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‘He Writes About the World that Remained Silent’: Witnessing Authorship in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun

2012; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 55; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/00138398.2012.731289

1943-8117

Emmanuel Ngwira,

South African History and Culture

Abstract This article focuses on how the issue of authorship of history is portrayed in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun. Particularly, the article focuses on how Adichie's novel portrays the actual writing of history: how events of the Biafran war are turned into historical narrative. The article argues that by reflecting on the actual moment of writing history, Adichie's novel draws the reader into a position of witnessing both the events of the Biafra war and, more importantly, the process of turning those events into narrative. The novel reflects upon the moment of writing history through a metafictional element known as self-reflexivity, which in postmodernist thinking, refers to how a text reflects upon its own making. Half of a Yellow Sun achieves such self-reflexivity through a book that is being written in the novel. Besides reflecting on the making of the text, these mise en abyme moments of writing that appear in the novel present an interesting dilemma for the reader for whom it is not immediately clear who is writing the book.