206 - War and Violence in Adichie's Novel Half of a Yellow Sun

1. War and Violence in
Adichie’s Novel
Half of a Yellow Sun

2. ❏ NAME: DHVANI RAJYAGURU
❏ PAPER NAME: AFRICAN
LITERATURE
❏ PRESENTATION TOPIC : War and
Violence in Adichie’s Novel Half of a
Yellow Sun
❏ ROLL NO:04
❏ EMAIL ID:
dhvanirajyaguru22@gmail.com
❏ DEPARTMENT NAME: DEP OF
ENGLISH,MKBU
UNIVERSITY,BHAVNAGAR.

3. Table of Content:
❏ Introduction
❏ Brief of Author
❏ Brief of Nigerian Civil War
❏ Summary of Novel
❏ War and Violence shown in Novel
❏ Conclusion

4. Introduction:
❏ War is an armed conflict.(Chinyere, 1)
❏ Last year, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie gave the inaugural Gabriel García
Márquez lecture and spoke about truth and storytelling. “To start a story, a true
story, thinking of balance is already to place an obstacle in the path of that
story,” she said. “Because what one must focus on is not balance, but
truth.”(Jordison and Saini)
❏ Graceful Evocation of forgotten time.(Afzal)

5. Brief
Of
Author:
❏ Born on september 15, 1977 in Enugu, Nigeria.
❏ Grew up in Nsukka, a university town in South Eastern
Nigeria, where her family lived in the house formerly owned
by fellow Nigerian writer, Chinua Achebe.
❏ Her father was a Statistics Professorand her mother a
Registrar at the University.
❏ First novel, Purple Hibiscus(2003) won the commonwealth
writers' prize for best first book and her second novel Half
of A Yellow Sun(2006), an historical fiction that is set
during the Nigerian Biafran war and tells the story of two
sisters, won the 2007 orange prize.
❏ Third book is a collection of short stories published in 2009
called The Thing Around Your Neck. It was shortlisted for
the 2009 John Llewellynrhys memorial prize and zolo
commonwealth writers prize.
❏ Adichie was selected in zolo as one of the New Yorker's “20
under 40” writers. (Afzal)

6. Brief Information of Nigerian War:
❏ Nigerian Civil War, also called Nigerian-Biafran War.
❏ War between Nigeria’s federal government and the breakaway state Biafra from 1967 to 1970.
❏ After Nigeria became independent in 1960, the new country sought to combine groups divided by ethnicity and
religion.
❏ When the Northern coup resulted in the murder of military and civilian members of the Igbo (Ibo) people in
1967, they declared their homeland, the Eastern region, independent. It was now known as the Republic of
Biafra, and Odumegwu Ojukwu was its leader.
❏ In the increasingly vicious war that followed, the FMG, with its superior forces, ruthlessly drove back the Biafran
fighters. Appalling hardship ensued for the civilian population of Biafra: massacres were reported as the FMG’s
soldiers advanced, and famine took hold after the Nigerian government blockaded Biafra and banned Red
Cross aid.
❏ As the world sat on its hands and ignored the developing humanitarian disaster, hundreds of thousands died of
malnutrition before Biafran resistance was eliminated in 1970.
❏ The Republic of Biafra ceased to exist after its officers surrendered in January 1970.(Britannica)

7. Summary:
❏ Title: from the rising sun on the official flag of Biafra covers the war and the years
leading up to it in a sweeping story that provides both a harrowing history lesson
and an engagingly human narrative.
❏ Central characters are a pair of upper-class twin sisters — Olanna and Kainene —
and the people most closely connected to them.
❏ Beautiful London-educated Olanna, as the story begins, is in love with Odenigbo.
❏ Odenigbo is idolized by his newly arrived young servant Ugwu, a village boy
stunned by his master’s comparatively opulent lifestyle.

8. 8
❏ Kainene, Olanna’s twin, is a shrewd businesswoman adept at the deal-making that has also
made their father rich and powerful. She falls in love with Richard, a mild-mannered white
English writer smitten with Igbo culture. As the rebellion begins, Kainene sees motives that
escape her more naive associates: “Richard was surprised when he heard the
announcement that the federal government had declared a police action to bring the rebels
to order. Kainene was not. ‘It’s the oil,’ she said. ‘They can’t let us go easily with all that oil.’
“
❏ Adichie (“Purple Hibiscus”) shifts points of view among the central characters, keeping
their stories always in the foreground. She also alternates between the pre-war and war
years, wrapping the emerging political conflict in a rich and involving drama.
❏ Olanna and Kainene, embarked on very different roads, become increasingly estranged;
both are almost embarrassed by their parents, wealthy dilettantes. A central crisis of
unfaithfulness drives the sisters still further apart and threatens Olanna’s relationship with
Odenigbo. Ugwu, perhaps most engaging of all the characters, grows by book’s end from a
young boy into a scarred and guilt-ridden battle veteran.
❏ Adichie, born seven years after the war, puts a powerfully human face on this sobering
story, which is far from over. Second-generation secessionist tensions in the former Biafra
continue to simmer. (JACOB)

9. War and Violence shown in Novel
❏ Pre War and Post
War
❏ Memory of War
❏ Memories of War
❏ Racism
❏ Horror Scenes of
War
❏ Violence

10. Racism:
❏ In the novel Half of a Yellow Sun, one of the protagonists Odenigbo states “The white man brought
racism into the world.” (253) .
❏ The British simply drew lines on the map in order to create political entities while colonizing Africa.
❏ When the map of Nigeria was drawn, two different ethnic groups – Hausa and Igbo were put together.
The predominant differences among them were Hausa who were largely Muslims followed feudalism
whereas Igbo mainly Christians pursued a democratic society.
❏ After the independence of Nigeria in 1960, the conflict between Hausa and Igbo became crucial to their
identities.
❏ The fights led the Igbos to secede from Nigeria and form a new country called Biafra.
❏ As a result the war took place in order to prevent the secession and to add the region back into the
country of Nigeria.
❏ The Biafrans suffered from hunger and starvation and claimed that Nigeria was using hunger and
genocide to win the war.
❏ In the end, Nigeria won the war and retained its stature as a unified nation but still the ethnic groups do
not identify with each other.

11. ❏ According to Thahiya Afzal:
❏ Half of a Yellow Sun goes back and forth between pre- war (The Early Sixties) and post- war
(The Late Sixties).
❏ The novel gives a detailed account of the war through the experience of its five main
characters: the twin sisters Olanna and Kainene, their spouses Odenigbo and Richard, and
Ugwu, Odenigbo’s houseboy.
❏ The story presents the lives of Odenigbo and Olanna belonging to the rational community at
Nsukka.
❏ Odenigbo is the strong advocator of Biafra secession along with Chief Ojukwu. Odenigbo
remarks that ‘…the only authentic identity for the African is the tribe’, and that ‘I am Nigerian
because a white man created Nigeria and gave me that identity . . . but I was Igbo before the
white man came.’ (11)
Pre War and Post War

12. Violence
❏ Adichie foregrounds the violence of war through the suffering of the characters in their day- to-
day existence.
❏ Violence, says Césaire in Discourse on Colonialism, a tool that is used by the colonizer to
repress and control the colonized. (9)
❏ Colonial rule is carried out through the force of violence which was often cruel and
uncompromising.
❏ Violence exercises power and exhibits the means of subjection.
❏ In this novel, violence cannot be directed only towards the white community, rather the
violence here becomes internalized where the suffering is inflicted upon one community and in
turn to other members of the black extended community.
❏ The cyclic nature of violence starts as white-on-black violence and moves into the black
community and proceeds as black- on- black violence.(Afzal)

13. Horror Scenes of War
❏ Half of a Yellow Sun (Biafran flag) is a story about birth and short life of Biafra, life
that ended in one of the worst possible ways while
“the world was silent when they died”.(Part:4)
❏ Biafra becomes a synonym for starvation, for hunger, misery, children with huge
bellies and limbs like toothpicks,”kwashiorkor”.
❏ But this is not only story about the war. War with its horror is scenery for the story of
love, loyalty, friendship, betrayal, forgiveness about fight and survival.
❏ It is very universal story placed in one precise historical context.

14. War
❏ Adichie’s account on the Nigerian civil war is to remind people of
their own past history and the significance of their tragedy.
In the article “No Humanity in War: Chimamanda Adichie’s Half of a
Yellow Sun”, Umelo Ojinmah has recounted
what Achebe has stated in the preface to Morning Yet on Creation Day
that: “…in our situation the greater danger lies not in remembering but
in forgetting… I believe that if we are to survive as a nation we need to
grasp the meaning of our tragedy.
❏ One way to do it is to remind ourselves constantly of the things
that happened and how we felt when they were happening.”

15. Memory of War
❏ As Ouma writes in his article:
❏ Ugwu embodies a memory that competes with the elite and bourgeoisie one, which has
defined the literary historiography of the war.
❏ He evolves from the state of naivety as a houseboy to become a ‘vernacular intellectual’.
❏ His involvement in the war allows Adichie to explore an expiatory and authorial role for
him that reflects the evolution of the traumatic, cultural and collective memory of the
destroyed Biafran nation.
❏ Ugwu is therefore a product of a composite consciousness that embodies composite
memories.
❏ These memories cut across the daily life of Ugwu's middle class employers, and the
trauma of the Biafran war, and his role as a child soldier. The memories are also
examined through their individual and collective dimensions.

16. References:
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. Half of a Yellow Sun. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2007. Accessed 10
March 2023.
Afzal, Thahiya. “Warring Identities: Metaphor of War in Chimananda Ngozi Adichie’s: Half of a Yellow Sun.”
Man in India, vol. 96, no. 11, 2016, p. 9. Serials Journal,
https://serialsjournals.com/abstract/85460_ch_45_-_thahiya_afzal.pdf. Accessed 10 March 2023.
Backhouse, Fid. “Nigerian Civil War | Description & Facts | Britannica.” Encyclopedia Britannica, May 2022,
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Nigerian-civil-war. Accessed 10 March 2023.

17. 17
Brennan, Mary. ““Half of a Yellow Sun”: The sweeping story of a nation erased.” The Seattle Times, 22 September 2006,
https://www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/books/half-of-a-yellow-sun-the-sweeping-story-of-a-nation-erased/. Accessed 10
March 2023.
Chinyere, Jacob Scholastica. “The Folly and Scourge of War in Chimamanda Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun.” Albertine Journal of Philosophy, vol.
6, no. 1, 2017, p. 10. Albertine Article, https://acjol.org/index.php/albertine/article/view/2949/2905. Accessed 10 March 2023.
Jordison, Sam, and Angela Saini. “Half of a Yellow Sun is a masterpiece in balancing truth and fiction.” The Guardian, 14 January 2020,
https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2020/jan/14/half-of-a-yellow-sun-is-a-masterpiece-truth-fiction. Accessed 10 March 2023.
Ojinmah, Umelo. “No Humanity in War: Chimamanda Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun.” Journal of Nigeria Studies, vol. 1, no. 2, 2012, p. 11.
Nigerian Studies, http://www.unh.edu/nigerianstudies/articles/Issue2/Half_of_a_Yellow_Sun.pdf. Accessed 10 March 2023.
Ouma, Christopher. “Composite Consciousness and Memories of War in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun.” A Journal of English
Studies, vol. 28, no. 2, 2011, p. 15. Taylor and Francis Online,
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/citedby/10.1080/10131752.2011.617991?scroll=top&needAccess=true&role=tab. Accessed 10 March
2023.

18. Thank You