Half Of A Yellow Sun
Rob Nixon writes about Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun:
Both “Half of a Yellow Sun” and Adichie’s first novel, “Purple Hibiscus” (which won a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize), explore the gap between the public performances of male heroes and their private irresponsibilities. And both novels shrewdly observe the women — the wives, the daughters — left dangling over that chasm.
When does loyalty flow from love, and when from shared adversity or heritage? “Half of a Yellow Sun” explores these questions through the twins’ uneasy relationship. Like Nigeria’s postcolonial peoples, their lives are involuntarily joined; both they and their nation must choose between a fractious unity and a fraught secession.
The Biafran War has exercised a powerful hold over Nigeria’s literary imagination, animating almost every notable Nigerian writer from Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka and Christopher Okigbo to Flora Nwapa, Buchi Emecheta and Ken Saro-Wiwa. Adichie, who was born after the war, belongs to a new generation of talented young Nigerian writers: Helon Habila, Uzondinma Iweala, Helen Oyeyemi and Chris Abani (whose “Graceland,” about a shantytown Elvis impersonator, is one of the most astonishing metropolitan novels of our time).
Teju Cole provides link to a BBC radio interview with the Nigerian writer.
