chimamanda ngozi adichie half of a yellow sun 2006

That adds an extra frisson of horror to descriptions of incidents like the one where a woman shows Olanna a bag containing her little girl’s head and says: “Do you know it took me so long to plait this hair? She had such thick hair …” Or the horrific descriptions of hunger and desperation at refugee centres, the rapes and the murders.Īt the same time, facts are not Adichie’s main concern.

She researched books on the war for years (even though they could be “boring”) and says that almost every single incident in the novel is based on something real. Adichie drew on first-hand eyewitness accounts from her parents and close family, friends and compatriots who were involved in the Biafran conflict. On a factual level, this novel has deep roots in the events of 1967 to 1970.

Half of a Yellow Sun is one of those books. But every so often, a book tests our instincts and makes us investigate our feelings about truth and reality more deeply.

We feel such gradations of truth instinctively when we read, so much so that it seems almost redundant to try to sift through these differences in this way. If you want to know the moral truth about the pompous cruelty of fascists in Italy in the early years of Mussolini’s reign, I’d recommend reading his short story about travelling through the country, Che Ti Dice La Patria – just don’t go there for the cold facts and stats. His novel about an old man catching a mythically huge fish has a different relationship to historical events than his novel about the Italian front in the first world war. Hemingway’s short stories are different to his journalism, for instance. We have to do some internal calculations to work out exactly where that truth lies. Yet, this idea does also have obvious complications. There’s a different kind of truth to be found in how he describes the downhill rush of skiing, the taste of Spanish red wine, or how it feels to know you’ve lost the love of your life. Write the truest sentence that you know.” It doesn’t matter that Papa sat there and made things up. We all understand what Hemingway meant when he explained how he produced fiction: “All you have to do is write one true sentence. We accept that fiction tells us the truth, even if that’s a contradiction in terms. It’s here that the definition of truth becomes complicated. It has helped hundreds of thousands of people understand a situation that has been largely forgotten, while telling a story that feels truthful – but is also clearly a work of fiction. Both in Nigeria and around the world, it was many people’s introduction to the Biafran conflict.

Among other things, Half of a Yellow Sun is one of the great truth-telling novels.

Chimamanda ngozi adichie half of a yellow sun 2006