Short Takes

After Nigerian war planes finish raining down bombs all around her, Olanna, the heroine of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's novel Half of a Yellow Sun, climbs out of the bunker in her backyard in eastern Nigeria, brooding over her near-death. "If she had died...the bunker would still smell like a freshly tilled farm and the sun would still rise and the crickets would still hop around," she thinks, and is filled with a "frothy rage." This moment, like so many others in Adichie's engrossing novel, incisively explores the disjunction between history as it is experienced personally and its result: that the world will continue to trundle on its way in spite of history's injustices.

Set during the turbulent first decade of Nigeria's independence in the 1960s, which saw the country torn apart by the Biafran Civil War of 1967-70, pitting the Igbo-dominated eastern region in a bid for secession against the rest of the country, the novel vividly brings to life the political and cultural crises that beset post-independence Nigeria. Moving back and forth in time between the euphoric optimism of independence in the early '60s and the nightmarish descent into civil war in the late '60s, Adichie probes the impact of politics and war on the psyche of ordinary people as she follows the lives of Olanna; her husband, Odenigbo, a professor impassioned about the Biafran cause; Ugwu, their houseboy; and Olanna's former lover, Richard, a British writer in eastern Nigeria who is now enamored of her twin sister, Kainene.

Although Adichie's characters are ultimately powerless to control the course of events that unravel their lives, the novel is not entirely pessimistic. It is only after Kainene is exposed to the violence of the war that she chooses to forgive Olanna for the affair that she had years earlier with Richard. "There are some things that are so unforgivable," she tells Olanna, referring to the mindless death and destruction of the war, "that they make other things easily forgivable." The only consolation for the trials of history, the novel seems to say, are the human bonds that individuals forge with one another.

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