Aesthetics of Absent Causality: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun

Abstract

In March 2012 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, author of the internationally bestselling historical novel Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), spoke to the Commonwealth Foundation in London on the subject of realist literature. In her address (‘To Instruct and Delight’), she describes writing and reading as acts of cultural exploration founded on a humanistic appreciation of the ‘magnificent diversity [of] the world’. The realist novel, she argues, promotes a cosmopolitan ethos of unity-in-diversity that is matched by its grounding in local specificity: ‘realist literature transmits this sensibility’, she avows, it ‘is steeped in this sensibility, both for the reader and the writer’. Adichie points out that the paradoxical enabler of this communicative function is imperialism. Writers across the globe are able to draw on a common language and repertoire of literary genres ‘not simply because our countries had been colonized by the British, […] but because we had, from childhood, read British books’. Even as metropolitan chauvinism led to the ‘loss of language and stories, the loss of a way of being and a way of thinking, the loss of dignity’, it was also establishing structures of global communication that underpin today’s transnational literary sphere. Adichie’s words demonstrate her sense that, as a contemporary realist author, her writing reflects and enables processes of imaginative border-crossing matched by an ethical commitment to territorial communities of affiliation.