Half of A Yellow Sun - Review

HALF OF A YELLOW SUN by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a historical account of Biafra’s struggle to break away from Nigeria. Author’s like Chimamanda bring history alive through fiction. She is in the league of Khaled Hosseini, Alex Hailey, Chinua Achebe who brought to the notice of the world the painful stories of peoples subdued at gunpoint. The story is not about which side was right or which wrong. It’s about the degrading existence that the ordinary folks have to undergo in the event of war. You are damned if you turn up as the vanquished, like the Biafrans were.

She has skilfully woven the story of a family, well-placed in society, intelligent and modern in their outlook. Their initial success, travails, romance and their final abject existence.

The narrative stands out as unique in character sketch. Apart from five main characters (Odenigbo, Olanna, Richard, Kainene and Ugwu), she has populated the story with an uncountable number of characters, each divergent and different from one another.

The book is a work of intense research, which one can feel as one reads. Besides, the Author’s Note and the End Matter in the last several give an account of her painstaking search for stories and experiences of a period when she was not born.

The ending is sad, though we already knew the inevitable result of the conflict – Biafra loses. Three years of war, one million dead. She constantly reminds the world of their inaction through the title of a book that is intended to be written by a character – The World Was Silent When We Died.

Recommended read from the point of view of literature, history and general awareness about West-Central Africa, but, caveat – you’ve got quite some reading to do, 152,000 words.