The war that has no heroes
What “Half of a Yellow Sun” successfully does is to diminish your typical heroes, the men who give tear-provoking speeches that fill their listeners with patriotic fervour. These typical heroes are diminished and one of them only appears in the story as a faceless voice on the radio.
GROWING up, reading about war in literary fiction usually left me with this feeling of regret that I was born too late. The way many Shona writers fictionalised the war made it some kind of gun party in which the guerilla and the gun combined to write beautiful violence on the physical and human landscape.
They made the gun very human, and a close friend of the guerilla. Every time I read a Shona novel about war, I told myself that had it been possible to go back in time, the Nicodemus way, there was no way I would not join the war.
When you read “Zvairwadza Vasara” (Gonzo Habakuk Musengezi, 1984); “Zvaida Kushinga” (Charles Makari, 1985); “Mutunhu Una Mago” [Vitalis Nyawaranda, 1985); and many other Shona war novels or novels about war, the war is given a certain glorious and ludic ambience that deprives it of its tragic edge. The most glaring shortcoming of these narratives is their failure to enter the psyche of the fighters in a way that makes them human, with human fears and anxieties, like fearing death, or wanting to give up. Instead, the narratives give the guerrilla a largerthan-life character which is augmented by the fluent Marxist discourse that is poured into the heads of the villagers at a pungwe by the guerrilla.
Interestingly, this awareness of the tragic edge of war is rampant in narratives written by Zimbabweans in English like “The Non-Believer’s Journey” (Stanely Nyamufukudza, 1981), “Harvest of Thorns” (Shimmer Chinodya, 1989) and “Echoing Silences” (Alexander Kanengoni, 1997). In these narratives, the war is not some gun party; its immediate and long-term effects are disastrous for the physical environment and for the mental scape of the guerrilla and anyone who is caught in the crossfire. Of the three novels I have mentioned above, “Echoing Silences” is by far the most lurid because of its fierce and savage depiction of what it looks like to be in a war. Probably this is because its author was a combatant.
This is why if I am to create a fictional medley of war narratives, you would find “Echoing Silences” in the same mix with “The War of the End of the World” (Mario Vargas Llosa, 1981) and “Half of a Yellow Sun” (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, 2006). This is because these novels are clear about the desolation that is brought by the war, a desolation that is both physical and spiritual. Today let me focus on “Half of a Yellow Sun” which is the reason why I titled this article, “The war that had no heroes”.
What the novel successfully does is to diminish your typical heroes, the men who give tear-provoking speeches that fill their listeners with patriotic fervour. These typical heroes are diminished and one of them only appears in the story as a faceless voice on the radio. In a way, Adichie succeeds in redeeming the silenced stories of “small” people from the bigger meta-narratives of larger-than-life heroes. By doing so, she deprives the war of heroes in the formal sense, while creating new heroes in the subaltern sense. These new heroes believe, they believe so much that they are willing to die for an idea, the idea of Biafra. The tragedy is that the ultimate decision is not with them but with the faceless heroes who only appear as voices on the radio.
Thus, for greater parts of the narrative, Adichie focuses on what happens in-between, that is, what happens in the private lives of the characters and how this is affected and altered by the war. Thus, instead of the ideology-spewing sage on the stage, we have the less obvious narrators like Ugwu whose involvement in the war is coincidental.
His view of the war as a houseboy is not tainted by utopian futures that those who ideologise war preach. And in the midst of that calamity of war, Adichie finds space to devote to the stirrings of Ugwu’s loins and his obsession with Eberechi, especially her buttocks. In that war, the only thing that Ugwu wants is to put his arms around Eberechi and make love to her, not this big business of creating a Biafran state.
That confessions of infidelity between Kainene, Richard, Olanna and Odenigbo take place even as the war rages on shows how the personal is as important as the public and should not be subordinated for the sake of telling “correct” stories. Great stories are not really great without the agency of “small” people, and many times when these stories ignore the agency of small people they end up becoming mere fictions created to serve a purpose. Ugwu’s rejection of Biafran nationalism is, for me, the moral of this novel. He refuses to listen to the faceless hero speaking on the radio and, most importantly, declares that “there is no such thing as greatness”. In doing so, Ugwu divests the war of heroes.
Many times when people fight for ideals, another suffering and silenced character is the land, as if the land is of no consequence when people make each other angry. I found the descriptions of wounded and scarred landscapes very heart-breaking. Like the characters, the landscape does not force us to see things its way; in fact, Adichie makes it a point not to be sermonic about anything in this novel. Everything is just there for the readers to make their judgments.
Here is my own judgment: I think I hate war. I find it meaningless. I find it a blow to our already obvious irrelevance here.
After the war, I doubt if anyone would remember Odenigbo, Kainene (the one who was stolen by the war), Olanna, Ugwu, Richard, Harrison, Baby, Eberechi and many other characters. They believed. But no one will remember them for believing. They will be swept away by bigger narratives. The beauty of it though is that literary fiction provides a chance for the suppressed stories to be told. As the novel comes towards an end, the baton to tell the story is given to Ugwu, and as a reader, it does not need prophecy to know that Eberechi and her swivelling buttocks will also be in the story.