Award-winning author and former Drexel student Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie spoke to an audience of over 60 students and faculty members in Drexel’s Living Arts Lounge on May 4th, 2007, describing how and why she creates fiction from history.
Adichie was awarded the O. Henry Prize in 2003, and her novel, Purple Hibiscus, won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book in 2005. Adichie’s new book, Half of a Yellow Sun, is set in 1960s Nigeria during the civil war. Adichie stressed the impact that growing up in the wake of the war had on her life.
“I carry with myself the legacy of that war,” Adichie said. “Both my grandparents died in that war. My brother was born in the war.”
Half of a Yellow Sun is Adichie’s attempt to understand the legacy she carries. “This is a story I wanted to write for a long time, to understand it myself,” Adichie said. “I often wonder what my life might have been like if my parents hadn’t started from the end of the war.”
But Adichie didn’t write the book solely for herself. She said that remembering and telling the story of the war was important both for those who lived through it and for others like her who were born in its aftermath. She said that she felt she owed it to history to tell the story as accurately as possible. “This book for many Nigerians would be the first time they learned about the war,” Adichie said.
Adichie wanted her readers to feel what it was like to have lived through the war. She researched it extensively, not only reading every historical account she could find, but also talking to relatives and friends who lived through it. “I felt I needed those little details that keep the reader grounded,” Adichie said.
Adichie’s book follows five major characters through the war, watching their relationships with each other develop. She read a passage in which a young Nigerian boy works his first day as a servant and sets foot into a modern house for the first time. She described with wonder the ways in which the boy reacts to these amazing things that are so commonplace to us: refrigerators, sinks, light switches. The character was inspired by a servant of Adichie’s family.
“He was such an Anglophile,” Adichie said. “He thought everything Nigerian was bad, everything English was good.”
Adichie said that she grew up reading stories with white male protagonists and that, in turn, she wrote only about blonde boys with blue eyes. The work of fellow Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe was groundbreaking in her life – it changed her world to find out that she could write about blacks and women.
Still, one of the main characters in Half of a Yellow Sun is Richard, a British expatriate who comes to Nigeria to research Igbo-Ukwu art, but falls in love with Kainene, a Nigerian woman. Against the backdrop of the war, the couple attempts to reconcile after Richard is seduced by Kainene’s twin sister, Olanna.
“It’s not a book about war, it’s a book about love,” Adichie said. “The big love: love for a cause. The small love: love for food. Romantic love…If I had to summarize my work, I would say it is about how love can make us whole.”
Perhaps it is this outlook that can allow Adichie to remain somewhat optimistic about the exploitation going on the Niger Delta today.
“On the whole I’m hopeful,” Adichie said. “In some ways I think I’m hopeful because I don’t have a choice. It’s the only country I have.”
Adichie’s visit was sponsored by the College of Arts and Sciences, the Certificate Program in Writing and Publishing in the Department of English and Philosophy, and Magnificent Minds.
Herb Shallcross is a Drexel graduate who majored in English. He is currently working for the UC Review.