Coming of Age through War: Exploring Bildung in Adichie’s half of a Yellow Sun
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18533/journal.v9i6.1934Keywords:
Half of a Yellow Sun, Bildungsroman, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Child soldier, Biafra War.Abstract
This paper explores Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun as a novel of formation with respect to its portrayal of Ugwu, one of the main focalisers of the novel. The novel follows the representation of Ugwu as he develops from a young house boy till he matures to become the chronicler of his people’s war time experience. A core proposition of the paper is that even though Ugwu fights with the Biafran army as a child soldier, his war-time experience does not destroy him like we see in other West African child-soldier novels. Rather, he learns important lessons from the war which makes him mature to become the writer of Biafran war history. This makes the novel conform to the Bildungsroman genre unlike most child soldier novels whose protagonist develop abnormally making those novels anti-Bildungsromane.
References
Atieh, M. R., & Mohammad, G. (2013). Post-Traumatic Responses in the War Narratives of Hanan al-Shaykh’s The Story of Zahra and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun. In Is this a Culture of Trauma? An Interdisciplinary Perspective (pp. 217- 225). Brill.
Beti, M. (1964). Mission to kala (Vol. 13). Heinemann Educational Publishers.
Boes, T. (2006). Modernist studies and the Bildungsroman: A historical survey of critical trends. Literature Compass, 3(2), 230-243.
Cooper, B. (2013). A new generation of African writers: migration, material culture & language. Boydell & Brewer Ltd.
Dangarembga, T. (1989). Nervous Conditions. Seattle, WA: The Seal Press.
Dardzinski, T. (2012). The Regenerative Paradigm: Male Initiations in Joseph Conrad's “The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’”,“Heart of Darkness” and “The Shadow-Line”. McGill University (Canada).
Darie, Daniela-Irina. “The Beheaded Child: Trauma and Resilience in Adichie’s Novels,” in Identities in Metamorphosis: Literature, Discourse and Multicultural Dialogue, ed. Iulian Boldea (Tîrgu Mures: Archipelag xxi Press, 2014): 1036–1046.
De Mey, J. (2011). The Intersection of History, Literature and Trauma in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun. Unpublished MA Dissertation, Ghent University.
Eromosele, E. F. (2013). Sex and Sexuality in the Works of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Journal of Pan African Studies, 5(9), 99-110.
Garff, Joakim. “Formation and the Critique of Culture” Oxford Handbook of Kierkegaard. Eds. John Lippitt and John Pattison, (2013): 252-261. Print.
Hirsch, M. (1979). The Novel of Formation as Genre: Between Great Expectations and Lost Illusions in Studies in the Novel. Genre Norman NY, 12(3), 293-311.
Iweala, U. (2005). Beasts of No Nation. London: Harper Collins.
Kearney, J. A. (2010). The representation of child soldiers in contemporary African fiction. JLS/TLW, 26(1), 67-94.
Kourouma, A. (2007). Allah is Not Obliged. New York: Anchor Books, 2007.
Krishnan, M. (2012). Abjection and the fetish: Reconsidering the construction of the postcolonial in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun. Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 48(1), 26-38.
Laye, C. (1955). The African Child. Trans. James Kirkup. London: Collins.
Marx, J. (2009). Fiction and State Crisis. In Novel: A Forum on Fiction (Vol. 42, No. 3, pp. 524- 530). Duke University Press.
Marx, J. (2008). Failed-state fiction. Contemporary Literature, 49(4), 597-633.
Mastey, D. (2016). Child soldier stories and their fictions. Interventions, 18(1), 143-158.
Ngugi, W. T. (1964), Weep not, child. Ibadan: Heinemann Educational Books.
Ngwira, E. M. (2013). Writing marginality: history, authorship and gender in the fiction of Zoe Wicomb and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Norridge, Z. (2012). Sex as Synecdoche: Intimate Languages of Violence in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun and Aminatta Forna's The Memory of Love. Research in African Literatures, 43(2), 18-39.
Novak, A. (2008). ‘Who speaks? Who listens?’: The problem of address in two Nigerian trauma novels." Studies in the Novel 40.1 (2008): 31-51.
Ogwude, S. O. (2011). History and Ideology in Chimamanda Adichie’s fiction. Tydskrif vir letterkunde, 48(1).
Ojinmah, U. (2012). No humanity in war: Chimamanda Adichie’s half of a yellow sun. Journal of Nigeria Studies Volume, 1(2), 11.
Okuyade, O. (2009). The Postcolonial African bildungsroman: extending the paradigm. Afroeuropa, 3(1), 1-11.
Ouma, C. E. (2011). Composite Consciousness and Memories of War in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun. English Academy Review, 28(2), 15-30.
Oyono, F. (1966). (John Reed, trans.). Houseboy. Oxford/Johannesburg
Plaias, L. M. (2013). ‘The danger of a single story’ in Chimamanda N. Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun. PhD Thesis, Università degli Studi di Padova.
Rackley, L. E. (2015). Gender Performance, Trauma, and Orality in Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun and Purple Hibiscus.
Ryan, C. (2013). Regimes of waste: aesthetics, politics, and waste from Kofi Awoonor and Ayi Kwei Armah to Chimamanda Adichie and Zeze Gamboa. Research in African literatures, 44(4), 51-68.
Sow, A. (2010). Political Intuition and African Autobiographies of Childhood. Biography, 498- 517.
Soyinka, W. (1981). Aké: the years of childhood. New York: Random House.
Swales, M. (2015). The German Bildungsroman from Wieland to Hesse. Princeton University Press.
Tunca, D. (2014). Stylistic Approaches to Nigerian fiction. Springer.
Ugochukwu, F. (2012). Plaited hair in a calabash–Adichie on the Biafran landscape. Mbari: the International Journal of Igbo Studies, 2(1-2), 49-59.
Uwasomba, C. (2012). Story as History; History as Story in Chimamanda Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun. AFRREV IJAH: An International Journal of Arts and Humanities, 1(4), 28- 45.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).
