Half of a Yellow Sun: Writing a War You Were Born After

Nora Ellis

Welcome to Behind the Book, the show where writers talk about how the work actually gets made. I'm Nora Ellis, and my guest today is Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: novelist, essayist, MacArthur fellow, and the author of Purple Hibiscus, Americanah and the novel we are here to talk about, Half of a Yellow Sun. Chimamanda, thank you for coming in.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Thank you for having me. It is a pleasure to be somewhere that wants to talk about sentences.

Nora Ellis

Let's begin with the book. For a listener who has not read it yet, what is Half of a Yellow Sun?

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

It is a novel about the Biafran war, told through five people who are not soldiers: a professor, a houseboy, twin sisters, an Englishman who thinks he is in love. The war arrives in their kitchen before it arrives in their history books. I wanted the reader to be inside a household when the world changes, because that is how it actually happens to people.

Nora Ellis

You were born years after that war. How did you find your way into it?

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Through my family, and then through four years of reading. Both of my grandfathers died in that war. I grew up with the story as a kind of weather in the house, present but rarely named. So I read the memoirs until they stopped frightening me, and then I could invent.

Nora Ellis

Was there a draft you had to throw away?

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

There was a whole narrator I loved and had to cut. A journalist, very knowing, very fluent. He explained things. That is a lovely thing in an essay and a fatal thing in a novel. Ugwu, the houseboy, understands almost nothing at the beginning, and that ignorance is what lets the reader learn with him.

Nora Ellis

What did you want this book to achieve? Not the reviews, the actual effect.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I wanted to make a forgotten war unforgettable to somebody who had never heard of it. And I wanted Nigerians to see themselves written with complication rather than sympathy. If a reader finishes the book and can no longer say Africa as though it were one place with one story, the book has done its job.

Nora Ellis

You have spoken about the danger of a single story. Is that still the argument you are making with your fiction?

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

It is. Complication is a moral position. When you give a character contradictions, you make it harder to dismiss them. That is quietly political work, and a novel does it better than any speech I could give.

Nora Ellis

How far do you want this book to travel? Every writer has a private ambition for reach.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Very far, and I say that without embarrassment. I want it in classrooms in Lagos and in Leeds. I want the reader who picked it up because of a film, or because a stranger pressed it into their hands. Word of mouth is the only marketing I fully trust, but I would like the word to travel to a great many mouths.

Nora Ellis

What do you say to a writer sitting with a book that nobody is asking for yet?

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Write the thing that frightens you, then find three readers who will tell you the truth. Talent is common. Finishing is rare.

Nora Ellis

Chimamanda, thank you. That is Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on Half of a Yellow Sun. As always, we carry on working after the microphones go off: every guest on this show gets a promotion campaign from us, so you will find her book on our promoted books page, in the newsletter, and shared across our channels for the month. If this conversation was useful, follow the show, leave a review, and tell one writer about it. I'm Nora Ellis. Thank you for listening to Behind the Book.