Half of a yellow Sun// Musings

Chimananda Ngozi Adichie

Chimamanda’s book is not a flawless piece of writing. This line flashed at me as I updated the book on my goodreads, (a corny thing that has a become a ritual and I slightly embrassed of ).

Set in Nigeria, Half of a Yellow Sun starts with Ugwu. It’s through his eyes that we are first introduced to Nigeria, a country on which I could hardly write five lines about before reading this book, to Olanna, a phantom, a beauty, the other object of affection of his master that he can’t hate even though he wants to and ofcourse to ‘master’, Obenigdo.

There is something special about hearing about a person and then being that person, knowing what that person was thinking when those things were being said about them. Told through three primary perspectives, the same instances being told by one person before being corroborated or refuted by the other person is a small part of the magic that the book holds.
Half of a yellow sun, belonging to the small group of books like ‘all the light we cannot see’, talks about war in a way that is real. We go through the war with them. We cry, we lose, we wonder at the fucking loss of it all.

at one point when kaniene says, ‘ the irony of bombing people who are starving’

The loss of kaniene.

the distaste when onigwu became ‘his excellency’, modi

However, its true, Chimamanda’s book is not a flawless piece of writing. But it does, what many forms of art fail to do so, it makes us go through a war with them.

And, it allows us the gift of grief.