Story as History; History as Story in Chimamanda Adichie’s <i>Half of a Yellow Sun</i>

Abstract

A story is a modest attempt by the writer to make sense of experience. It represents an illumination of social reality. It is also in this sense that we can begin to perceive literature as a national biography, depicting social conditions of certain periods in our history. The artist is a conduit through which old things or issues (the past) are recovered or reconfigured. Stories illuminate the past and offer an insight into its understanding. The world that the writer has created is what we want to savour and enjoy, but we cannot deeply appreciate it unless we comprehend its relevance to the other two worlds, the writer.s world and our world. It is within the context of the foregoing that an attempt is made in this essay to highlight the relevance and power of Adichie.s Half of a Yellow Sun in the understanding of the Nigeria/Biafra war of 1967-1970. Using the postcolonial theory as its
guiding principle with a view to locating and commenting on issues and
activities that characterized the war which Adichie tries to reconstruct in her
novel, the essay explores the relationship between history and story and
concludes on the note that in Africa, given her circumstances, African writers
are historically bound to take recourse to their history. In the case of Adichie with the novel under consideration, she ends up producing a work of “faction” in all its materiality.

Key words: Story, History, Postcolonial, Social reality, 'Faction',
Nigeria/Biafra