Clocking in at over 500 pages, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s second novel Half of a Yellow Sun (published in 2006) is a weighty work both in form and subject. It engages with a pivotal event in Nigerian history, the kind of event that creates ‘before’ and ‘after’ stories: the civil war, the Biafran War. It is a war that results from tensions between Igbo and Hausa, north and south, from lingering colonial structures. It is a war that begins with the southern Igbo secession from Nigeria as the Republic of Biafra and the subsequent violent action of the Nigerian government against this new state. It is a war, like any war, that is complicated and violent and flinchingly human. And it is a war that began in 1967, precisely a decade before Adichie was born. Both her grandfathers died as Biafran refugees, and her novel is an imagining of the event through intimate relationships, multiple narratives and multiple times: homage to a national memory. The book takes its title from the powerful image of the rising sun on the Biafran flag.
Creating a film adaptation of such a hefty, complex novel is an ambitious task. Though unconfirmed, many suspect that censors delayed the Nigerian release of the film adaptation of Half of a Yellow Sun due to its content on the Biafran War and a fear that it might incite violence in the wake of the recent Boko Haram attacks. Director Biyi Bandele, in an opinion piece for CNN, discusses this possibility and calls the delay “a clumsy, heavy-handed ban in all but name.” He maintains that no Nigerians who have seen the movie have had any inclination toward violence; rather, the movie has had a great Nigerian reception. It is, I think, a moving, emotional film that reaches in many directions, though I don’t quite think that writer-director Biyi Bandele manages to interweave the narratives of political and personal as seamlessly as Adichie does in the novel. The cast is full of big names. The film centers on wealthy sisters Olanna (Thandie Newton) and Kainene (Anika Noni Rose), Olanna’s lover, Odenigbo (Chiwetel Ejiofor), and Kainene’s white British ex-pat novelist lover, Richard (Joseph Mawle). The story spans the decade from 1960 to 1970 in Nigeria. Unlike the novel, the film does so chronologically, interspersing black and white news footage with the more warm-toned narrative. In some ways the film freely gives context perhaps to a fault; it uses maps and words scrawled on the screen to show the characters’ movements around the country.
Both Olanna and Odenigbo are academics in Nsukka committed to the Biafran cause, Odenigbo deemed “the revolutionary,” mostly by Kainene. The film revolves around their personal and romantic conflicts, conflicts that mirror political conflicts. Their personal conflict culminates in the meddling of Odenigbo’s mother, who disapproves of the well-educated Olanna as a match for her son. As she hopes and plots, Odenigbo has a child with Amala, his mother’s housemaid. Olanna ultimately adopts the child, “Baby,” as her own, though not before she in her anger has a one-time, wine-fueled fling with Richard, which causes a rift between her and Kainene. The war eventually resolves and supersedes these conflicts. Of all the characters, I was left wanting more screen time for the compelling and enterprising Kainene and a more complex critique of Richard’s relationship to the other characters and the context as an ex-pat novelist claiming some stake in Biafra.
One of the most interesting parts of the novel, for me, is Adichie’s egalitarian treatment of diverse narrative voices, important among them (arguably most important and overarching), the narrative voice of Ugwu, Odenigbo and Olanna’s houseboy, who ends up fighting in the war. In the film, Ugwu becomes the likeable boy who burns rice and reunites, albeit wounded, with Odenigbo and Olanna after fighting in the midst of war’s horror. In the book, Ugwu becomes a narrator readers sympathize with implicated in the war, who participates in the rape of a girl during the war and carries the guilt with him, and who is one of the most insightful of the novel’s characters. What would the film be like with more of his voice? Similarly, I wanted to see the scene where Kainene, in her anger, burns Richard’s novel-in-progress The Basket of Hands.
It should be said, however, that a film has different constraints than a novel; it is necessarily condensed. Half of a Yellow Sun, the film, is certainly accessible to a wide range of audiences, and I think this is good. Ejiofor, Newton, and Rose all gave a visceral performance. War sequences, like the wrenching scene of the interruption of Odenigbo and Olanna’s wedding by an air strike, move the plot along and give it an underlying sense of the violent tension of the war. For spanning such a long period of time, I thought the film well paced. I liked that it ended with present-day updates on the characters, further blurring the genre lines of fiction and documentary. It did, ultimately, leave me with a small sense of disconnect. The passion was there; the desperation of war was there. However, though the film format makes it more difficult than in a novel, I still wanted to see more of the daringly complex characterization and perspective that make the novel so compelling.
