Review: Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

In this novel Adichie follows the lives of Biafran people in the late 1960s, as they attempt to declare their independence from greater Nigeria and form a country of their own. She traces the lives of "real people" from all different levels of life: middle class, servants, government leadership, etc. Also, by incorporating the relationships of her main characters with people on the "other side" of the war, we see people on both sides of the fighting as they deal with the horrors of war and the losses associated with it.

I really enjoyed this novel. I think I learned a lot about a topic that I didn't see a lot in my history classes in college. In the late 1960s, the Igbo-led Biafra (in southern modern Nigeria) declared independence from the mostly Muslim Hausa-led north. The civil war leads to the separation of once-strong friendships and threatens the way of life of the intellectual middle class in Biafra. Adichie traces how the war changes people's lives. The characters are believable; each has personal flaws but enough humanity for me to absolutely fall in love with them. I cared what happened to the main characters...and the minor characters, which I think is a huge success for Adichie. I cared about the Igbo people, and I wanted them to win.

In addition to the characters, I think that the author did a fantastic job describing the horrors of war, not just the fighting, but the "collateral" damages caused by civil war: hunger, starvation, suspicion of neighbors. Adichie tackles the issues associated with the "saboteurs," or the other minority non-Igbo people in the south, who were often accused of helping the enemy. She also describes other "side-effects" of war: rape, theft, disease. But she does this in a way that allows the reader to understand some of these terrible actions in the context of war. The reader can criticize the action and the war without necessarily finding people (namely Ugwu) personally culpable for these issues.

There were some issues with the novel. In the beginning, Adichie switched back in forth in time unnecessarily. While it formed some mysteries that kept me reading, I think the novel in chronological order would have provided the same readability without creating confusion with the time lapses.

Still, in general, I think this is a fantastic novel. I would recommend it to anyone! It's also advanced my relative obsession with reading about Latin America and Africa recently. There's just something about the voice of the authors, and the heartbreaking stories they often tell that keeps me reading novels like these over and over.

My rating: 9.4/10

Source: Borrowed from my step-sister

Other reviews:
A Guy's Moleskine Notebook
Kiss A Cloud
Farm Lane Books Blog
Ramya's Bookshelf...

Up next: Whatever I decide to download with my new Kindle!!!!!!!

So Long A Letter by Mariama Ba

I read this novel as another part of my required reading for my Gender in 20th Century Africa class, and, like God's Bits of Wood, I really liked this book. It's a super-fast read, only about 90 pages or so, and I'm interested to see what we're going to do with it during class discussion.

The novel is set up as a letter between the main character, Ramatoulaye, and her friend Aissatou; both are women who went to school to become teachers in a time when African women's limits in professions were limited largely to being either midwives or teachers (rather reminiscent of an article I read recently that discussed Saudi women's limitations in education to teaching or medicine...makes you kinda rethink the pervasive stereotype that Africa is far behind any place else in the world). The novel begins as Ramatoulaye finds out that she has been widowed by a husband that she married for love soon after school and who had recently broken the trust in the marriage by taking a second wife and beginning to ignore her and their children together for the sake of a younger girl, who was forced to marry by her mother in hopes of increasing that family's material standing.

Although the story is fantastic, I was much more fascinated by the underlying theme that I saw in the story: a discussion of the place that marriage should have in a "modern" African society. The story ends happily, with two of Ramatoulaye's daughters marrying/planning to marry for love (one completely by choice; the other's marriage is accelerated due to an unplanned pregnancy), rather than material wealth. None of the main characters at the end of the book were taking social expectations for granted. Very early in the novel Aissatou leaves her husband for taking a second wife and takes her sons to the U.S., where she works as a translator. Ramatoulaye has forsaken expectations, turning down marriage proposals from her husband's brother and another well-to-do man to begin courting. The novel contains ample amounts of heartache throughout the story, but, by the end, I think that it presents a realistic hope for improvement for the lot of women in Africa.

My rating: 9/10

God's Bits of Wood by Sembene Ousmane

I know this isn't on the list of 1,001 Books, but I had to read it for my Gender in 20th C. Africa class. It's totally worth writing about, even though it's not on the list (and, in my opinion, rightfully so). Still, I liked the book a lot.

The basic premise of the book is the description of the various people and groups involved in a railway strike in colonial Senegal. Written by an extremely politically active man, it puts faces to the history read in more "historically-geared" books. Like most historical fiction, he takes liberties with the history involved to help push his own political agenda, particularly in dealing with the Women's March to the city. He does, however, embellish for a reason; there is a strong undercurrent of support for women's equality within the nascent independent Senegal. (Ousmane wrote the novel on the cusp of Senegalese independence.)

I really believe that this book is worthwhile for one major reason: it puts individuals within the history. Often historians discuss "the strikers" or "the Africans" when discussing African history, especially in regards to protests, strikes, etc., but this book, even though the characters in the novel are either entirely fictional or based loosely on major historical leaders, really highlights the idea that this strike, and others, was led by people, and people were involved in every element of this strike. Each dealt with it in their own way, depending on their personal level of agreement with the strikers, their gender, their economic standing, their relationship/position in the company and in greater Sengalese culture and society, and so on. The strikers and their supporters were not a homogenous group of faceless Africans; each person individually helped shape the strike itself and the aftermath according to their needs and expectations.

Yet, I thought, personally, that there was something missing from this book; Ousmane is, in my opinion, not Achebe or Ngugi. He writes well, but there are some elements to the story that are unclear, and his use of some characters tends to be artificial; for example, I think the inclusion of the character Sounkare didn't advance the story much. He acted more as a symbol that didn't necessarily advance the story and had much more to do with Ousmane's push for worker solidarity (after all, he was a member of the Communist Party in France). In general, though, the book was a good supplement to my class (the role of women in the strike was similar to the roles of women in other strikes and protests in other African colonies during this time period) and provided a more individualized view of African-led protests against white colonizers.

My rating: 9.5/10