by JULIET WATERS

There is nothing sly, ironic or clever in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s narrative voice. But there’s something mischievous in the opening paragraphs of her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, set in early-1960s Nigeria. The first character we meet is Ugwu, a houseboy to an eccentric middle-class bachelor. For the average reader, it will probably only dawn slowly, like the sun of the novel’s title, that “Master” is not a flaky Brit or American gone a little native. Odenigbo is a Nigerian leftist academic who has gone a little colonial. But just a little. Odenigbo is a good man who cares about social equality in the country that by the end of the novel will become Biafra. He does, however, get a little caught up in the grandiosity of his socialist rhetoric.

The family of Odenigbo’s beautiful girlfriend call him “The Revolutionary.” Again, because we are introduced to her first from Ugwu’s point of view—and the first thing Ugwu notices is language and accent—it is not immediately obvious whether master’s “special woman” is white or black. We only know that she is highly educated. Olanna, it turns out, is the daughter of an Igbo chief, and one of two very non-identical twins. Olanna is gorgeous, graceful and expresses her class in repeated acts of kindness and generosity. Kainene is sexy, plain, arrogant and a born capitalist.

In many ways, Kainene is the more interesting of the two sisters, but Half of a Yellow Sun is mostly Olanna’s story. The contrasting fates of the two sisters as Nigeria erupts into war and secession is the backbone of this novel. Its heart is the interweaving of two love stories, Olanna and Odenigbo and then Kainene and Richard—a British writer and the only significant white character in the novel.

Even if it is fundamentally the tale of two sisters, the world that Adichie creates is very much a man’s world, in the worst sense. A world of horrific violence and degradation as Biafra separates from Nigeria, and as genocide is declared on the Igbo. As privileged upper-middle-class daughters who have in a sense married down (even though Kainene never marries, and Olanna only does much later, in a ceremony destroyed by shelling) both sisters were comfortably equal to their mates. But the politics of their respective relationships become increasingly strained and irrelevant as the struggle for basic survival takes over. Nigeria declares war on Biafra and the intellectuals and politicians who support it. Poverty kills and degrades those who haven’t been slaughtered or raped, as both sisters take on different roles in the political crisis, Olanna as a teacher, Kainene as a contractor.

As the story shifts fluidly back and forth from the early ’60s to the late ’60s, this totally engrossing novel thoroughly disguises the fact that Adichie wasn’t even born until 1977. Adichie’s first novel, Purple Hibiscus, established her as part of an emerging trend in American fiction: first-generation immigrants who are writing astonishingly assured novels and short stories from the perspective of dual citizens. Writers like Edgwidge Dandicat from Haiti, and Rattawut Lapcharoensap from Thailand shift effortlessly between the old and the new world. These are writers whose multiple nationalities are a source of strength and complexity, not ambivalence.

A decade or two ago, Adichie might have been labelled an important African-American writer. Few would have the audacity to call her that now. She came to the U.S. from Nigeria to study when she was 19, and travels frequently between the two continents. Having won the Commonwealth award for her first novel, she obviously hasn’t felt compelled to give up her Nigerian citizenship. As a Hodder fellow at Princeton, she obviously doesn’t need to. She’s an important American writer, yes. But if she continues to write masterpieces like this one, she is more likely to be considered an extremely important African writer.

Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie,
Knopf, hc, 435pP, $32.95