In: Silesian studies in English 2009 : Proceedings of the international conference of English and American Studies, Opava 7-8 September 2009. - Opava : Slezská univerzita, 2010. - ISBN 978-80-7248-622-9, P. 251-261.Simona Hevešiová
Abstract:
The paper focuses on the problem of memory and trauma in the second novel of the Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Half of a Yellow Sun. The novel recounts the gruesome historical events of the Nigeria-Biafra War; a war that the author believes has shaped the national identity of Nigeria to a significant extent. By interweaving several individual narratives together, the author presents the conflict from different viewpoints allowing various characters to speak on their behalf. Moreover, she manifests the necessity to remember these tragic events in order to reconstruct the nation’s identity and thus answers the question who is supposed to recreate, i.e. rewrite the collective history of Igbo people.
Successful fiction does not need to be validated by ‘real life’; I cringe whenever a writer is asked how much of a novel is ‘real’.
(Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie)
For centuries, people have felt the need to express their opinion on things and events happening around them and to them. The urge to demonstrate and locate their own position in the spatial and temporal dimension naturally led to the process of documenting these events in various forms and by various media. Gradually, the writing of history, or in other words, the reconstruction of the past has transformed into a rather complicated process. Undoubtedly, there is some kind of a general agreement about the responsibility and the importance to remember the past but this agreement also raises many questions: Who is entitled to speak / write of it and why? What is the common ground in this process? What is worth speaking / writing about? Are there things which should be better overlooked or erased from the collective memory? Moreover, are there not fissures in our remembrances? Are our recollections to be taken as valid and reliable sources? How, if at all, can an objective and truthful account of events be achieved?, etc.
As Alena Smiešková observes, history “is no longer viewed as a sum of undoubted facts” since it is “contaminated by the process of subjectivization. The objective history is only another narration and its quality refers to general characteristics of any other text.” (Smiešková 2008, 19) Literary texts, among others, then “are understood as equally important to reconstruct what we understand as personal or national history” (ibid.). Moreover, the relation between history and fiction is to be regarded as reciprocal as the comments of the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie about writing her second novel Half of a Yellow Sun, the focus of this paper, demonstrate: “If fiction is indeed the soul of history, then I was equally committed to the fiction and the history, equally keen to be true to the spirit of the time as well as to my artistic vision of it.” (Adichie 2007b, 11) The novel provides an account of Nigeria-Biafra war of the 1960s. A thorough research, based on scholarly publications and stories she heard from the war survivors, backed up her writing. Yet, the writer’s imaginative vision of the past as experienced by her socially and nationally diverse characters stands at the core of the novel which thus fuses these seemingly disparate narratives.
Adichie was born in 1977, seven years after the Nigeria-Biafra war. This conflict, representing according to the writer an unspeakable or a rather repressed part of national history, is the main focus of her second novel Half of a Yellow Sun. The primary impetus for writing a book about the war and the tribal resentments between Igbo and Hausa peoples was Adichie’s need “to engage with [her] history in order to make sense of [her] present” (p2 of the P.S.). Even though she has not experienced the conflict herself, Adichie stated several times that she regarded the war not as a history but as a memory. With members of her own family being traumatized and haunted by the shadows of the war, Adichie felt an urgent need to reconstruct the destinies of ordinary people in a written form and thus reconcile with the traumatic legacy of her ancestors.
The Biafran war and its disastrous consequences traumatized the whole country and, as Adichie mentioned, it still hangs like a shadow over Nigeria. The novel, combining history with an imaginative world created by the author, belongs, in words of Amy Novak, to the genre of contemporary trauma fiction because of “its exploration of the difficulty of recounting and voicing [the] trauma” and because the characters show “classic traumatic symptoms of disassociation and withdrawal.” (2008) The narrative oscillates mainly between the lives of three characters – Olanna, an upper-class teacher at Nsukka University; Ugwu, a teenage houseboy of her lover Odenigbo, a free-thinking professor of mathematics, and Richard, a British journalist and a great admirer of Igbo culture who falls in love with Olanna’s twin sister Kainene. All these characters suddenly become engulfed in the terrors of the war and are forced to face almost psychically unbearable situations.
The novel’s opening passage centers on Ugwu, a thirteen-year-old houseboy working for Olanna’s intellectual lover Odenigbo who lives and works in the university town of Nsukka. Ugwu is obviously a poor, uneducated village boy whose ideas about world are rather naïve and incomplete, as shaped by his limited experience and influenced by his idolized master. Yet soon enough (due to the highly intellectual and stimulating environment) it becomes clear that he is a very careful observer and his sharp intelligence and ability to learn quickly help him to mature. Adichie herself described Ugwu as the eternal student of life. Both Olanna and Odenigbo recognize this and Ugwu becomes a valid member of their family. In fact, the character of Ugwu, as it becomes apparent later on in the novel, represents the so desired anchor; the connection between traditions and modernity, intellectualism and common sense, past and future.
Nevertheless, the novel does not attempt to romanticize or idealize the characters and Ugwu is not an exception. The innocent and naïve boy from the novel’s beginning is later conscripted as a soldier and becomes directly involved in the war atrocities thus earning his nickname Target Destroyer. Together with his fellow child soldiers who are deprived of their identity and are referred to only as Kill and Go and High-Tech Ugwu fights against the vandals; yet he is aware that “[h]e was not living his life; life was living him.” (Adichie 2007a, 364) The rape of a bar girl, a crucial turning point in Ugwu’s transformation, releases a rumbling wave of self-loathing which forces him to unwrap his mind from his body (ibid., 365). The gruesome consequences of this incident become fully clear to him when he finds out that his sister Anulika was raped during the war.
Meanwhile, Olanna and Odenigbo struggle to keep up their everyday life despite the inhuman conditions; yet their relationship falters. The once fiery and self-assured Odenigbo, never afraid to voice his opinion in front of authorities, succumbs to drinking. Paralyzed by the loss of his ideals and hope, unable to intellectualize the horrors happening around, he needs to be supported by Olanna and Ugwu. The death of his mother represented the last straw in his decline which turns him into a helpless figurine. Even Olanna becomes alienated from him since his “self-assured eccentricities and his fierce moralities” (ibid., 29) she had admired so much vanished. Odenigbo’s impregnation of a village girl Amala, forced upon him by his mother, creates a definite barrier between them. The child called Baby is later adopted by Olanna and becomes the main focus of her life; she clings to her even more after Ugwu’s disappearance. At certain point in their relationship, even Odenigbo’s physical presence seems to be unbearable:
“Once he tried to hold Olanna, to kiss her, but his touch made her skin crawl and she turned away from him and went outside to sleep on a mat on the veranda, where Ugwu had sometimes slept… She did not want to speak to him, to sleep beside him… She said little to him.” (ibid., 382)
But not even the beautiful and strong Olanna is able to preserve her dignity and self-respect. In an outbreak of jealousy following the humiliation caused by Odenigbo’s infidelity, she seduces Kainene’s lover Richard and shatters the already fragile bond between the sisters. Furthermore, the struggle for sole survival has erased her upper-class uppishness and privileged attitudes which were clearly visible during her visits to poorer relatives. Suddenly, the nice and comfortable house filled with intellectuals is supplanted by a refugee camp full of starving and desperate people, feasts and social gatherings are replaced by air raids and the meals often consist just of lizards’ legs and roasted crickets.
The impact of the drastic and hostile external environment which surrounds the characters is, however, multiplied in their internal, private sphere where it leaves devastating traces. The haunting images of witnessed terrors settled down in their minds and disable their normal functioning. After seeing the mutilated body of her relative, Olanna breaks down completely and is confined to bed, unable to articulate the grisly moment. Moreover, the image of a decapitated head of a little girl held in a calabash by her desperate mother (that comes to epitomize the horrors of the war) haunts her repeatedly, rendering her unable to speak about the brutalities she has witnessed. In words of Amy Novak, Olanna “exhibits classic characteristics of the traumatized in her struggle and inability to discuss the past.” (2008)
Similarly, Ugwu who was directly involved in the killing and fighting is not able to clear his mind of the battlefield scenes. He is, moreover, not only an observer but also a perpetrator of the crimes which do not leave him unmarked.
“The ka-ka-ka of shooting, the cries of men, the smell of death, the blasts of explosions above and around him were distant. But back at the camp his memory became clear; he remembered the man who placed both hands on his blown-open belly as though to hold hi intestines in, the one who mumbled something about his son before he stiffened. And, after each operation, everything became new.” (Adichie 2007a, 365-6)
And finally Richard, the British journalist and an ardent admirer of Igbo culture who even “attempts to shed his European identity and become a Nigerian” (Novak 2008), is trying to stifle his memories of a brutal massacre of Igbo people at the Kano airport.
“He had often wished that he would lose his mind, or that his memory would suppress itself, but instead everything took on a terrible transparence and he had only to close his eyes to see the freshly dead bodies on the floor of the airport and to recall the pitch of the screams.” (Adichie 2007a, 165)
These traumatic events and memories burden the characters to such an extent that they leave them impotent. For a while, none of them is able to process them, the psychic remnants of the horrors being too vivid and terrifying. Richard attempts to come to terms with the crude reality writing things down; yet “the sentences were risible. They were too melodramatic […] The echo of unreality weighed each word down; he clearly remembered what had happened at that airport, but to write about it he would have to reimagine it, and he was not sure if he could.” (ibid., 168) Gradually, a decision to write a book about Biafra ripens in him and the reader catches few snippets from it. The book is called The World Was Silent When We Died and contains facts about the Civil war making, among others, explicit connections between the conflict and the British imperial policy in Nigeria.
Yet as the story progresses “the narration of the traumatic history of colonialism and Biafra transfers from Richard to Ugwu” (Novak 2008) allowing Adichie to make a strong political point about who should be writing the history of Africa. The diapason of characters ranging from poor and uneducated villagers, intellectuals, government officials, to foreigners and expatriates provides a wide platform for discussion. All the characters are given space to express their political / personal views on the conflict so the reader is confronted with several diverse viewpoints. But only one of them is entitled to document it. “Ugwu becomes the chronicler of trauma as the colonial voice that Richard represents fades into the background, marking the exit of the Western subject from the narrative control.” (ibid.) Ugwu’s memoir thus captures the collective memory of Igbo people with his voice controlling the narrative.
In fact, Adichie accentuates the therapeutic effect of storytelling / writing down the past and its necessity in the process of reconstructing the group identity. She makes it absolutely clear that the story of Biafra has to remain in peoples’ memories no matter how painful it is. Moreover, Brison argues that “narrating memories to others […] empowers survivors to gain more control over the traces left by trauma” (Brison 1999, 40) so when Olanna revisits the traumatic images in her mind and shares them with Ugwu, she seems to start grasping her life again.
“Ugwu was writing as she spoke, and his writing, the earnestness of his interest, suddenly made her story important, made it serve a larger purpose that even she was not sure of…” (Adichie 2007a, 410)
By writing down these traumatic memories and offering them to a listening audience, Adichie marked her novel not as “an act of closure” but as “an act of remembering”. She said: “I don’t believe in the concept of closure. I think that the traumas we have experienced remain an indelible part of who we are; we carry it with us always.” (Adichie quoted by Anyokwu 2008, 189) Half of a Yellow Sun then seeks to contribute to the act of remembrance since “we cannot begin to make sense of our present and of our future until we have engaged properly with our past.” (ibid.)
Bibliography:
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. 2007a. Half of a Yellow Sun. London/New York/ Toronto/Sydney: Harper Perennial.
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. 2007b. “In the Shadow of Biafra”. In Half of a Yellow Sun, Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. London/New York/ Toronto/Sydney: Harper Perennial, 2007.
P.S. Ideas. Interviews & Features. In: Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. 2007a. Half of a Yellow Sun. London/New York/ Toronto/Sydney: Harper Perennial.
Anyokwu, Christopher. “May We Always Remember”: Memory and Nationhood in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun. In: NTU Studies in Language and Literature, Number 20 (December 2008), 179-196.
Brison, Susan J. Trauma Narratives and the Remaking of the Self. In: Bal, Mieke & Jonathan V. Crewe & Leo Spitzer. Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1999.
