Childhood in contemporary nigerian fiction
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- 3.2.3 chronotopicity and cartographies of violence in Half of a Yellow Sun
| Half of a Yellow Sun, a time when perhaps the potholes in the tarred roads were not there as portrayed in Purple Hibiscus). This was a time when the university town was indeed a suburban upper middle class, without the silences, tensions and economically better. This is different from the potholed, rusty and dusty town of the Aunty Ifeoma generation in Purple Hibiscus. The chronotopicity of Nsukka is explored through the experiences of the teenager Ugwu, a houseboy. 3.2.3 chronotopicity and cartographies of violence in Half of a Yellow Sun The Biafran war plunges Half of a Yellow Sun into a historically loaded discourse. To fictionalise the Biafran war four decades after it actually happened involves a conscious choice of writing across and along existing works on the subject. The impetus forgoing back forty years, in a second novel says something significant about an authors choice in stepping into a literary minefield. For Adichie though, this decision is also influenced by her need to retrace her familial history that ties in with her ethnic Igbo roots. In other 146 words, the Biafra war defined her familial history, as a source of genealogical knowledge and affirmation of a lineage. 89 Half of a Yellow Sun is written against a background of competing narratives of victims and victors, nation-states and nations and ethnicities entangled in along history of conflict. In view of this, textual strategies are deliberately chosen because of the expectations and assumptions of truths about the war. Adichie is conscious about treading that line of fact and fiction carefully as she points out the imaginative truths that attend to poetic justice. 90 The narrative choices she makes become important in light of this politically charged notion of the Biafran war. Textual strategies are particularly important, especially narrative voices and the subjectivities they represent. The textual space here is therefore an extended space for the engagement of history, and provides an alternative archive of this particular subject of the Biafran war. 91 Adichie is conscious of the choices of narrative voices, historical debates about the war and her own subjectivities regarding the subject. Therefore the generic nature of Half of a Yellow Sun is multiply informed. Considering Bakhtin‟s (1981) ideas about the multi-generic nature of the novel, and the heteroglossic nature of the novelistic word, Half of a Yellow Sun can be examined as historical by virtue of its subject of the war. It is also epistemological as it competes with avast knowledge about the war – historical and literary. The child narrator, Ugwu, is also on an epistemic journey, which turns outwith him being included in the textual strategies of this novel, as a coauthor of the book within this novel. It is also a story about romance, and love during times of war, with protagonists involved in a sub-narrative of love that runs up to the end of the novel. While the book is dedicated to her grandfathers who lived during and took part in the war, the Authors Note (in the form of an epilogue) explains further, the role of lineage as a source of the story. She credits her extended family for being participants in the research that brought to existence Half of a Yellow Sun. Refer to the Authors Note at the end of Half of a Yellow Sun. 91 Here one has in mind Appadurai‟s (1996) discussion of Global ethnoscapes”. He talks about how many lives are inextricably linked with representations (novels, cinema etc), and thus we need to incorporate the complexities of expressive representation into our ethnographies […] as primary material which is to construct and interrogate our own representations (p. 63-64. Emphasis mine. Chapter two also examines the text in relation to the notion of an alternative time, history and therefore archive. 147 In view of the competing histories in times of war, Adichie‟s strategies in crafting her work are based on a conversational approach. The actual research that Adichie undertook which involved a metaphorical act of reclaiming her familial lineage is also complemented by a literary historiography of the Biafran war. After her epilogue, she acknowledges these) books that helped in my research giving a list of fictional and nonfictional works she consulted while writing Half of a Yellow Sun. She highlights specific influences as follows I owe much thanks to their authors. In particular, Chukwumeka Ike‟s Sunset at Dawn and Flora Nwapa‟s Never Again were indispensable in creating the mood of middle-class Biafra: Christopher Okigbo‟s own life and Labyrinths inspired the character of Okeoma; while Alexander Madiebo‟s The Nigerian Revolution and the Biafran war was central to the character of colonel Madu. (Authors Note- emphasis retained) In light of the authors note, it is important to see how (inter)textuality is a strategic choice for the author in Half of a Yellow Sun – Adichie is aware of the vast amount of work on the war. She is therefore aware of the numerous voices at the background of the topic. Half of a Yellow Sun becomes an engagement with multiple textual, lineage and genealogical narratives in view of multiple authorial sources. Ugwu, who is one of the three narrators in the text, provides an interesting perspective into the narrative strategies, competing voices, worlds and cultures. Ugwu‟s role as a narrator takes on a more complex (inter)textual role as he coauthors another book within Half of a Yellow Sun titled The World Was Silent When We Died The book within the novel is a portrayal of a competitive narrative, a meta-fictive strategy intrinsic to the dialogic structure of Download 1.93 Mb. Share with your friends:
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