Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun and the Valorization of Womanhood

Abstract

The Nigerian Civil War has birthed much writing with the actors and victims reimagining the dark historical experience, highlighting the divergent role(s) in different literary genres. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, one of the latest additions to the corpus of the war narratives, marks its distinctiveness by its fictive feminization, valorizing the marginal ‘other’. Available studies on the text focus on gender and trauma, with a passing mention of education. With the feminist theory as its thrust, this paper examines Adichie’s redefinition of the status of femininity vis-à-vis education. Through the actions of male/female genders and the rural illiterate/highly educated female gender captured in duality, Adichie, in the text, configures education as an undercurrent for the exploits of the educated female even as it (education) serves as the author’s strategy of subverting gender bias in society.