Tales of War for the ‘Third Generation’: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun

Abstract

As leading figure of a burgeoning ‘third generation’ of Nigerian writers (Adesanmi & Dunton 2005), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie raised to international fame in 2007 after winning the Orange Prize for Fiction with  her novel on the Biafra war, Half of a Yellow Sun. This paper aims at investigating how the way Adichie’s fiction deals with the subject of war offers new insights in the role of the engagé writer in a postcolonial and global context. Adichie chooses to narrate the conflict through multiplying layers of re-telling, and hence refuses to cast herself as the spokesperson of either a national identity (Nigeria and/or Biafra), an ethnic group (Igbo), or a social class among those featured in the novel. Hence, Half of a Yellow Sun is meant to foster a culture of peace for a generation of cosmopolitan Igbo Nigerians born at least a decade after the war’s bitter end, advocating the new generations’ right to memory without retaliation.

DOI: 10.17456/SIMPLE-27

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