Half of a Yellow Sun
Interview: An up-and-coming Nigerian author revisits the war that shaped her country.
October 24, 2006
When Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie wrote Half of a Yellow Sun, she wasn’t planning on authoring a sweeping political epic about the promise and devastation of sovereignty in the postcolonial world. “For me, I’m writing a story about human beings, love, and family,” she says. But, she adds, “Somehow, politics comes in.” Adichie’s recently published novel begins in the early 1960s in newly independent Nigeria and follows a group of middle-class intellectuals through military coups, genocidal killings, and the secession of the doomed Igbo state, Biafra. To simply focus on the novel's sweep, from the pre-war hope and idealism of the '60s to the twisted reality of international interest (and lack of interest) in Africa, doesn't do it full justice. It’s also a great read—character- and plot-driven, and without the oppressive symbolism or exoticism common to novels by young authors from so-called third world countries.
Adichie’s first novel, 2003’s Purple Hibiscus, was a critical success and with Half of a Yellow Sun’s release, there is renewed speculation that Adichie is poised to inherit the mantle of fellow Nigerian author Chinua Achebe. Currently enrolled at Yale University, Adichie will earn a masters degree in African Studies, “if I survive the program,” she says. MotherJones.com recently caught up with the author-slash-scholar via phone.
MotherJones.com: Your current book is about the Nigerian civil war. Why did you decide to take up this topic?
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Considering how central it is in Nigerian history, there aren’t many people who have talked about it or written about the people who actually went through the war. But whether or not there had been other books about the war, I don’t think it affected my decision to write about it. I wrote about it because I felt it was something I had to do. My grandfather died in the war, my family went through the war, and it affected my parents in really profound ways. I’ve always wanted to write about that period—in some ways to digest it for myself, something that defined me but that I didn’t go through.
MJ.com: Growing up, how much was the war and the idea of Biafra a part of your family’s collective consciousness?
CA: Profoundly. This was not just my family, it was the case for many families, many Igbo families, particularly. Because the war wasn’t the Nigeria-Biafra war, it was mostly the Biafran war—the people who were in that region that felt the war. When I was growing up, I knew that Biafra was something that had happened—something bad. It was the reason I didn’t know my grandfather, because he had died. My parents really didn’t talk about the actual details of the war. We all knew it had happened, but we didn’t know exactly what it had meant. As I got older, I started to read about it and started to ask questions.
MJ.com: You grew up in a middle class, intellectual home, similar to that of the book’s main characters. Your father was a statistics professor; one of the main characters, Odenigbo, is a math professor. How much of the story in the novel is inspired by your family’s history?
CA: I did a lot of research before writing the book, talked to a lot of people. But it’s really my father and his experience that formed the backbone of my writing. I haven’t recounted what happened to him; I’ve sort of fictionalized things. But quite a bit of the book is based on what he went through, and a lot of the details really came from him.
MJ.com: Near the beginning of the book, many of the characters’ conversations revolve around the idea of fashioning some sort of collective identity in the disarray of post-British rule. They talk about whether they consider themselves Nigerian, or more tribally identified, or pan-African—and then those who are Igbo become Biafran nationalists. Where do you come out of that?
CA: I think that identity shifts. My identity shifts; it’s is a constant issue for Africans. I’m here in the U.S. now, so I’m “African” or “black.” If I went to another African country, I’d be Nigerian. When I’m back in Nigeria, I would primarily be seen as Igbo. And for me, really, it depends on where I am. At the time when Nigeria was just becoming independent, for a lot of intellectuals, it was really important to define themselves against what the British had done. In other words, they wanted a very clean cut—Nigeria for Nigerians, rather than an identity that was defined as a creation of the British. I don’t think ethnicity was in play at first—Igbo, Yoruba, whatever—I think they wanted to see that it was a country they were running for themselves, for their interests. And it’s funny, because the first government was seen as an imposition—it wasn’t popular with intellectuals at all.