The Story
Behind the
Book....HALF OF A YELLOW SUN....ADICHIE.
Both my grandfathers were
interesting men, both born in the early 1900s in British-controlled Igbo land,
both determined to educate their children, both with a keen sense of humor,
both proud. I know this from stories I have been told. Eight years before I was
born, they died in Biafra as refugees after fleeing hometowns that had fallen
to federal troops. I grew up in the shadow of Biafra. I grew up hearing ‘before
the war’ and ‘after the war’ stories; it was as if the war had somehow divided
the memories of my family. I have always wanted to write about Biafra—not only
to honor my grandfathers, but also to honor the collective memory of an entire
nation. Writing Half of a Yellow Sun has been my re-imagining
of something I did not experience but whose legacy I carry. It is also, I hope,
my tribute to love: the unreasonable, resilient thing that holds people
together and makes us human.
Q & A with
the Author
Q: What led you to write a book about the
Nigeria-Biafra war?
I wrote this novel because
I wanted to write about love and war, because I grew up in the shadow of
Biafra, because I lost both grandfathers in the Nigeria-Biafra war, because I
wanted to engage with my history in order to make sense of my present, many of
the issues that led to the war remain unresolved in Nigeria today, because my
father has tears in his eyes when he speaks of losing his father, because my
mother still cannot speak at length about losing her father in a refugee camp,
because the brutal bequests of colonialism make me angry, because the thought
of the egos and indifference of men leading to the unnecessary deaths of men
and women and children enrages me, because I don’t ever want to forget. I have
always known that I would write a novel about Biafra. At 16, I wrote an awfully
melodramatic play called For Love of Biafra. Years later, I wrote short
stories, That Harmattan Morning, Half of a Yellow Sun and Ghosts, all dealing with
the war. I felt that I had to approach the subject with little steps, paint on
a smaller canvas first, before starting the novel.
Q: Given that, at the time of the war, you hadn’t
yet been born, what sort of research did you do to prepare for writing this
book?
I read books. I looked at
photos. I talked to people. In the four years that it took to finish the book,
I would often ask older people I met, “Where were you in 1967?” and then take
it from there. It was from stories of that sort that I found out tiny details
that are important for fiction. My parents’ stories formed the backbone of my
research. Still, I have a lot of research notes that I did not end up using
because I did not want to be stifled by fact, did not want the political events
to overwhelm the human story.
Q: Was it important to you that you get all the
“facts” of the war correct for this work of fiction?
I invented a train station
in Nsukka, invented a beach in Port Harcourt, changed the distance between
towns, changed the chronology of conquered cities but I did not invent any of
the major events. It was important that I get the facts that mattered right.
All the major political events in the book are ‘factually’ correct. But what
was most important to me, in the end, was emotional truth. I wanted this to be
a book about human beings, not a book about faceless political events.
Q: Are memories of the Nigeria-Biafra war still
alive in Nigeria, talked about on a regular basis, or do you feel that the
conflict is being lost to history as time passes and that it becomes less
important to Igbo culture?
The war is still talked
about, still a potent political issue. But I find that it is mostly talked
about in uninformed and unimaginative ways. People repeat the same things they
have been told without having a full grasp of the complex nature of the war or
they hold militant positions lacking in nuance. It also remains, to my
surprise, very ethnically divisive: the (brave enough) Igbo talk about it and
the non-Igbo think the Igbo should get over it. There is a new movement called
MASSOB, the movement for the actualization of the sovereign state of Biafra,
which in the past few years has captured the imagination of many Igbo people.
MASSOB is controversial; it is reported to engage in violence and its leaders
are routinely arrested and harassed by the government. Still, despite their
inchoate objectives, MASSOB’s grassroots support continues to grow. I think
this is because they give a voice to many issues that have been officially
swept aside by the country but which continue to resonate for many Igbo people.
Q: The book focuses on the experiences of a small
set of people who are experiencing the conflict from very different points of
view. When we step into their individual worlds, we don’t exactly know their
every thought—the narrator who follows them isn’t omniscient—but rather we seem
to see and understand them through a film. Can you describe your narrative style
and why you framed these characters the way you did?
I actually don’t think of
them as being seen through a ‘film.’ I have always been suspicious of the
omniscient narrative. It has never appealed to me, always seemed a little lazy
and a little too easy. In an introduction to the brilliant Italian writer
Giovanni Verga’s novel, it is said about his treatment of his characters that
he ‘never lets them analyze their impulses but simply lets them be driven by
them.’ I wanted to write characters who are driven by impulses that they may
not always be consciously aware of, which I think is true for us human beings.
Besides, I didn’t want to bore my reader—and myself—to death, exploring the
characters’ every thought.
Q: The character of Richard is a British white expatriate
who considers himself Biafran, drawing a certain amount of quiet—and some
loud—criticism for his self-proclaimed identity. Another key narrator, Ugwu, is
a thirteen-year-old houseboy who reacts rather than acts. Both are interesting
choices for characters for the narrator to “shadow.” Why did you pick them?
Ugwu was inspired in part
by Mellitus, who was my parents’ houseboy during the war; in part by Fide, who
was our houseboy when I was growing up. And I have always been interested in
the less obvious narrators. When my mom spoke about Mellitus, what a blessing
he was, how much he helped her, how she did not know what she would have done
without him, I remember being moved but also thinking that he could not
possibly have been the saint my mother painted, that he must have been flawed
and human. I think that Ugwu does come to act more and react less as we watch
him come into his own. Richard was a more difficult choice. I very much wanted
somebody to be the Biafran ‘outsider’ because I think that outsiders played a
major role in the war but I wanted him, also, to be human and real (and needy!)
Q: Are there other characters based on real people?
‘Harrison’ is based on a
real Harrison who lived with my family until very recently. What the character
does with beets is, in fact, what the real Harrison told me he did during the
war.
Q: There is a conflict in this story between what is
traditional and tribal versus that which is modern and bureaucratic. What is
the mix today? How worrisome is it that some of the tribal ways have been lost?
Cultures evolve and things
change, of course. What is worrisome is not that we have all learned to think
in English, but that our education devalues our culture, that we are not taught
to write Igbo and that middle-class parents don’t much care that their children
do not speak their native languages or have a sense of their history.
Q: We see snippets of a book written by a character
in Half of a Yellow Sun—it is an account of the conflict depicted in Half of a
Yellow Sun, written after the fact. Its authorship may come as a surprise to
some at the end of the story. What effect did you want this book within a book
to have on Half of a Yellow Sun?
I wanted a device to
anchor the reader who may not necessarily know the basics of Nigerian history.
And I wanted to make a strongly-felt political point about who should be
writing the stories of Africa.
Q: You must have come across many books on Biafra.
Are there any you would recommend in particular?
Surviving in Biafra by
Alfred Obiora Uzokwe is a marvelous memoir of war seen through the eyes of a
young boy. Chinua Achebe’s Girls at War contains three sublime Biafran stories.
Adewale Ademoyega’s Why We Struck is a fiercely ideological look at the events
that led to the war. A Tragedy Without Heroes by Hilary Njoku and The Nigerian
Revolution and the Biafran War by Alexander Madiebo are fascinating personal
accounts from top-ranking Biafran Army officers. The writing in Ntieyong
Akpan’s The Struggle for Secession has a formal beauty and he
presents—inadvertently, I suspect—a complex, flawed and sympathetic portrait of
the Biafran leader. Wole Soyinka was imprisoned during the war and records this
period in his magisterial memoir The Man Died. George Obiozor’s The United
States and the Nigerian Civil War: An American dilemma in Africa is informative
albeit brief and has an interesting forward by Walter Ofonagoro. Herbert Gold’s
stark account of his visit to Biafra, Biafra Goodbye, moved me to tears. The
Biafran War: Nigeria and the Aftermath by Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe is a concise and
clear-eyed look at the conflict. Chukwuemeka Ike’s Sunset at Dawn and Flora
Nwapa’s Never Again are novels that convincingly portray middle-class Biafra.
John De St Jorre’s The Nigerian Civil War presents an excellent view of Biafra
from the outside. And Sunset in Biafra, the bitter and beautifully-written
memoir by Elechi Amadi, looks at the war from the point of view of an
anti-Biafran minority.
Interviews with
the Author
