Narrating a new nationalism: Rehistoricization and political apologia in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun

Abstract

This article offers an alternative reading of the thematization of post-independence Nigerian nationalism in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun (2006. Lagos: Farafina). I argue that the novel can be read to represent – as part of its multifaceted thematic project – a subtextual privileging of a form of nationalism that centres the ethnic group. Criticism of Yellow Sun has so far tended to leave out what this article argues is one of Adichie's avowed commitments, which is the articulation of a ‘Biafran’ position on the Nigerian Civil War. Approaching the text as a ‘socially symbolic act involved in . polemic and strategic ideological confrontations’ (Frederic Jameson. 1981. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. New York: Cornell, 19), this article interrogates its rehistoricization of the war and unearths some of the less conspicuous political contradictions likely to have influenced, directly or indirectly, its thematic mission. The discussion demonstrates that the novel gestures beyond the conventional purview of fiction and becomes enmeshed, whether by design or not, in ongoing contestations over Nigeria's post-independence politics, history and national identity. These discourses remain deeply mired in sub-regional and ethnic positioning, and continue to be articulated through various narrative channels – fictional and non-fictional alike. Indeed, the angle taken by this article may well be understood in this context as one of many alternative responses to the Biafran perspective offered in the novel.