Chimamanda Adichie, the current Joan Jakobson Visiting Writer, read from her acclaimed novel “Half of a Yellow Sun” this Wednesday, Feb. 13, at the second event in the Distinguished Writers/New Voices series. A graduate of both the University of Nigeria’s Medical School and Johns Hopkins University, Adichie read to a full house of fans at Russell House.
Adichie said that it was lovely to know her reading was being webcast.
“That’s something that happens when someone like Mandela speaks,” she quipped. “It’s very exciting.”
“Half of a Yellow Sun,” which took Adichie four years to write, is an account of the Biafran War, also known as the Nigerian Civil War. She emphasized that she wanted to be emotionally and intellectually prepared to take on the war, in which she lost both her grandfathers. In regards to the book’s reception in Nigeria, Adichie recounted that a Nigerian publisher informed her that she would need to wear a helmet there, as many want to leave the past in the past.
Adichie expressively and rhythmically read from one of the three perspectives that narrate the work: a houseboy named Ugwu, whose master is the revolutionary thinker Odenigbo.
Adichie researched the war extensively while writing the novel, interviewing her parents for material. She described her creative process as “turning cold facts into warm truth.”
Out of her many half-written notebooks and writings on scraps of tissue, Adichie ultimately produced a powerful work that became a starting point used by her generation to ask questions about a war that led to 3,000,000 deaths.
“Her work is inspiring to young writers because this project was started when she was an undergrad,” said Sandra Manzanares ’08. “I really appreciate the way she used her transnational experience to inform herself in new ways about her identity. I think many students at Wesleyan can relate as we seek to reconcile our identities in our various experiences. Additionally, I think she has courage to invoke a history that has been stifled in order to embrace her past and her national identity in new and interesting ways.”
Leave a Reply