Sense and Sensibility: The Politics of Representation in Chimamanda Adichie’s <i>Half of a Yellow Sun</i>

Abstract

No literary enterprise is as complex and challenging as writing a novel on civil war, especially in a postcolonial, multi-ethnic society. It is a  narrative that often generates very contentious views, and so requires a very nuanced and complex telling. It is the contention of this  article that Chimamanda Adichie must have realised the complex and difficult nature of her task when she was writing Half of a Yellow  Sun (Half), hence, her attempt at some historical nuance and ambivalence in the novel. Therefore, this paper attempts a deconstruction  of Adichie’s methods and styles in Half of a Yellow Sun and highlights some of the challenges and perspectival difficulties she must have  encountered while she was writing the novel. The paper also highlights some of her lapses, silences and evasions. It concludes that there  is something Adichie deftly inters in the roles and assertions she ascribes to her characters and in the way she has shaped her narrative  that seems to indicate not only how ethnicity permeates and structures everything we do and represent in the country but also how the  question of ethnicity has seldom been made a subject of self-scrutinising reflection in public discourse.