The Untold Story

Author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. (Steve Carty/CBC)

Anyone who grew up in North America in the late 1960s will remember being cajoled into finishing their dinner with the guilt-laden reminder that “there are children starving in Africa.” Those children were Igbos, citizens of the short-lived independent nation of Biafra, which splintered from Nigeria in 1967 during a bloody civil war. In the next three years, more than a million civilians died, most from starvation. Images in newspapers and on TV of hollow-eyed children with distended bellies in newspapers and on television shocked Westerners.

The crisis became known as the defining moment of modern humanitarian action, inspiring the creation of the international aid group Médecins Sans Frontières. The Biafran war was the Rwanda of its time: long-simmering ethnic tensions between the Igbo and the Hausa, Fulani and Yoruba peoples were exacerbated by years of European rule and arbitrary national borders established by the colonial powers.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie always knew she’d write a novel about Biafra. Her academic, upper-class Igbo parents both lost their fathers in the war, as well as everything they owned. The 29-year-old Nigerian-American author was born seven years after the war, but it was always present in her imagination. At 16, she wrote what she says was “a terrible play” called For Love of Biafra. It would be another decade before she returned to the subject for her assured and sensational new book, Half of a Yellow Sun.

“I don’t enjoy the research part of writing,” she says, during a brief stop in Toronto in September, “but I spent two years researching this. Biafra is still so controversial. I didn’t want to write a book that could be easily dismissed because I hadn’t gotten the historical events right. But I didn’t want to write something preachy, either. I really hope that if this book does anything, it gets my generation talking about our history. Because we’re not.”

A dark, shattering survey of violence and hunger, the novel opens a few years before the war, during the early, optimistic days of Nigeria’s independence from Britain. Ugwu, a young villager, comes to the university town of Nsukka to work as a houseboy for Odenigbo, a radical, hot-headed math professor in love with Olanna, the voluptuously beautiful daughter of a wealthy chief and businessman.

The couple socializes in a privileged circle of like-minded academics who plot revolution over cocktails and Highlife music. Among them is Richard, the idealistic British boyfriend of Olanna's cool, pragmatic twin sister, Kainene. From time to time, Olanna and Kainene’s status-obsessed parents invite them into Nigerian high society, a milieu that Adichie skewers with great amusement.

“It’s such a closed, self-regarding life, where people don’t care about the larger social issues,” says Adichie says of the Nigeria elite.

This idyllic set-up serves as a crushing contrast to what’s to come. After growing persecution leads them to establish Biafra — taking the rich oil reserves in the country’s southeast with them — the Igbo are starved and slaughtered into surrender by the Nigerian army. Adichie renders this period with unflinching detail.

Among the many horrors, there is a scene of Olanna on a train full of refugees, sitting beside a woman who carries the decapitated head of her daughter in a hollowed-out calabash (a type of gourd): “She saw the little girl’s head with the ashy-grey skin and braided hair and rolled-back eyes and open mouth. She stared at it for a while before she looked away. Somebody screamed. The woman closed the calabash. ‘Do you know,’ she said, ‘it took me so long to plait this hair. She had such thick hair.’”

(Knopf Canada)

The novel is bravely ambitious, chronicling an ugly period that remains a taboo subject in Nigeria and grappling with questions of morality, race, class, loyalty and love. It exceeds even the glowing promise of Adichie’s 2003 debut, Purple Hibiscus, which was short-listed for the Orange Prize and won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book. For Half of a Yellow Sun, Adichie received a blurb from Nigeria’s most celebrated author, Chinua Achebe (Things Fall Apart), who gushed about Adichie in terms that still make her blush: “We do not usually associate wisdom with beginners, but here is a new writer endowed with the gift of ancient storytellers... Adichie came almost fully made.”  

The acclaim has come with a certain burden, Adichie says. “I’m often uncomfortable with the position my writing puts me in. Because, as a writer, my first responsibility is to my art. But sometimes, I think that’s too easy to say. Because I’ve grown up in Nigeria with the history I have. And I’m a black, African woman who writes realistic fiction, and in doing that, there is a political role that emerges. And it’s my responsibility to accept it.”

That responsibility has made her a little wary. She confesses she is so anti-social that “by the time I’m 50, I’ll probably become a full recluse.” Yet, even with the stress of juggling a book tour and the start of the fall semester at Yale — where she is working on a graduate degree in African history — Adichie is voluble and energetic. With her brown almond eyes and flawless skin, she is also, like her character Olanna, “illogically pretty” — a selling point her publisher has picked up on.

When I tell her that the subject line of her publicist’s email pitch to me was “Young, Brilliant and GORGEOUS!” Adichie covers her face with her hands and says, in her buttery British accent, “Oh, God, no one told me that.” When I speculate about a connection between Olanna’s beauty and her own, she dismisses the suggestion with a belly laugh. “That’s flattering, because Olanna, to me, is the perfect woman. I would love to look like her… I do remember when I was growing up hearing people say that I was beautiful, but I always preferred when people said I was smart. I always say that long before I knew what feminism meant, I was fiercely feminist… Of course, being told I am beautiful meant something, too. I always say I’m the kind of feminist who likes lip gloss.”

She’s also the kind of feminist who likes to write about sex. The novel is full of passionate scenes between Odenigbo and Olanna, who are in bed as often as they are debating politics. “I wanted to write about sex the way I write about war,” Adichie says. “To look it in the face and not use vague language. I think it’s real in the sense that as bombs are falling, people are loving. People go on with life. The aim was to humanize my characters. I wanted the reader to remember that these people had full lives before the war.”

As bold as she may sound, Adichie still frets about how her father will receive the novel’s explicit scenes. “I adore my parents, they’ve always been supportive,” she says, even when she decided to drop out of a coveted spot in medical school to become a writer. (“Medicine is a noble profession,” Adichie says, “but I would have been a very unhappy doctor.”) Her proud mother keeps a box of copies of Purple Hibiscus in the trunk of her car to hand out to strangers, and her father is currently reading Half of a Yellow Sun, which has just been published in Nigeria.

“He hasn’t said anything to me yet, but he told my brother that he thought it was even better than Purple Hibiscus. All I can think is that my father is reading my writing about sex.”

Half of a Yellow Sun is published by Knopf Canada and is available in bookstores now.

Rachel Giese writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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