Yale Bulletin and Calendar

March 30, 2007|Volume 35, Number 23

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

In her novel, student tells
human story of Biafran War

Yale graduate student Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie never knew her grandfathers, but their absence made the two men loom large in her life while she was growing up in Nigeria.

Both of her grandfathers were killed in the Nigerian/Biafran civil war of the late 1960s, during which, by some estimates, more than a million civilians and soldiers died.

Adichie was born seven years after the war ended, but throughout her childhood she heard stories about her grandfathers from her parents, although the manner of their deaths was never discussed. Once she was a teenager, however, Adichie began to ask questions about their deaths and about the war that erupted when the southeastern provinces of Nigeria attempted to secede from the nation to form the independent democratic state of Biafra. The succession effort -- spearheaded by the region's ethnic Igbo people to which her family belongs -- failed, and hundreds of thousands of Biafrans starved to death during the bloody conflict. The war has since been described as the first genocidal episode in African history.

In her recently published novel, "Half of a Yellow Sun," Adichie gives a human face to the war that killed her grandfathers, uprooted her parents and was, as she was growing up, only a vaguely understood trauma. The book recreates the political and cultural turbulence of the period principally through the intertwined lives of three different characters. It was nominated for the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Prize and is short-listed for the 2007 Commonwealth Writers Prize for the best book published in Africa. The novel was also published in the United States and the United Kingdom, earning rave reviews from The New York Times, The Washington Post and numerous other newspapers. People magazine selected it as one of the top 10 books of 2006.

Since the novel's release last fall, Adichie has traveled throughout the United States, England and Africa on a book tour, where she has often been greeted with the question: How did you manage to so vividly depict a war you never personally experienced?

"Lots of people in my parents' generation didn't talk about their experiences during the war, as they were still coping with something that is very difficult," says Adichie. "But it was always there in the background. In the stories my dad and other relatives would tell, it would be mentioned in an offhand way, where, in the middle of a story, they would say 'before the war' or 'after the war.' They were still dealing with having been defeated, with having the dreams they once had for a new country shattered. But I would look at horrific pictures from the war years and think, 'I might have been related to one of these people.'"

While Adichie spent years conducting major research for the novel, she was most concerned with telling a human story in "Half of a Yellow Sun," named after the Biafran flag depicting a half sun.

"I think the soul of literature is character and emotion," the Yale student says. "For me, reading fiction has to be different from reading a newspaper. I wanted to write about how it felt, not just write about what happened. It's easy to write about the facts, but it's how human beings reacted to the facts that interests me."

Of all of the accolades she has received for the book, the Yale student is most pleased by the reaction from fellow Nigerians who were also born after the war.

"People of my generation are saying, 'My god, we knew the war had happened but didn't know the details about it,'" comments Adichie. "Older people -- those who experienced the war -- wonder how I described so accurately part of what they experienced. The surprising thing is seeing how the positive response I have gotten manages to cross ethnic divides. I had imagined that people who were Igbo like me might resonate to the book, but I have found that people of every ethnic group in Nigeria do. In a country whose politics has long been divided along ethnic and religious lines, this matters: If we are going to be one Nigeria, we need to own that story [of the war] and confront it."

"Half of a Yellow Sun" is Adichie's second novel; she wrote her first, "Purple Hibiscus," while an undergraduate at Eastern Connecticut State University. Published in 2003, the book is set in Nigeria in the late 1990s, and is told through the eyes of a 15-year-old girl whose father, a devout Catholic and respected political rights activist, is tyrannical in his own home, punishing his children for even the most minor transgressions. The book won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize in 2005 and was long-listed for the 2004 Booker Prize, among other honors.

While not autobiographical, "Purple Hibiscus" takes place in Adichie's hometown of Nsukka, also home to the University of Nigeria, where her father was a professor of mathematics and statistics and her mother was an administrator. She grew up in the former campus residence of one of Nigeria's most renowned novelists and poets, Chinua Achebe, with whom she is now being compared. The Washington Post Book World, in fact, described her as "the 21st-century daughter of Chinua Achebe."

Adichie is modest about such comparisons, but is thrilled with Achebe's assessment of "Half of a Yellow Sun." He says of the younger writer: "We do not usually associate wisdom with beginners, but here is a new writer endowed with the gift of ancient storytellers. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie knows what is at stake, and what to do about it. She is fearless, or she would not have taken on the intimidating horror of Nigeria's civil war. Adichie came almost fully made."

Adichie has also written short stories and essays for literary journals, magazines such as The New Yorker and other publications. These have examined subjects ranging from the challenges faced by Nigerian immigrants in the United States to such topical issues as Madonna's call for others to adopt African children. One of her short stories, "The American Embassy," won the O. Henry Prize in 2003.

Asked when she decided to become a writer, Adichie says, "From the time I could spell, I have always considered myself a writer." She was also an avid reader in childhood, although most of her earliest books, she recalls, were "about white girls living in England, not about people who were like me." She also read Dickens, Charlotte Brontë and Jane Austen, as well as "any romance I could get my hands on," Adichie remarks, and "what I now know to be commercial books."

At home, Adichie did not have access to much literary fiction, so she instead devoured sociology textbooks, histories of the Catholic church and other non-fiction. As a young teenager, she finally discovered Achebe, a writer who will always be important to her not so much for influencing her style but for "emboldening" her, she says.

In high school, Adichie had some of her poetry published in Nigeria, and she also began writing plays and staging productions of them with her classmates. "I cringe now when I think about how bad they are," she says. She was an excellent student, and in Nigeria, according to Adichie, "if you were a good student you went to medical school." While studying medicine at the University of Nigeria, Adichie believed that she could earn her living as a doctor and spend the rest of her time writing. However, when she got the opportunity to come to the United States, where one of her American-born sisters works as a doctor, Adichie jumped at the chance to leave medicine behind.

Adichie first studied communication at Drexel University in Philadelphia, then transferred to Eastern Connecticut State University so she could be close to her sister, whose medical practice is nearby. After earning a degree in communication and political science at Eastern in 2001, she obtained a master's degree in creative writing at Johns Hopkins University. Last year, she was a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University.

The Yale student now divides her time between the United States and Nigeria, and says she is adjusting to life in New Haven as a student. While she acknowledges that her first year of graduate school and her book tour have left her little time to write, she has already chosen the Nigerian immigrant experience in the United States as the subject for her next book.

Aside from wishing she had more time to write, Adichie says she would also love to nurture young writers, especially those in her home country.

"I think there is a lot of incredible talent there," Adichie says. "It is a lovely feeling when younger people come up to me and say that after they read one of my books they want to write, or that they saw themselves in my story, or they just want to write their own. More than any prize -- as prizes can be a distraction -- this makes me feel happy."

-- By Susan Gonzalez

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