Writing About the Dead in the Present Tense: Half of a Yellow Sun as a Work of Postmemory

ABSTRACT:This paper examines Chimamanda Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun as a work of postmemory. It argues that the novel disrupts the state repression, institutionalized amnesia, and traumatic silence that surround the Nigeria-Biafra War. It also argues that Adichie wrote the novel as a way of bearing posthumous fidelity to her ancestors. The novel, I argue, serves as Adichie's way of working through her inheritance of loss. Since she did not personally experience the war, I argue that Yellow Sun as a work of postmemory is built on earlier narratives; it is a literary afterlife of earlier stories. The abounding intertextual references in the novel provide a literary archaeology of loss incurred from the war. I also argue that the novel gives a postmodern touch to the narrativization of history through the adoption of metatexts that, in the long run, serves to blur the line between fact and fiction. With intertextual and extratextual readings, I argue that Adichie's postmemorial journey confirms how generational hauntings can facilitate conversations about justice. That is, Adichie's postmemorial endeavor comes with a sense of wanting to remedy the injustices of the past and create possibilities of a just future.