War Does Not Silence Women: Gendered Survival and Narrative Resistance in Half of a Yellow Sun

Abstract

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) can be read as a deliberate intervention in the reductive historiography. Through its multi-perspective narrative structure and character-driven storytelling, the novel dismantles the dominance of externalised accounts of Biafra and re-centres African voices as the authoritative interpreters of their own past.

 In Half of a Yellow Sun, women are put right at the centre of such strict structures. Although the conservative communities and bloody histories of the Nigerian Civil War and the Second World War belong to two different continents and are decades apart; still, the strain and weight of these wars is common having the lesser of choice.

Thus, the paper seeks to highlight the distinct role of female characters in war-torn Africa and their contribution in prudently challenging and in overcoming those trouble times. Focusing mainly on Black Feminism, the papers try to show that Black women, which were earlier shown to be a trope of submissive and hypersexualized identity, could have their own views and stands on various subjects.

Thus, through the character of Olanna and Kainene along with some other minor characters, the black women’s tropes have been dismantled.

Keywords: Biafra, Black Feminism, Submissive, Hypersexualized identity and Tropes