Literature for countries tearing themselves apart: Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche
It's never too late to review "Half of a Yellow Sun"
A nation divided by politics. Families broken by migration: a stream of young graduates seeking their lives in countries with four seasons. The anguish of losing their original identity. Watching, from afar, a country eat its children like Saturn. To return: facing the accusation of having betrayed one's culture. The limbo of not feeling neither from there nor from here…
These are the themes developed by Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche, superstar of American literature. Born in Nigeria, she made the bestseller lists with two books, "Half a Yellow Sun" and "Americanah". She cemented her fame in a talk at the prestigious TEDx Talks, with one of the most watched lectures on the entire site. "We should all be feminists", the title of her talk, ended up being a rallying cry for the defense of women's rights. It was a social event that impacted American popular culture: designer Maria Grazia Chiuri printed it in her first work for Dior. The brand put it on sale for a whopping $710 a piece, promising to donate a portion of the proceeds to singer Rihanna's humanitarian foundation. Thus, Chimamanda has become an icon, the new currency that everyone wants to own.
However, in a society ruled by poorly written 140-character sentences, the author has rejected this appropriation. In an interview with the German Volkskrat newspaper, Adiche expresses her frustration: "Aren't you people interested in my books?" she says, when asked for the umpteenth time about the video of singer Beyoncé where they use her TED Talk. "My feminism is not hers," she clarifies before the image of a panting Beyoncé wiggling in a pseudo-sex-fuelled frenzy.
For someone who read her work with fascination and interest, I think that reducing the Nigerian's work to her lecture or a Beyoncé video is to deprive oneself of an outstanding literary figure. Many have written about identity and migration, a subject as old as Ulysses getting lost on a boat trying to return home. What Chimamanda adds is an incredible freshness and a masterful rhythm. The author is able to open "Half of a Yellow Sun" with an amusing scene about social contrasts in Nigeria. Ugwu, one of the main characters, arrives for his first day of work as a maid's helper to a middle-class home. When he is told he can eat whatever he wants from the fridge, the boy from humble origins must guess what "a fridge" is:
"Ugwu entered the kitchen cautiously, placing one foot in front of the other. When he saw the white thing, almost as big as he was, he knew it was the refrigerator. His aunt had told him about it. It's a cold barn, she told him, that keeps the food from spoiling."
It's Aureliano Buendía remembering ice, from an African point of view. When Ugwu plucks up his courage and manages to open the huge white appliance, he is frozen, as if facing a firing squad. He can't believe how much groceries he has before his eyes, and decides to pocket a whole chicken before the food disappears. When the owners discover him because of the chicken stench emanating from his greasy bag, the reader is confronted, through the author's humor, with the great problems of wealth distribution that a country like Nigeria can have.
In this way, we are gradually reeled into the story, which will prove to be heartbreaking. Nigeria is a rich country because it has oil. However, society is fractured. There are those who believe that they have lost the "true values" of the country and that it must be re-founded. The government calls them traitors. They decide to disown the central government and found a parallel government. They baptize the project "Biafra". What follows, we all know: a civil war of appalling proportions and one of the most serious famines of the second half of the 20th century.
(They made a movie based on the book, but I never watched it)
This is why "Half of a Yellow Sun" stands out in contemporary literature. It is a brilliant X-ray of a decaying society, advancing at a vertiginous pace towards its own catastrophe. These are countries that are committing suicide, countries that vote for rulers who will impoverish them, who will destroy the collective fabric and lead them to civil war. It is the great failure of monoproduction: a State that manages resources, rewarding favors and punishing its enemies. This creates a nouveau-riche middle class, disinterested in art or studies. The lack of culture and the most abject ignorance is applauded, as long as it brings people closer to power. This is what "Half a Yellow Sun" teaches us: the socio-political collapse of a country points to the mediocrity of its upper and middle classes.
"The new Nigerian upper class is a collection of illiterates who read nothing and eat food they don't like in overpriced Lebanese restaurants, while conversing around a single topic: how is the new car doing?".
However, the owner of the house where Ugwu works, a university professor with nationalist ideas, will never see the war coming, not even after the coup d'état:
"The master was standing near the radio. (...) There has been a coup, said my master, pointing to the radio. (...) The Constitution has been suspended, as well as regional governments and assemblies. Dear compatriots, our goal is to establish a nation free of corruption and infighting. Our enemies are the political profiteers, the swindlers, the people in high and low positions who ask for ten percent commissions, those who want to divide the country to rule forever, the tribes, the nepotists (...) those who have corrupted our society".
The end of the book, once the division of Nigeria in two and the civil war have been made official, stands out for its sobriety. Moving away from the excessive demagoguery that characterizes historical accounts, Ngozi Adiche invites us to follow the characters towards the end that we all intuit.
"She was concerned with other things: how her periods were becoming less and less frequent and no longer reddish, but a clay brown, how the baby's hair was falling out, how hunger was robbing her of the memory of her children."
Great novels appeal to the founding epic tales of culture. The Nigerian story is Cain killing Abel, envy and hatred taking over brothers. Nations also fall into fratricide. They allow themselves to be divided by ideology, by politics, by the dehumanization of their adversary. War follows, an event in which there are never winners.
No nation is exempt from horror. It is the job of institutions and citizens to mediate conflicts. Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche shows us what happens when this fails, when society allows itself to be dragged towards barbarism.
This is why, at this time, there is no country that needs to read "Half of a Yellow Sun" more than the United States of America.