Abstract
Seretha D. Williams proposes that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) examines the systemic, individual, and gendered traumas of the Nigerian-Biafran War in an attempt to comment on the aftermath of empire. For Adichie, the postcolonial experience of an independent Nigeria is the beginning of a new chapter in the legacy of colonialism. Independence leads to the Nigerian-Biafran War of 1967–1970 and its resultant devastation. Within this framework, Olanna—after discovering the massacred bodies of her family members—loses control of her bodily functions and suffers psychosomatic paralysis of her legs, flashbacks, and paranoia. She attempts to narrate her traumatic experience; however, other characters silence her. She thus begins to experience dark swoops, which she describes as “[a] thick black descend[ing] from above and press[ing] itself over her face, firmly, while she struggled to breathe.” The dark swoops, a symbol of Olanna’s temporary madness, can also be interpreted as a characterization of Nigeria’s experience with colonialism. In this essay, Williams specifically explores the intersection of personal and national traumas and gendered representations of madness.
Keywords
- Adichie
- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
- novelNovel
- traumaTrauma
- Biafra
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution.
Buying options
Bibliography
Achebe, Chinua. Girls at War and Other Stories. New York, NY: Anchor, 1991. Reprint.
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. “A Private Experience.” The Thing Around Your Neck. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009.
———. Half of a Yellow Sun. New York, NY: Anchor Books, 2006.
———. “The Story of the Book.” http://chimamanda.com/books/half-of-a-yellow-sun/the-story-behind-the-book/.
Andrade, Susan. “Adichie’s Genealogies: National and Feminine Novels.” Research in African Literatures 42. 2 (Summer 2011): 91–101.
Aniebo, I.N.C. The Anonymity of Sacrifice. London: Heinemann, 1974.
Atieh, Majda and Ghada Mohammad. “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 The Strangled Cry: The Communication and Experience of Trauma. Eds. Aparajita Nanda and Peter Bray. Oxfordshire, UK: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2013. 65–86.
Augusti, Clara Escoda. “Strategies of Subversion: The Deconstruction of Madness in Eva’s Man, Corregidora, and Beloved.” Atlantis 27. 1 (June 2005): 29–38.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981.
Butler, Octavia. Kindred. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2004. Reprint.
Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. The Madwoman Can’t Speak: Or Why Insanity is Not Subversive. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998.
Chuku, Gloria. Igbo Women and Economic Transformation in Southeastern Nigeria, 1900–1960. New York: Routledge, 2005.
Cooper, Brenda. “An Abnormal Ordinary: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun.” In A New Generation of African Writers: Migration, Material Culture and Language. University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2008. 133–150.
Craps, Stef, and Gert Buelens. “Introduction to Trauma Novels.” Studies in the Novel 40, 1 & 2 (Spring & Summer 2008): 1–12.
De Mey, Joke. “The Intersection of History, Literature and Trauma in Chimamanda Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun.” MA thesis, Ghent University, Belgium, 2011.
Dinka, Ritgak A., and Simon L. Dein. “The Work of a Woman is to Give Birth to Children: Cutural Construction of Infertility in Nigeria.” African Journal of Reproductive Health 17.2 (June 2013): 102–117.
Emecheta, Buchi. Destination Biafra. London: Allison & Busby, 1982.
Gans, Herbert. Deciding What’s News: A Study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek and Time. New York: Vintage, 1980.
Granofsky, Ronald. The Trauma Novel: Contemporary Symbolic Depictions of Collective Disaster. American University Studies Series 3 Comparative Literature. New York: Peter Lang, 1995.
Griffiths, Jennifer L. Traumatic Possessions, The Body and Memory in African American Women’s Writing and Performance. Charlottesville, VA: U of Virginia P, 2009.
Hawley, John C. “Biafra as Heritage and Symbol: Adichie, Mbachu, and Iweala.” Research in African Literatures 39.2 (Summer 2008): 15–26.
Hirsch, Marianne. “The Generation of Postmemory.” Poetics Today. 29.1 (2008): 103–28.
———. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. 2012.
Hodges, Hugh. “Writing Biafra: Adichie, Emecheta and the Dilemmas of Biafran War Fiction.” Postcolonial Text 5.1 (2009): n.p.
Jones, Gayl. Corregidora. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1975.
Korieh, Chima. “Gender and Peasant Resistance: Recasting the Myth of the Invisible Women in Colonial Eastern Nigeria 1925–1945.” The Foundations of Nigeria: Essays in Honor of Toyin Falola. Eds. Adebayo Oyebade and Toyin Falola. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2003.
LaCapra, Dominic. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.
Laub, Dori. “Bearing Witness of the Vicissitudes of Listening.” Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. Eds. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub. New York: Routledge, 1992. 57–74.
Marx, John. “Failed State Fiction.” Contemporary Literature 49.4 (Winter 2008): 597–633.
Mason, Bobbie Ann. In Country. New York, NY: Harper Perennial, 2005.
Mehta, Brinda. Rituals of Memory in Contemporary Arab Women’s Writing. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2007.
Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. New York: Vintage, 1970.
———. Sula. New York: Plume, 1982. Reprint.
———. Beloved. New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2007. Reprint.
Novak, Amy. “Who Speaks? Who Listens?: The Problem of Address in Two Nigerian Trauma Novels.” Studies in the Novel 40, 1&2 (Spring and Summer 2008): 31–51.
Nwankwo, Victor Uzoma. The Road to Udima. Enugu: Fourth Dimension Publishers, 1985.
Nwapa, Flora. Never Again. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1992.
Ondaatje, Michael. Anil’s Ghost. New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2001.
Osaki, Lillian Temu. “Madness in Black Women’s Writing, Reflections from Four Texts: A Question of Power, The Joys of Motherhood, Anowa and Possessing the Secret of Joy.” The Ahfad Journal. 19, 1 (June 2002): 4–20.
Osinubi, Taiwo Adetunji. “Literacies of Violence after Things Fall Apart.” Interventions 11.2 (2009): 157–160.
Perry, Phyllis Alesia. Stigmata. New York: Knopf Doubleday, 1999.
Uko, Iniobong. “Of War & Madness: A Symbolic Transmutation of the Nigeria-Biafra War in Select Stories from The Insider: Stories of War & Peace from Nigeria.” War in African Literature Today: A Review 26 (2008): 49–59.
Spiegelman, Artie. Maus. New York: Pantheon, 1997.
Whitehead, Anne. Trauma Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2004.
Young, Shannon. “Therapeutic Insanity: The Transformative Vision of Bessie Head’s A Question of Power.” Research in African Literatures 41. 4 (Winter 2010): 227–41.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Williams, S.D. (2017). “Dark Swoops”: Trauma and Madness in Half of a Yellow Sun . In: Brown, C., Garvey, J. (eds) Madness in Black Women’s Diasporic Fictions. Gender and Cultural Studies in Africa and the Diaspora. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58127-9_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58127-9_6
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-58126-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-58127-9
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)