, although he wants to comfort Kainene, he feels there is nothing he can say: “She wanted him to tell her that she was mistaken about the whole thing,” about seeing Ikejide beheaded, but although “he wished he could,” he says nothing (399). He knows not what to say nor how to cope with this traumatic experience. Thus, Richard’s experiences of terror and trauma during the War are very similar to the experiences of the text’s other focalizers, Olanna and Ugwu. In this way, the very structure of focalization in Half of a Yellow Sun—that is, three very distinctive focalizers who each experience the Biafran War so similarly—undercuts the ideology of separatism that underlies the Biafran cause.
Beyond fear, Ugwu, Olanna, and Richard all experience loss and grief as a result of the War, which further demonstrates how the structure of focalization, in highlighting the similarities of the focalizers’ experiences, undercuts the separatist doctrine of the War. Ugwu is separated from his family for an extended period of time during the War, during which time much has changed. His mother has died, and he mourns for her loss: “Ugwu sank to his knees, placed his forehead on the ground, and wrapped his hands around his head, as if to shield himself from something that would fall from above, as if it were the only position he could adopt to absorb his mother’s death” (252). His grief is palpable, almost physically tangible to a reader. Similarly, something has changed in his beloved sister Anulika: “There were no energetic gestures, no sharp wit in her answers…She looked away often, as if she felt uncomfortable sitting with him, and Ugwu wondered if he had imagined the easy bond they had shared” (252). Although Anulika will not talk about what happened to her, a relative later tells Ugwu how soldiers attacked and raped Anulika: “They forced themselves on her. Five of them…They nearly beat her to death. One of her eyes has refused to open well since” (526). The War stole from Ugwu his mother and the relationship he once had with his sister. He feels a keen sense of loss; with his mother gone and his sister irrevocably changed, home no longer feels like home. Further, “Ugwu took a walk around the village, and when he got to the stream he remembered the line of women going to fetch water in the mornings, and he sat down on a rock and sobbed” (526). The intense nostalgia that Ugwu feels for all he has lost—for all that the War has stolen from him—brings him to tears.
Olanna too experiences profound loss during the Biafran War. Both she and Ugwu experience loss tangibly—for the War takes millions of lives—and intangibly—for Ugwu no longer feels a connection to his home and Olanna stops feeling safe. Olanna’s tries to visit her aunt and uncle only to find they have been killed: “Uncle Mbaezi lay facedown in an ungainly twist, legs splayed. Something creamy-white oozed through the large gash on the back of his head. Aunty Ifeka lay on the veranda. The cuts on her naked body were smaller, dotting her arms and legs…” (186). Besides losing loved relatives, itself deeply painful, Olanna also loses her sense of safety and security. She begins to experience what she calls Dark Swoops. “That night, she had the first Dark Swoop: A think blanket descended from above and pressed itself over her face, firmly, while she struggled to breathe. Then, when it let go, freeing her to take in gulp after gulp of air, she saw burning owls at the window grinning and beckoning to her with charred feathers” (196). The Dark Swoops represent Olanna’s having lost her sense of safety in the world. Much in the way that Ugwu no longer has a sense of home, Olanna too has undergone an abstract form of loss. Furthermore, Olanna’s relationship with her partner Odenigbo becomes strained after his mother is killed. She feels unable to connect with her Odenigbo; “She sensed the layers of his grief…but she did not feel connected to his mourning” (404). And after Odenigbo unsuccessfully tries to find his mother’s body, Olanna recalls that she “no longer remembered the hours of waiting for Odenigbo to come back, but she did remember the sensation of blindness, of cold sheaths begin drawn over her eyes” (404). Not only does Odenigbo lose his mother, but also Olanna and Odenigbo lose one another. Olanna recognizes that their relationship will never recover: “she knew he would not be the same again” (404). Loss—via death or emotional disconnect—happens as a result of the War.
Finally, Richard, like the other two focalizers, also experiences loss as a result of the War. His partner Kainene crosses into enemy territory one day towards the end of the War and never returns. As he goes out in search of her, “Richard felt himself tumbling through a tunnel, felt the weight being sucked off him hour after hour” (509). Losing Kainene is incredibly painful for Richard. When he eventually comes to accept that she is gone—and that he is unlikely to ever know what happened to her—he recognizes that he never truly will recover from this loss: “Darkness descended on him, and when it lifted he knew that he would never see Kainene again and that his life would always be like a candlelit room; he would see things only in shadow, only in half glimpses” (537). The War took his love for him, and the world will never be whole for him without Kainene. Moreover, Richard’s descriptions of what it feels like to lose Kainene—specifically the language of “darkness,” “a candlelit room” and “shadow[s]”—parallel how Olanna experiences losing her sense of safety via the “dark swoops” (537, 196). That two focalizers use the same figurative language of darkness to describe loss is further evidence for how similar the focalizers’ experiences the War are. The similarity of their experiences serves to undercut the doctrine of separatism and the War’s reliance upon an ideology rooted in differences and what divides people. Evidently, experiences of terror and loss are common for those living through the Biafran War. Indeed, Ugwu, Olanna, and Richard, despite considerable differences in their identities, all experience the War in remarkably similar ways. Thus, Half of a Yellow Sun suggests through its multiple focalizers that what is common between characters far outweighs what divides them and makes them different. In this way, the text challenges authority and the doctrine of separatism underlying the War.
Although Half of a Yellow Sun, when taken purely at face value, may appear to be a text interested in promoting the Biafran cause, a narratological examination of space and focalization in the text suggest the presence of a deeper message, one that reveals just how destructive and brutal the Biafran Civil War was. Space in the novel is described purely projectively and never topologically, which suggests the text’s allegiance to the experiences of individuals over an “official” (governmental or otherwise) understanding of space. For a text interested in the politics of national borders—in whether Biafra should remain a part of Nigeria or become independent—it is striking that the novel refuses to describe space in a “map-like manner.” The absence of topological representations of space works to undermine the pro-Biafran sentiment the novel’s narrator. Likewise, projective representations of space challenge neocolonial authority, with which scholars tend to associate topological representations of space. Furthermore, when we examine focalization in the text, we realize that it serves to critique authority in two ways. First, the experiences of the focalizers—Olanna, Ugwu, and Richard—undermine the narrator’s explicitly pro-Biafran message. And second, the structure of focalization itself—that the text is focalized through the eyes of three very diverse characters whose experiences during the War are all remarkably similar—which further undercuts the separatist doctrine that underlies the Biafran War cause.
In this way, my postcolonial narratological reading of Adichie’s text suggests that counter to those who write of the novel as homage to Biafran, the text is actually much more interested in capturing the reality of life for and the authentic experiences of individuals who lived through the Biafran War. Scholars who neglect to study the narrative form of Half of a Yellow Sun tend to miss this aspect of the text and thus fail to recognize the disconnect between what the narrator explicitly says and what the text, when we foreground the importance of form, implicitly suggests about the Biafran War. As my paper suggests about Half of a Yellow Sun, reading novels in light of postcolonial narrative theory can, and will, reveal about texts new insights that we otherwise will miss. The field of postcolonial narratology is in its infancy, and scholars need to do more work at the intersection of these two fields. Specifically, scholars thus far have focused primarily on the works of non-white authors residing in the West. To better understand the nature of narrative, however, we must consider all texts. Studying the narratives of African writers like Adichie furthers narrative theory by exploring whether our existing understanding of how narratives function applies to non-white and non-Western texts.
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