Part one

Just as she did in Purple Hibiscus, Adichie captures the sounds and sense of the generation in its brutal honesty, like when she watches two kids playing and one saying to the other, “your mother’s pussy.”

In several interviews, Adichie has said that she did not set out to write a war novel. She wants to see HYS as a love story. Her only savior is in the crafty decision to halt the story at Part Two and jump into Part Three. Part Three rescues it from what is more than a war novel, but one that makes its readers want to go back to war. It brings the tempo down, explains the mystery of the baby that suddenly arrived in Part Two.

Odenigbo’s idealism is tried several times in the course of the book. “The reason we live the life we do is because we do not remember that we will die,” he says as he mourns the killing of his mother in Biafra. The intellectual quickly degenerates into a drunk as the struggle for Biafra flutters. The mantra, “If the sun refuses to rise, we will make it rise,” becomes an empty expression.

In the midst of the war, while Olanna is eking out a living, she gets a letter from Mohammed, her northern prince friend who finds it important to inform her that, “My polo game is much improved.” To be fair to him, he also sends soap.

The saboteur virus in Biafra is so pronounced that Olanna has to complain, “We cannot keep beating people because Nigeria is beating us.” In spite of the damaging impact of the saboteur phenomenon, Richard, a believer in the Biafran cause has hope as he observes: “A country born out of the ashes of injustice would limit its practice of injustice.”

In planting her story inside the war, Adichie presents the picture of what transpired before and during the war. “A single act could reverberate over time and space and leave stains that would never be washed off,” she writes.

Half of a Yellow Sun implicates the conscience of everyone who reads it: those who know but do not care; those who care but do not know; and those who do not know and do not care. For readers like me who know little about the war, HYS gives them a full picture.

It all started with the British experience in trying to conquer the Africans. The Igbo gave them the toughest time because the Igbo had no kings to be bought over. And when the British succeeded through brutal wars, the Igbo immediately constituted themselves into the bulk of the opposition against the British rule. It came to a head with the general strike of 1945. The British blamed the Igbo for the strike. They banned Igbo published newspapers. The British generally encouraged anti-Igbo sentiments, which began to spread fast across the country. The British GOCs were promoting unqualified soldiers in the name of ethnic balance against the Igbo who were getting ahead by merit. In the North, the northern leader, Sardauna, would not let Igbo children go to public school. Igbo Union had to set up the Igbo Union Schools. Immediately the coup of 1966 occurred; it was the BBC that first began to call it an Igbo coup because majority of the coup plotters were Igbo. In Lagos, as soon as the crises began, Igbo people were being taunted and beaten. They were being told: “Go Igbo, go so that Garri will be cheap. Go and stop trying to own every house and every shop.”

A man in three-piece wool suit in a plane with Olanna from Kano to Lagos who thinks Olanna is Yoruba captures this anti-Igbo sentiment thus:

The problem with Igbo people is that they want to control everything in this country. Everything. Why can’t they stay in the East? They own all the shops; they control the civil service, even the police. If you are arrested for any crime, as long s you say keda, they will let you go.

The same intensity with which it portrays injustices against the Igbo is also used to portray Igbo excesses as when Sardauna’s death is mocked with mmee-mmee-mmee bleating of a goat.

The raggedness of the Biafran army is shown graphically openly. Yet, at the end, it is the French ambassador who captures the feeling about the gallant Biafran soldier when he is quoted to have said, “I was told that Biafra fought like heroes, but now I know that heroes fight like Biafrans.”

As I read the last word of HYS, I said to myself, Daddy can keep his story. Mommy can keep her story of walking to a military base to identify a wounded uncle of mine or being at the bedside when my grandfather died. Uncle Joel who as Captain in Biafra lost his finger to a flying bullet and has some bullets still lodged in his body. He, too, can equally keep his story. So should Uncle Festus who did not go to war because he is a Jehovah Witness. I have read Half of A Yellow Sun and now I know.