a return to the everyday memory of war composite

89 Most significantly is the narrative voice of the houseboy Ugwu who works for Olanna and Odenigbo. Ugwu provides a composite dimension of memory in this story. As a child figure, he provides us with an alternative perspective unlike many other narratives on the
Biafran war. Adichie uses Ugwu to construct shifting subjectivities of the war. Ugwu is first of all modeled after an actual houseboy of the Adichie household called Mellitus, who Adichie acknowledges. Secondly, Ugwu, the teenage combatant, provides Adichie entry into the prescient theme of the child of war. Ugwu‟s status provides Half of a
Yellow Sun with a composite account of a war that does not just portray (as feminist critics like Marion Pape have posited about Biafran war works by women, the Home Front leaving, for the male writers the War Front (2005:237). Ugwu connects Half of
a Yellow Sun to a wider textual topography on the theme of children of war. Here, I have in mind similar protagonists in Uzodinma Iweala‟s Beasts of No Nation and Chris
Abani‟s Song for Night, amongst the abundance of similar tales in contemporary Francophone African literature, the products of the escalation of civil wars in postcolonial Africa.
64
Adichie disperses voices in the novel across gender, race and class and the experience of shifting realities of daily life. Ugwu is significant as a consciousness of childhood. Of more importance is his central role of the child of war who survives and eventually takes on an authorial role, represented as an act of expiation and healing at the end of the novel. As a houseboy, Ugwu provides an account of daily life in his performance of household chores, in much the same way as Kambili does in Purple Hibiscus, even though their levels of consciousness differ. While both are marginal figures, Kambili is female while
Ugwu‟s role as a houseboy highlights his menial status within the postcolonial class structure. Adichie has referred to Ugwu as the soul of the novel,”
65
presenting for usher predilection for marginal but precocious voices as organising consciousnesses in her works. Ugwu comes into the employ of Odenigbo and Olanna at around the age of thirteen, with nave countryside comportment. The tale that ensues can also be related to Fora further exploration on this notion of children of war in Francophone literature, see Odile Cazenave See Interview with Molara Wood – http://www.bbc.co.uk/africabeyond/africanarts/18942.shtml
[accessed August, 26 2010]

90 an epistemological journey, even of a bildungsroman that sees him engage with modernity, at the advent of flag independence and eventually become a vernacular intellectual,”
66
through a process of gradual assimilation into the academic sodality at
Nsukka. His consciousness is defined at first by Nsukka and more specifically within the confines of his Master Odenigbo‟s house. Like Kambili, Nsukka becomes a place that allows Ugwu to develop a critical awareness as he encounters postcolonial modernity through the English language. This is counterbalanced by the competing historical voice of the tensions of an emerging post- independent Nigerian nation-state for his attention. Nsukka becomes a place for composing memories in Adichie‟s fiction and in Half of a Yellow Sun it is at the centre of the significance of Biafra – as a memory-place in the nation-building front at the start of this war. However, Adichie‟s return to the everyday, through the narrative voice of Ugwu provides an interesting perspective of history and memory in relation to the Biafran war. Much of the work by feminist critiques of Amadiume (2000), Akachi (1991; 2000; 2005) and Bryce (1991) reflects on not only the dearth of women authors on the war, but also the way women authors such as Flora Nwapa, Rose Njoku, Buchi Emecheta among others, provide an alternative perspective on the war, through their insistence on the importance of what Marion Pape (2005) refers to as the Home Front by which is implied the maternal domestic front. This critique places premium on the role of women authors in providing a feminist historical consciousness within the archive and memory of this war, while at the same time underscoring Burton‟s (2003) argument about the importance of the micro-narratives of the domestic front in re-imagining history and time. However, most of this critique, as Jane Bryce (1991) anticipates, does not reflect, for instance, on the historical militancy of Igbo women in such events as the “women‟s war in 1927 and the continued problematisation of exclusive gender roles and categories in the discourse of the Biafran war. Hence, Bryce in this sense begins to problematise such concepts as heroism and patriotism in the gendered discourse on war while The phrase vernacular intellectualism can be regarded as an offshoot of Fareed Grants (2003) idea of Black vernacular intellectuals (an extension of Gramsci‟s arguments) about intellectuals who in their critique of social justice stand both inside and outside of academic and conventional spheres.

91 underscoring the idea that the dearth of women‟s voices in this discourse is because the
Biafran war and its patriotic and heroic consciousness was constructed in a traditional patriarchal framework. The domestic front therefore opens an alternative site to critique the masculinised ideas of patriotism, heroism and at the same time refigure the archives of the Biafran war in the form of a literary text. It draws us back to the everyday routines and from the micro- memories of houseboys and children like Ugwu in Half of a Yellow Sun. Ugwu‟s class position and his status as a teenage boy works as a critique of the memories and histories of protagonists and classes who have hitherto been synonymous with this particular war memory. Indeed, Chidi Amuta (1984) has made the argument that the Biafran war and its histories have been read alongside the anxieties of a bourgeois business and military elite. Thus, Ugwu‟s voice provides a critique of not only literary historiography about the war, but also past representations of protagonists involved in it. His status as a houseboy can be argued as sui generis, in the vast representation of the Biafran war in Nigerian literature. He not only brings in the open and nave consciousness of childhood, but also a reconstructed perspective of the everyday that is not polemically feminist or masculinist. It is however perceptive to foresee, from a readers point of view, how the author sets us up to eventually see Ugwu as a somewhat problematic hero, who emerges, on the other side of the war morally tainted by the rape incident (365). However, Ugwu is also reborn through the act of writing as a process of expiation and healing. While he is a hero, he is also an antihero, who signals an already contested vision of a future Nigerian nation- state as an organic body politic.

Download 1.93 Mb.

Share with your friends: