Tales of War for the ‘Third Generation’: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun

Serena Guarracino

doi:10.17456/simple-27

Abstract

As leading figure of a burgeoning ‘third generation’ of Nigerian writers (Adesanmi & Dunton 2005), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie raised to international fame in 2007 after winning the Orange Prize for Fiction with her novel on the Biafra war, Half of a Yellow Sun . This paper aims at investigating how the way Adichie’s fiction deals with the subject of war offers new insights in the role of the engage writer in a postcolonial and global context. Adichie chooses to narrate the conflict through multiplying layers of re-telling, and hence refuses to cast herself as the spokesperson of either a national identity (Nigeria and/or Biafra), an ethnic group (Igbo), or a social class among those featured in the novel. Hence, Half of a Yellow Sun is meant to foster a culture of peace for a generation of cosmopolitan Igbo Nigerians born at least a decade after the war’s bitter end, advocating the new generations’ right to memory without retaliation . DOI: 10.17456/SIMPLE-27 Bibliography Adesanmi, Pius and Dunton Chris. 2005. Nigeria’s Third Generation Writing: Historiography and Preliminary Theoretical Considerations. English in Africa , 32.1: 7–19. Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. 2009 [2006]. Half of A Yellow Sun . London: Fourth Estate (digital edition). Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. 2009. The Danger of a Single Story. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9Ihs241zeg (last accessed 17 November 2015). Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. 2014a. We Should All Be Feminists . London: Fourth Estate. Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. 2014b. Hiding from Our Past. The New Yorker . May 1. http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/hiding-from-our-past (last accessed 17 November 2015). Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. 2015. My Father’s Kidnapping. The New York Times . May 30. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/31/opinion/sunday/chimamanda-ngozi-adichie-my- fathers-kidnapping.html?_r=0 (last accessed 17 November 2015). Attridge, Derek. 2004. The Singularity of Literature . London: Routledge. Attridge, Derek. 2005. J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event . Chicago- London: University of Chicago Press. Attridge, Derek. 2015. The Work of Literature . Oxford-London: Oxford University Press. Bailey’s Price for Fiction. n.d. Archive. http://www.womensprizeforfiction.co.uk/archive (last accessed 17 November 2015). BBC World. 2013. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie – Half of a Yellow Sun. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01b9nqd (last accessed 17 November 2015). BBC World News. 2014. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsWfm0_xgkc (last accessed 17 November 2015). Bryce, Jane. 2008. ‘Half and Half Children’: Third-Generation Women Writers and the New Nigerian Novel. Research in African Literatures , 39.2: 49-67. Dalley Hamish. 2013. The Idea of ‘Third Generation Nigerian Literature’: Conceptualizing Historical Change and Territorial Affiliation in the Contemporary Nigerian Novel. Research in African Literatures , 44.4: 15-34. Gould, Michael. 2011. The Struggle for Modern Nigeria: The Biafran War, 1967-1970 . London: I. B. Tauris. Griswold, Wendy. 2000. Bearing Witness: Readers, Writers, and the Novel in Nigeria . Princeton: Princeton University Press. Guarracino, Serena. 2014a. Said’s Contrapuntal Reading and the Event of Postcolonial Literature. Le Simplegadi , 12: 11-26. Guarracino, Serena. 2014b. Writing ‘so raw and true’: Blogging in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah . Between , 4.8: 1-27. Hesmondhalgh David. 2012. The Cultural Industries . London: Sage. Ponzanesi, Sandra. 2014. The Postcolonial Cultural Industry. Icons, Markets, Mythologies . New York: Palgrave Macmillan. The Herald. 2014. Boko Haram: “We can solve on our own damn problems” – Chimamanda Adichie slams foreign intervention, 1 June 2014 (last accessed 17 November 2015).

Highlights

: Di recente emersa come autrice principale della ‘terza generazione’ di scrittori nigeriani (Adesanmi & Dunton 2005), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie è approdata alla notorietà internazionale nel 2007, quando il suo romanzo Half of a Yellow Sun vinse l’Orange Prize for Fiction
On May 30, 2015, The New York Times published a story by Nigerian-American writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, titled “My Father’s Kidnapping”
Half of a Yellow Sun, whose title describes the flag of the short-lived Republic of Biafra, narrates this repressed history through the lives of three fictional characters, who tell their stories in a third person point of view narration; yet in the closing Author’s Note to the novel, it is stated that many events are based on Adichie’s own family history, a statement that creates a strong relationship between the writer’s life and the fictional stories from the novel, making them ‘authentic’ in an emotional, if not factual, sense

Summary

Introduction

: Di recente emersa come autrice principale della ‘terza generazione’ di scrittori nigeriani (Adesanmi & Dunton 2005), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie è approdata alla notorietà internazionale nel 2007, quando il suo romanzo Half of a Yellow Sun vinse l’Orange Prize for Fiction.

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