What will we be able to forgive when we learn the truth?
With Half of a Yellow Sun, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie presents her readers with a gorgeously wrought story set in horrific times. I don't remember the Nigerian-Biafran civil war, but I do recall the time for my first exposure to television pictures of starving children. Adichie provides context for those memories. In this novel, war and class, foreign policy indifferent to human suffering when oil is involved, malnutrition and prejudice, arrogance, dependence and corruption, and genocide serve as the backdrop for stories of love and loyalty, childhood and morality and identity, belonging and exclusion, forgiveness and betrayal, vibrancy, hope and grief, survival and resilience, family and friendship.

The characters are full-bodied and dynamic. We meet kind, bright, innocent Ugwu at age 13 as he leaves his village to work as a houseboy. He discovers the comparative opulent lifestyles of city-dwellers with their running water and daily eating of meat. Over a brief period of time, his role expands from houseboy to student, teacher, army conscript, and writer.

It is through Ugwu's observations of the visitors to Odenigbo's house that we begin to learn about the move to secession and the personalities involved in Biafra's formation. Odenigbo treats Ugwu with kindness and, in congruence with his revolutionary socialist ideals, promotes the boy's education. But this represents Odenigbo's only success in bringing his political theorizing to fruition.

Odenigbo's mistress is the beautiful, London-educated Olanna. She abandons her parents' lavish and privileged lifestyle, declining the opportunity to wait out the war with them in favor of supporting of Odenigbo's social principles. Olanna's gentleness, compassion, and sense of self are tested as the war progressively claims those around her through chaos, massacre, and starvation. We are witness to her realization that: "If she had died, if Odenigbo and Baby and Ugwu 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. The war would continue without them. It was the very sense of being inconsequential that pushed her from extreme fear to extreme fury. She had to matter. She would no longer exist limply, waiting to die." And so she rises above and learns to survive.

In contrast to Olanna's naïveté, her non-identical twin sister Kainene responds to the struggle with clear-eyed determination. Kainene recognizes that, at heart, this war is ultimately not a struggle for self-determination but a bid to control resources (namely oil). She describes Nigeria's ruling elite as "a collection of illiterates who read nothing and eat food they dislike at overpriced Lebanese restaurants and have social conversations about one subject: `How's the new car behaving?'" She has no illusions about where this attitude will lead, and when war breaks out turns her shrewd mind from running her father's factories to assuring the survival of those dear to her. Improbably, Kainene takes as her lover Richard, a British expatriate writer who is enamored with ancient Igbo-Ukwu art and is desperately seeking to be seen as Biafran.

This is a marvelous book. With glorious prose, Adichie presents the war as lived by these thoroughly human characters. Their experiences linger in my mind. I gave this book 4 stars when I first read it. Half of a Yellow Sun has been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Prize and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize: Africa. It was also included in the New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2006. What makes a book great is its power to move people. I have been moved. Given the continued impact that this book has on my thinking, perhaps it deserves 5 stars.

The Biafran conflict serves as a mirror for current-day Iraq, a country immersed in turmoil due to war and class, foreign policies indifferent to human suffering when oil is involved, malnutrition and prejudice, arrogance, dependence and corruption, and genocide. Iraq in the late twentieth century was much the same as Nigeria in the 1960s: ruled by dictators appointed, anointed, and supported by foreign powers; pressured by these great nations and their multinational financiers to keep the oil (and hence the money) flowing outward; and manipulated to increase division among tribal and religious groups, thereby weakening those factions who might oppose such indirect rule.

Today, of course, there are no pictures of starving Iraqi children on our televisions each evening. In the decade prior to the 2003 US invasion, nearly 2,000,000 Iraqis had died from starvation and disease. War certainly has not improved the plight of the survivors. But the world can only guess at the current extent of malnutrition and death by starvation and preventable disease. The Iraqi Development Fund, charged with meeting the minimal nutritional needs of its country's people, involuntarily funnels millions of dollars a year to its sole supplier, Halliburton.

Given the incapacity of the US government, its military, and their Iraqi trainees either to negotiate a cease-fire between guerilla parties or to enforce order in the absence of such negotiation, humanitarian agencies have been forced to suspend operations because of the extreme risks posed to their representations. The only information regarding the welfare of the Iraqi people comes from embedded journalists whose access and content is controlled by their US military overseers. Perhaps in some distant future, the stories of semi-fictional Iraqis will be presented to us with the same clear-sightedness and passion provided by Adichie in Half of a Yellow Sun. As Kainene says, "There are some things that are so unforgivable that they make other things easily forgivable." What will we be able to forgive when we learn the truth?

Review this book