Half of a Yellow Sun
This is an amazing, powerful, heavy book about love and betrayal and war. The story follows two sisters and their lovers and servants in Nigeria in the 1960s, before and during the Nigerian Civil War and the rise and fall of the brief nation, Biafra.
I hadn't ever heard of this period in history before I encountered the work of Adichie. That's American education for you. We weren't really involved in this in any way, except for how we shaped it by ignoring it. Inside the pages of the book, one of the character is working on another book, a non-fiction account of the war titled The World Was Silent While We Died. It wasn't just silent then, it remains largely silent now.
There's a lot going on here. The politics of the situation are complicated and Adichie does a great job distilling them through the use of ongoing conversations between the characters. Even moreso than in Americanah, debate is a central feature of this book. Well, the first half anyway. Once the war really starts, we are thrust into the horrors of starvation and air raids, rapes and killings.
As hard as the book was to read, it was also amazing. The characters feel like real people, with all sorts of different loyalties and opinions. Betrayals are both large and small as they muddle through their lives, trying to figure out what they want their future to look like.
Books like this leave me a little torn. I obviously need to read all of Adichie's work. I also want to see out other Nigerian authors, and learn more about this country. Adichie is Igbo, so her writing focuses on that perspective. Oyeyemi is Yoruba, but her focus is more on the Western world. There are other authors I've heard about more recently: Nnendi Okorafor and Chigozie Obioma, both of whom released very successful books in the past year. Adichie herself warns against the pitfalls of a single story and urges people to seek out more perspectives about any one place or people.
Then again, I also know that I should expand my view beyond Nigeria, read literature from Kenya or Ghana or South Africa, guard against letting Nigeria stand in for the entire continent in my mind's eye. And I want to read more from African-Americans, as those stories hit closer to home and will probably have more impact on my own life. And so my to-read list grows longer and longer and I despair of ever reading them all or learning everything I should know. Especially when I so often want to just sink into comfort reads.
The only solution is to keep reading, as much as I can, as the books come to me.
I hadn't ever heard of this period in history before I encountered the work of Adichie. That's American education for you. We weren't really involved in this in any way, except for how we shaped it by ignoring it. Inside the pages of the book, one of the character is working on another book, a non-fiction account of the war titled The World Was Silent While We Died. It wasn't just silent then, it remains largely silent now.
There's a lot going on here. The politics of the situation are complicated and Adichie does a great job distilling them through the use of ongoing conversations between the characters. Even moreso than in Americanah, debate is a central feature of this book. Well, the first half anyway. Once the war really starts, we are thrust into the horrors of starvation and air raids, rapes and killings.
As hard as the book was to read, it was also amazing. The characters feel like real people, with all sorts of different loyalties and opinions. Betrayals are both large and small as they muddle through their lives, trying to figure out what they want their future to look like.
Books like this leave me a little torn. I obviously need to read all of Adichie's work. I also want to see out other Nigerian authors, and learn more about this country. Adichie is Igbo, so her writing focuses on that perspective. Oyeyemi is Yoruba, but her focus is more on the Western world. There are other authors I've heard about more recently: Nnendi Okorafor and Chigozie Obioma, both of whom released very successful books in the past year. Adichie herself warns against the pitfalls of a single story and urges people to seek out more perspectives about any one place or people.
Then again, I also know that I should expand my view beyond Nigeria, read literature from Kenya or Ghana or South Africa, guard against letting Nigeria stand in for the entire continent in my mind's eye. And I want to read more from African-Americans, as those stories hit closer to home and will probably have more impact on my own life. And so my to-read list grows longer and longer and I despair of ever reading them all or learning everything I should know. Especially when I so often want to just sink into comfort reads.
The only solution is to keep reading, as much as I can, as the books come to me.
Comments
Post a Comment