Half of a Yellow Sun — gender, class, and post-colonialism
[written for my AP English Literature class]
Half of a Yellow Sun touches upon several complex topics, with consistent association being drawn between British colonization of Nigeria and how this has affected perceptions of gender, race, class, and other social structures.
One large shift in traditional cultural standings brought by colonialism is the subversion of gender roles during the war. With the ‘dominant’ men off fighting, women were left to uphold society as well as performing their role as a homemaker. This progressiveness and newfound independence provided women with more opportunities and positions of leadership following the war, as shown by Kainene and Olanna. The former has a strongly present dominant role throughout the novel as the leader of a refugee camp. She is directly involved with the war and its social effects, her role also being representative of preexisting gender roles in that she almost serves as a nurturing motherly figure to a wide group of people. Olanna, alternatively, regains control through her interpersonal life, choosing to start an affair with Richard as an expression of her anger. These bold feminist positions subverting expected performances of women show how traditional gender roles can be shifted to give gender-oppressed people wider opportunities.
The novel has strong motifs of colonization and how it has affected Nigerian society, Adichie arguing that British colonization is a main cause for the Civil War, having caused massive instability and detachment between areas of the country. The effects of colonialism can also reach deeper levels, imbedding resentment and a need to regain control in those impacted. Losing a sense of structure and traditional social systems, these groups wage war against one another because material gain and a sense of victory could appease the feelings of loss now permeating their culture collectively.
Adichie also highlights how the fracturing of Nigerian societies also exists on a smaller level, depicted through class structures and differences between Ugwu’s village and modern Nigeria. By exploring perspectives in different classes within Igbo society, Adichie highlights different effects of colonialism and how it has led to widespread disconnection, hatred, and resentment between affected peoples. Adichie argues that “the real tragedy of our postcolonial world” is not the direct exploitation and dismantling of Nigerian communities, rather “that the majority have not been given the tools to negotiate this new world.” Tradition and stability were taken from the colonized, with their colonizers abandoning the remnants of the countries they reaped. The former were now forced to operate in these fractured societies, projecting their resentment and confusion onto those around them. Differences in race are also analyzed explicitly, with parallels drawn between white colonizers and the Africans whose lives and culture they have affected, as well as directly through the characters of Richard and Susan and their interactions with the Igbo characters. Susan sees the Igbo and other local cultures as foreign spectacles, but also holds them to low standards and shaming them for not keeping contact with first-world countries, like the Yoruba have. She sees post-colonial areas as lacking in distinct culture and independent function, instead focusing on their disconnect from Europe in the wake of colonialism’s departure.
The dominating force of colonialism still affects the Igbo people and other Nigerian cultures even in a post-colonial period, leading to permeating feelings of lost control and power that fracture communities and united cultural sensibilities. Adichie choosing to focus her novel on how the war affects communities on an individual basis, using different perspectives within those communities, makes the colonized instigation of war clearer. Disparity in the wake of such a massive loss of power and preexisting divisions lasts for generations, still present in less explicit ways: an interesting example of this is Joy DeGruy’s Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome theory, arguing that the effects of slavery live on both under a micro-aggressive, systematically racist society and within Black communities themselves. This is similar to Adichie’s focus on class and gender disparity within the now divided Nigerian societies during the war, a universal idea that exists even outside the confines of post-colonialism. However, colonialism only exacerbates these disparities and embeds a desire to regain control within affected peoples long after its direct imposition.