Last week, Nigerian writer, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie won the MacArthur Foundation fellowship. The fellowship, often called genius grant comes with a grant of $100,000 for five years. Here is a review of her second book, Half of a Yellow Sun.

At the 41st anniversary of the pogrom of 1966, I wrote a short story I called The Blank Tape. It is a story of a videotape in which frames of the pogrom were recorded. It ends up blank when played back. The blank tape is a metaphor for all that we do not know about the events that led to the Nigerian-Biafran War. If I had read Half of A Yellow Sun, I would not have felt so blank.

Written by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun won the 2007 Orange Prize. Her previous book was Purple Hibiscus.

Half of A Yellow Sun (HYS) begins at the days of innocence sprinkled with idealism and promises. Ugwu, an amiable houseboy, goes to live with a radical math professor, Odenigbo, at the University of Nigeria. He will become a reverse mirror of his master, the glue that ties the distinct stories of his master, the master’s girlfriend Olanna, Olanna’s twin sister Kainene, Kainene’s English boyfriend Richard, and a war that brings them all together.

Seen primarily from the eye of Ugwu, HYS shows him growing from a boy thirsty for knowledge to an astute observer of life around him. All houseboys are influential but Ugwu belongs to the category of very influential houseboy, VIHP. When he is conscripted to fight for Biafra, he leaves a hole behind. Once reported killed in battle, his ghost hovers around until he is seen again, wounded in Biafra.

Though born twins, Olanna and Kainene cannot be any more different. Their relationship with each other and their rich business parents shows no closeness. Still, despite the dysfunctional nature of their family, the war, rather than break the twins permanently, ends up bringing them closer.

Though London educated, Olanna finds a surrogate family in Aunty Ifeka, the wife of her uncle, Mbaezi, who lives in Kano. Aunty Ifeka is the woman who breast-fed her and her twin when their mother’s breast milk dried up, or according to Kainene, when her mother became scared that her breasts might droop. She is the woman she openly wishes is her mother.

Olanna travels to the northern city of Kano to cool off when facing changing tides of life. It is where she has a family she could not make out of her own immediate family. It is also where she has a friend, Mohammed, she could not make a husband out of.

What proverbs did for Achebe in Things Fall Apart, piercing portrayal of human spirit does for Adichie.

Adichie shines most when she is dealing with human relationships. Here is how Olanna confirms her suspicion that something happened between Odenigbo and Amala (the girl Odenigbo’s mother brought for Odenigbo to marry) by mere looking at their interaction when she arrives from a trip to Kano: “It was a tiny moment, brief and fleeting, but Olanna noticed how scrupulously they avoided any contact, any touch of skin as if they were united by a common knowledge so monumental that they were determined not to be united by anything else.”

After Odenigbo betrays her trust, Olanna goes to Kano, to Aunty Ifeka to find solace. There she finds words of wisdom from her aunt about Odenigbo and life.

“Odenigbo has done what all men do and has inserted his penis in the first hole he could find when you were away. Does that mean somebody died?”

Talking about her own experience with her husband, Aunty Ifeka says, “I now know that nothing he does will make my life change. My life will change only if I want it to change.”

“You must never behave as if your life belongs to a man. Do you hear me? Your life belongs to you and you alone,” she advises Olanna.

Olanna in her depression sleeps with Richard. It crushes a relationship with her sister that has been largely distant. This is how Kainene reacts to Olanna’s betrayal: “You’re the good one and the fortunate one and the beauty and the Africanist revolutionary who doesn’t like white men, and you simply did not need to fuck him. So why did you?”

Back in Kano to rethink her moves, Olanna comes face to face with the beginning of the war when she becomes a witness to the massacre of her beloved aunt, uncle and her pregnant cousin, Arinze, for being Igbo.

... to be continued