13 novembre 2007
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Siren of African Historical Novel
This past long weekend---it was Veterans' Day weekend in the U.S.---I serendipitously discovered the new siren of African Historical Novel: the Nigerian Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born in 1977) in her 2006 novel Half of a Yellow Sun that has been reissued in paperback this year (New York: Anchor Books, 2007). 
I'm thrice ashamed by the fact that: 1) At the bookseller, I was wholly attracted by the paratextual guise of the novel's marvelous cover design (in spite of the proverbial warning that you don't buy a book by its cover); 2) As an amateur of fiction---whose taste ranges from Vikram Seth, Zadie Smith, A.S. Byatt, Robertson Davies, Barry Unsworth, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Shauna Singh Baldwin to J.K. Rowling (and the list is not exhaustive)---I've never heard of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, though she has a previous award-winning novel: Purple Hibiscus, which I still have to read; and 3) I hail from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where creative fiction and daily literary practice by the citizenry have all but vanished to be replaced by a kind of a national vicious fictional practice I call "religious-political rumor-mongering" which has the potential of ruining lives through violence at any time in a Congolese urban environment. No wonder then that in DRC, Soukous musicians have usurped the traditional role of "writers" and "intellectuals"---a crazy development where in times of crises the head-of-state would convene those musicians---some of them with frivolous names like "Bill Clinton"---for meetings to find ways out of these crises due to these musicians' alleged role as "educators of the masses"! The problem is that these Soukous musicians don't take their role seriously or don't think they can stand by their political choice and commitment. During the 2006 presidential electoral campaign in Kinshasa, some Soukous musicians---like Mbilia Bell, Tshala Mwana, Emeneya, Kofi Olomide, Papa Wemba, and Werrason---were paid by the incumbent to write propaganda songs for him. And when Jean-Pierre Bemba's supporters went on an anti-incumbent violent rampage on July 26 of last year, they also targeted those musicians---burning to the ground for instance the club Samba Playa, the rehearsal venue of Werrason. The most astonishing defense of musicians I saw on Congolese TV came from Papa Wemba who claimed in an interview that in fact musicians are just akin to "prostitutes" who get paid, like griots, to sing the praises of well-paying politicians! ... No wonder then that in the Congo, the entire popular culture is being "restructured " by Nigerian Igbo films with Igbo words like "igwe" (chief) being given to Jean-Pierre Bemba!...
I need to turn back to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's novel, lest I get lost in my digression. One would be missing the whole
picture by just describing this novel---Half of a Yellow Sun---as a historical or political novel. It is also a great multi-layered novel of love (also beyond races and religions), of friendship, of filial relations, of sisterhood... It could also be construed as a glimpse into the post-independence Nigerian upper class and intellectual elite... More importantly, it's also the first African novel to stand as a counterpoint to the Cameroonian novelist Ferdinand Oyono's Une vie de boy (1956)---translated in English as Houseboy (1966). For in this novel, in contrast to Oyono's novel in which the houseboy will never turn into a coeval of his masters, Ugwu, the houseboy in Adichie's novel, becomes a coeval family member in the household of his "Master," a fellow Igbo, who sends him back to school and evolves into the writer whose book's outline is interspersed into the novel in a "mise-en-abyme"---a technique A.S. Byatt has pushed to its apex in the new fiction written in English (Possession: A Romance comes here vividly to my mind). The writing of the houseboy takes on such importance that it even crystallizes the experience of the "Master"'s wife, Olanna, who is an intellectual trained in the U.K.: "Ugwu was writing as she spoke, and his writing, the earnest of his interest, suddenly made her story important, made it serve a larger purpose that even she was not sure of, and so she told him all she remembered about the train full of people who had cried and shouted and urinated on themselves" (page 512).
The symbolism of the title of the novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, an expression that recurs in the novel like a refrain of a Congolese soukous song, is unlocked on page 352 of the novel: "About a quarter of her class attended school. She taught them about the Biafran flag. They sat on wooden planks and the weak morning sun streamed into the roofless class as she unfurled Odenigbo's cloth flag and told them what the symbols meant. Red was the blood of the siblings massacred in the North, black was for mourning them, green was for the prosperity Biafra would have, and finally, the half of a yellow sun stood for the glorious future."
Though the story is told from the perspective of "Biafrans," the novel by no means stands as a piece of propaganda for the Igbos. Biafrans are also cast as bad guys: war profiteering; rapes of their own Igbo women; forced conscription of children (Ugwu would be conscripted and wounded in combat); the Ministry of Information as the Ministry of lies; use of mercenaries (particularly one German mercenary who "throws girls on their backs in the open where the men can see him and does them, all the time holding his bag of money in one hand" (p. 406); even Ojukwu's alleged autocracy, "rape" of some of his collaborators' wives, and flight abroad under the false pretense of negotiating a peace treaty with Gowon. At one point, as the fall of Biafra looms, Harrison, another houseboy, walks up to Ugwu with a blaring radio tuned to "Radio Biafra" and the latter balks:
"Please turn that thing off," Ugwu said. He was watching some little boys playing on the nearby patch of grass. "I want to hear the birds."
"There are no birds singing," Harrison said.
"Turn it off."
"His Excellency [Ojukwu] is about to give a speech."
"Turn it off or carry it away."
"You don't want to hear His Excellency?"
"Mba, no."
Harrison was watching him. "It will be a great speech."
"There is no such thing as greatness," Ugwu said (p. 500).
Adichie's novel, though set against the background of the Nigerian civil was in the late sixties, has a searing relevance today in many of Africa's ethnic conflict-ridden regions: Darfur and the Great Lakes---with their accompanying humanitarian disasters and the Western media horrible ranking of African news: famine that forces people to "watch[..] the goats" "[t]o see what they are eating, and after seeing they are boiling the same leaves and giving their children to drink. It is stopping kwashiorkor" (p. 340); the abuse of refugees: with the Catholic Father Marcel who "fucks most of them [starving girls] before he gives them the crayfish that I slave to get here" (p. 499); the horrific "rule of Western journalism: one hundred dead black people equal one dead white person"; and what we often forget while watching TV footages of Internally Displaced People [IDP's]: "The smell was awful, nose-filling, the smell of a dirty toilet and rancid steamed beans and boiled eggs gone bad" (p. 363).
I didn't rehash the plot of the novel for one simple reason: Adichie's novel is a universe; one has to grab this page-turner and lose oneself into its multi-layered universe and back-an-forth chronotope between the "early sixties" and the "late sixties."