a return to the everyday memory of war: composite consciousnesses

In light of the vast store of literature on trauma memory, specifically Holocaust memory, Dan Ben-Amos (1999:297) advocates for “a shift in the perception of collective memory from the monumental to the mundane, from the archives to everyday life.” Half of a

Yellow Sun reverts to the everyday, to the shrinking realities that come when the war

starts. Set primarily at the University of Nigeria Nsukka, the narrative of Half of a Yellow

Sun alternates between the early 1960s during Nigeria‟s independence and the Biafran

war in the late 1960s. Adichie plots the narrative plot in a manner that allows the turbulence of war to intrude, from time to time the engagement with life before the war. Adichie therefore succeeds in showing the disruptions that war causes in the routines of daily life. The story plots the lives of an academic community at the University, with the female protagonist Olanna and fiancé Odenigbo. An interesting narrative voice is provided by the white man Richard, who comes to Nigeria to research on ancient “Igbo-

Most significantly is the narrative voice of the houseboy Ugwu who works for Olanna and Odenigbo. Ugwu provides a composite dimension of memory in this story. As a child figure, he provides us with an alternative perspective unlike many other narratives on the Biafran war. Adichie uses Ugwu to construct shifting subjectivities of the war. Ugwu is first of all modeled after an actual houseboy of the Adichie household called Mellitus, who Adichie acknowledges. Secondly, Ugwu, the teenage combatant, provides Adichie entry into the prescient theme of the “child of war”. Ugwu‟s status provides Half of a

Yellow Sun with a composite account of a war that does not just portray (as feminist

critics like Marion Pape have posited about Biafran war works by women), the “Home Front,” leaving, for the male writers the “War Front” (2005:237). Ugwu connects Half of

a Yellow Sun to a wider textual topography on the theme of children of war. Here, I have

in mind similar protagonists in Uzodinma Iweala‟s Beasts of No Nation and Chris Abani‟s Song for Night, amongst the abundance of similar tales in contemporary Francophone African literature, the products of the escalation of civil wars in postcolonial Africa.64

Adichie disperses voices in the novel across gender, race and class and the experience of shifting realities of daily life. Ugwu is significant as a consciousness of childhood. Of more importance is his central role of the child of war who survives and eventually takes on an authorial role, represented as an act of expiation and healing at the end of the novel. As a houseboy, Ugwu provides an account of daily life in his performance of household chores, in much the same way as Kambili does in Purple Hibiscus, even though their levels of consciousness differ. While both are marginal figures, Kambili is female while Ugwu‟s role as a houseboy highlights his menial status within the postcolonial class structure. Adichie has referred to Ugwu as the “soul of the novel,”65

presenting for us her predilection for marginal but precocious voices as organising consciousnesses in her works. Ugwu comes into the employ of Odenigbo and Olanna at around the age of thirteen, with naïve countryside comportment. The tale that ensues can also be related to

64

For a further exploration on this notion of children of war in Francophone literature, see Odile Cazenave (2005)

65 _{See Interview with Molara Wood – http://www.bbc.co.uk/africabeyond/africanarts/18942.shtml} [accessed August, 26 2010]

an epistemological journey, even of a bildungsroman that sees him engage with modernity, at the advent of flag independence and eventually become a “vernacular intellectual,”66

through a process of gradual assimilation into the academic sodality at Nsukka. His consciousness is defined at first by Nsukka and more specifically within the confines of his Master Odenigbo‟s house.

Like Kambili, Nsukka becomes a place that allows Ugwu to develop a critical awareness as he encounters postcolonial modernity through the English language. This is counterbalanced by the competing historical voice of the tensions of an emerging post- independent Nigerian nation-state for his attention. Nsukka becomes a place for composing memories in Adichie‟s fiction and in Half of a Yellow Sun it is at the centre of the significance of Biafra – as a memory-place in the nation-building front at the start of this war. However, Adichie‟s return to the everyday, through the narrative voice of Ugwu provides an interesting perspective of history and memory in relation to the Biafran war. Much of the work by feminist critiques of Amadiume (2000), Akachi (1991; 2000; 2005) and Bryce (1991) reflects on not only the dearth of women authors on the war, but also the way women authors such as Flora Nwapa, Rose Njoku, Buchi Emecheta among others, provide an alternative perspective on the war, through their insistence on the importance of what Marion Pape (2005) refers to as the “Home Front,” by which is implied the maternal domestic front. This critique places premium on the role of women authors in providing a feminist historical consciousness within the archive and memory of this war, while at the same time underscoring Burton‟s (2003) argument about the importance of the micro-narratives of the domestic front in re-imagining history and time. However, most of this critique, as Jane Bryce (1991) anticipates, does not reflect, for instance, on the historical militancy of Igbo women in such events as the “women‟s war” in 1927 and the continued problematisation of exclusive gender roles and categories in the discourse of the Biafran war. Hence, Bryce in this sense begins to problematise such concepts as “heroism” and “patriotism” in the gendered discourse on war while

66 _{The phrase “vernacular intellectualism” can be regarded as an off-shoot of Fareed Grant‟s (2003) idea of} Black vernacular intellectuals (an extension of Gramsci‟s arguments) about intellectuals who in their critique of social justice stand both inside and outside of academic and conventional spheres.

underscoring the idea that the dearth of women‟s voices in this discourse is because the Biafran war and its patriotic and heroic consciousness was constructed in a traditional patriarchal framework.

The domestic front therefore opens an alternative site to critique the masculinised ideas of patriotism, heroism and at the same time refigure the archives of the Biafran war in the form of a literary text. It draws us back to the everyday routines and from the micro- memories of houseboys and children like Ugwu in Half of a Yellow Sun. Ugwu‟s class position and his status as a teenage boy works as a critique of the memories and histories of protagonists and classes who have hitherto been synonymous with this particular war memory. Indeed, Chidi Amuta (1984) has made the argument that the Biafran war and its histories have been read alongside the anxieties of a bourgeois business and military elite. Thus, Ugwu‟s voice provides a critique of not only literary historiography about the war, but also past representations of protagonists involved in it. His status as a houseboy can be argued as sui generis, in the vast representation of the Biafran war in Nigerian literature. He not only brings in the open and naïve consciousness of childhood, but also a re-constructed perspective of the everyday that is not polemically feminist or masculinist. It is however perceptive to foresee, from a reader‟s point of view, how the author sets us up to eventually see Ugwu as a somewhat problematic hero, who emerges, on the other side of the war morally tainted by the rape incident (365). However, Ugwu is also reborn through the act of writing as a process of expiation and healing. While he is a hero, he is also an anti-hero, who signals an already contested vision of a future Nigerian nation- state as an organic body politic.

Half of a Yellow Sun begins in the “Early sixties,” in the newly independent Nigeria at

University of Nigeria Nsukka, in the home of burgeoning intellectuals – Odenigbo and Olanna, master and mistress of Ugwu. As a historically conscious novel, Adichie provides, through the dialogues of this intellectual class at Nsukka, the discourse of a postcolonial society in the making. Through the narrative perspective of Ugwu, we are allowed into the daily practices of this intellectual class, through their conversations, that Ugwu, in his position in the kitchen is privy to, as he cooks, serves food and drinks and

goes about the daily culinary chores assigned to him. Indeed, taking the idea of an academic sodality as representative of the consciousness of this new nation-state-in-the- making at Nsukka, at face value is problematic. One could even argue, in light of Amuta (1984) that Adichie‟s Half of a Yellow Sun depicts the bourgeoisie anxieties that were behind the war, because academics form part of this particular class as intellectual stakeholders. J.P O‟Flinn‟s article also traces the “sociology of the Nigerian novel” through the elitist alliances of the military, businessmen and politicians that resulted in what Olalare Oladitan called “The Nigerian Crisis in the Nigerian Novel” – the strings of coups and the civil war67 - and collapse in post-independence Nigeria. However, the idea of Ugwu the houseboy represents a self-critique to the one-sided colonial/patriarchal consciousness of the Biafran war. Ugwu‟s role in the kitchen as a servant, allows for his construction as a reliable voice who takes part in the war from a different point of view. He is scarred by the war, and through the epistemological evolution he goes through as a servant, then as pupil/student, a teacher during the war and eventually an authorial voice, he embodies a composite ideological vision of Adichie – as the previously marginal subject who eventually finds a voice and becomes central to the history being constructed in the novel.

Ugwu starts as a naïve subject facing a new and rapidly advancing post-independent modernity. He is confronted by an anti-colonial consciousness, through his master‟s conversations with his visitors. He has come into an academic sodality as an observer from the margins of society. Yet he is confronted by historical discourses and epistemological debates, in a manner that has him listen and watch in naïve bewilderment:

„There are two answers to the things they will teach you about our land: the real answer and the answer you give in school to pass. You must read books and learn both answers. I will give you books, excellent books.‟ Master stopped to sip his tea. „They

67 _{Refer to J.P. O‟Flint “Towards a Sociology of the Nigerian Novel” in African Literature Today no. 7 and} Olalare Oladitan “The Nigerian Crisis in the Nigerian Novel” in Kolawole Ogungbesan (ed) New West African Literature.

will teach you that a white man called Mungo Park discovered River Niger. That is rubbish. Our people fished in the Niger long before Mungo Park‟s grandfather was born. But in your exam, write that it was Mungo Park.‟

„Yes, sah.‟ Ugwu wished that this person called Mungo Park had not offended master so much. (11)

Thus begins Ugwu‟s epistemological journey, through a baptism of fire by an employer who is an academic and a revolutionary at University of Nigeria Nsukka. While these discourses are meta-critical in relation to Ugwu‟s mental position as a semi-literate village boy, they begin a build up to the controversial counter-discourse of the Biafran war in the wake of a history of nationalism within the intellectual class at Nsukka. Ugwu begins to witness the dialogues between Odenigbo, his master, and a host of other academics of different races, cultures and ethnicities. The everyday life for Ugwu, apart from preparing the food, is listening to the clink of glasses and laughter, as well as the highly charged topics of nation-state and national identities between Odenigbo, Miss Adebayo the Yoruba Academic, Dr. Patel the Indian, Mr. Johnson the Caribbean, Professor Lehman the American, Okeoma the poet (modeled after Christopher Okigbo) and Professor Ezeka (18-20). Adichie takes this opportunity to construct, through the daily conversations of this academic sodality a discourse around ethnic and national identities and subjectivities around the ideas of Pan-Africanism and Pan-Igboism (18-21). The everyday is therefore fraught, already, with verbal-ideological fractures of differing ideas of identity. Ugwu‟s role is to listen, from his marginal position and status to the different accents of English or Igbo, ethnicities, like Miss Adebayo‟s Yoruba accent and to slowly witness how fragile the national identity texture is. Nsukka becomes a microcosm of the already existing tensions that are part of uneasy coexistence of colonial occupation.

Anderson‟s (1991) idea of an imagined community is interrogated by the intellectuals here. Odenigbo, Ugwu‟s Master, is already being constructed as a revolutionary, even a vernacular intellectual, championing Igbo nationalism:

„Of course, of course, but my point is that the only authentic identity for the African is the tribe,‟ Master said. „I am Nigerian because a white man created Nigeria and gave me that identity. I am black because the white man constructed black to be as different as possible from his white. But I was Igbo before the white man

came.‟ (20. Emphasis retained.)

Ugwu listens to these polemical debates that foreground the underlying tensions within the nationalist history of Nigeria that the novel is reconstructing. Within the discourse of daily life for these academic society at Nsukka, is encrusted identity tensions. As a university town, it has a cosmopolitan demographic, indicated by the diversity of ethnicities and races that form Odenigbo‟s regular interlocutors. The collective experience of colonialism provides a locus on shared history for the intellectuals here, but they soon realise that the practice of everyday life – language and culture, as well as shared communal origins are different and that the post-independent political unit – the nation-state – seems not to provide enough platform for dialogue among these disparate “nationalities”. Nation-state tensions are brought to the level of the everyday in Half of a

Yellow Sun. The “Home Front” as Ugwu witnesses becomes a “War Front” of verbal-

ideological warfare. The “early sixties,” the period depicted in the novel as tranquil at the University is ideologically simmering with identity tensions. Adichie‟s structuring of the novel as periods of juxtaposed history with “early sixties” alternating with “late sixties” is aesthetically similar to her engagement with the memory of “Palm Sunday” in Purple

Hibiscus, in which events that happen “before Palm Sunday” are also alternated, with

Nsukka and Enugu becoming trajectories of memory-places embodied in red and purple hibiscus flowers. In Half of a Yellow Sun, history is engaged with through the migration of memories across time, essentially between these two periods of years, early and late sixties. These two periods are alternate trajectories of history that leave an indelible collective memory of an Igbo nation and which are times when heritages and legacies are created and destroyed. The domestic front remains a veritable battleground in Half of a

Yellow Sun, where the memory of the everyday is reconstructed by Adichie, as a

As a novel dealing with historical events, domestic histories and memories provide a critique to many assumptions of heroism and patriotism. Moreover, Adichie is aware of the need to provide a composite yet microcosmic account of the war, with an array of protagonists and voices, even though there is always the underlying subjectivity of her own genealogical heritage of the war. Hence Ugwu, the houseboy modeled after an actual houseboy called Mellitus is admitted into the genealogy of the Adichie family, through his voice in Half of a Yellow Sun, as part of the narrative‟s construction of the genealogy of the Biafran war. Ugwu‟s position in relation to other houseboys in Nsukka, as he realises, is different: his Master Odenigbo insists he should refer to him as Odenigbo and not “sah” as Ugwu has been instructed by his aunt. Odenigbo also enrolls him at the staff primary school, and allocates him a room in the main house rather than the “Boys‟ Quarters”. These, Ugwu realises, are privileges that other houseboys in Nsukka do not enjoy.

2.5.2 collective memory and trauma: composite memories of war