A Rising Sun

THIRUVANATHAPURAM: Adichie, the Nigerian writer, is like that new kid on the block who has performed a particularly spectacular feat that commands attention. What with the God of African literature, Chinua Achebe enlisting himself among her fans with the generous remark that she is “a new writer endowed with the gift of ancient storytellers.” The three-book old author is already the recipient of prestigious literary awards. “And Adichie has become a name familiar even to our roadside book venders that they pick out her book for you at the mere mention of the name,” says Sreebala K Menon.

 Bookie listened, amused and all ears, to the inadvertent gynocentric overtones that our conversation had taken on. It was interesting to hear Sreebala, a rare mix of bold stands and a talent to tickle the funny bones (a budding film director who has made a foray into the male bastion out of a passion for the craft, and an author who bagged the Kerala Sahitya Akademi’s award in the category of humour), reflect on how impressed she was by Adichie who writes on grave concerns, pinning the world to vicarious guilt for the sufferings of her people and then looks out of pictures with deceptively dove-like eyes.

Sreebala has read both the books of Adichie, Purple Hibiscus (2003) and Half of a Yellow Sun (2006).  But it is the latter that she chose to speak about. The novel which brings alive the 40-year-old history of the Nigeria-Biafra war, is put down in “simple and straight language, the way Achebe did,” said Sreebala, “but it refuses to loosen its grip on you after you are done with it. It’s haunting in that peculiar way, through its construction and the intricacies of the relationships.”

And indeed, the book culls out the history of the war through individuals whose lives are devastated by the war, through relations that are shattered. Adichie consciously made it a book on “emotional truth”, as she explained in an interview, and not “about faceless political events.”

The factual details are thus used sparingly, to lay the foundations of the historical context strong, so the ‘emotional truth’ of lived experiences are foregrounded like the half of the yellow sun painted on the olive uniforms of the Biafran warriors. The story jumps between the early 1960s when the characters are introduced and the late 1960s  when the civil war broke out between Nigerian government and the secessionist Republic of Biafra. The republic finally fell to the British-supported Nigerian forces in 1970, but only after about 180,000 civilians lost their lives to hunger and genocide. But the war is engraved in the conscience of Nigeria so much so that it is still an ethnically divisive factor according to Adichie, who says she “grew up in the shadow of Biafra”.

Adichie sets about weaving together the stories she had heard and those she painstakingly unearthed. Through the lives of Odenigbo, a university professor and a revolutionary; his mistress, the wealthy Olanna who left a life of comfort to accompany her lover; Richard, a British writer who comes to Africa and falls in love with Olanna’s twin sister, Kainene; and a young peasant from a village, Ugwu who works as a houseboy for Ogenigbo, the author puts in motion a multi-pronged discourse on the war. In the thick of the war, these individuals find themselves reduced to human beings holding on to their dear lives, and severely tested are their ideals as well as loyalties to one another.

“It is also an open statement to the world about how hunger was used as a weapon,” said Sreebala. “The Nigerian forces won the war by cutting the food resources to the Biafran republic, and the book  talks about how the  malnourished children who came to symbolise the ‘real Africa’  were the products of deliberately induced starvation.”

A writer in her own right, Sreebala said that the beauty of the book is that the author has not attempted to play with the language. “But yet, the craft is powerful and compelling”. She sounded firm in her belief that Adichie was one of the most promising of contemporary writers.  “As of now, I don’t think Adichie has been translated into Malayalam. But I am sure she will be, and widely too, maybe like Paulo Coelho. She added that like most African novels, “it is a book that you can relate to as an Indian because there is so much that is similar between the two cultures.”  

aswathy@expressbuzz.com

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