From Pages of Fiction, A Volume of Sad Truth
Young Novelist Preserves the Story of Biafra

By Bob Thompson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 27, 2006

When she was writing the massacre scenes, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie says, she would sometimes stop and think: This really happened to people.

The 29-year-old author of "Half of a Yellow Sun" hadn't been born in 1967, when Nigeria's Eastern Region broke away to form the doomed Republic of Biafra. She wasn't around for the civil war that followed, during which both her grandfathers died as refugees. She wasn't there to watch her parents, who lost everything, struggle to survive.

When the writing wasn't going well, she'd tell herself it didn't make any difference, she was only writing a novel. But she knew better. She was trying to recapture "this time that belongs to so many people" -- and she needed to get it right.

Adichie is in Washington this week for a number of book-related events. Monday morning, as part of the PEN/Faulkner Writers in Schools program, she dropped in on a 10th-grade English class at the District of Columbia's M.M. Washington Career High School; that evening, she read at the organization's annual benefit gala. Today at 4:30, she'll help kick off the Fall for the Book Festival at George Mason University ( http://www.fallforthebook.org/ ). At 6:30 tomorrow, she'll be in Arlington at Karibu Books.

Over breakfast at the Hotel Monaco, simultaneously animated and sleep-deprived, she talks about the book she calls "my special baby." She wears a red sweater, a black skirt, and six beads carefully strung in her twisted hair.

Adichie grew up "knowing that Biafra had happened," she says, but with little knowledge of the specifics. Eventually she started reading and asking questions.

She learned about her father's hasty flight as the Nigerian army approached the university town of Nsukka. Like an otherwise dissimilar character in the book, he was a professor of mathematics there. He grabbed three shirts but left all his books behind.

She learned of people in her family's home town, Abba, shot down by soldiers. She learned of her maternal grandfather's death, in a refugee camp, and what happened a month later when her parents got the news. "Your mother threw herself on the ground," her father told her, "with so much force that I was frightened."

She wrote a play about Biafra while she was in high school. ("Awful. Let's not even talk about it.") She wrote bad poetry and good short stories, including one that functioned as a kind of warm-up exercise for "Half of a Yellow Sun." ("It was me thinking, 'I need to take small steps.' ")

Adichie's first novel was, in a way, another warm-up effort.

"I love 'Purple Hibiscus,' " she says, and she's not alone: The Washington Post called it a "breathtaking debut" and it won a 2004 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, among other honors. Yet because it was a story that "belonged to me" and wasn't shared with so many of her countrymen, it was far easier to write.

It also didn't require the kind of research Adichie did for "Half of a Yellow Sun."

Yes, the book is fiction. Yes, she's changed many things. But she tried hard "to have all the major events be based on facts. The major things that happened actually did happen to people."

This includes the horrifying ethnic violence that sparked Biafran secession. Igbo people like Adichie and her family made up the majority of the Eastern Region. But they were a minority in Nigeria as a whole -- and the scenes in which her heroine's Igbo relatives in the north are brutally slaughtered were among the hardest for Adichie to write.

She took care, however, that the book would not be unrelentingly grim.

"She's interested in writing about characters in the context of history," says her Knopf editor, Robin Dresser. It's no easy task, especially when the slice of history in question is so difficult, but Adichie is aided by what Dresser calls her natural storytelling ability and "sometimes wicked humor."

The action shifts back and forth between the peaceful early 1960s and the bloody end of the decade. This structure allowed her first to establish her protagonists as sympathetic human beings and later to remind her readers -- by flashing back to better days -- "that these are people who had real, full lives and betrayed each other and laughed."

The most intimate betrayals involve twin sisters, Kainene and Olanna. Kainene, a self-assured businesswoman with more than a whiff of mystery about her, fascinates her creator.

"You get the sense that she really lives life on her own terms," Adichie says. "This is the way she is and you can take it or you can leave it." Where did she come from? The author doesn't know. A friend once told her that she's a bit like Kainene, which she says she was "flattered by" but insists is not true:

"I don't think I'm quite as brave as she is."

Maybe not. But to consider why Adichie is here now, and not in Nigeria, is to think: Perhaps that friend was onto something.

She grew up with the expectation that she would become a doctor. In Nigeria, she says, "you do well in school and it's just assumed." For a year and a half, she studied medicine, thinking she could heal the sick and write in her spare time.

Then she thought, "I can't do this anymore."

College in the United States was her escape route. She ended up in Connecticut, where her older sister (who'd already become a doctor) was working. She graduated from Eastern Connecticut State University and went on to get a master's in creative writing from Johns Hopkins.

She's been here off and on since 1997, but all on temporary visas, and she sometimes has to remind people that Nigeria is still home. Ask her about her adopted country and she'll smile broadly and express a kind of bemused affection: It's grown on her, almost without her knowing. But there's also much she finds upsetting.

There's "the sense that might is right," for one thing, the presumption that Americans "get to decide for the rest of the world." Not to mention their shocking ignorance about that world. How can someone on a university campus ask her, "Is Nigeria in the Middle East?" She's patient with the high school kids who inquire about "African" food as if the continent housed a single culture. But she corrects them just the same.

Ask Adichie what she's reading and you'll get a response that displays a resistance to being pigeonholed.

Yes, she brings up a great countryman: "Chinua Achebe I adore ." But right now she's reading and loving "The Emperor's Children," Claire Messud's satire of entitled Manhattanites. And she has a particular affection for "Decorations in a Ruined Cemetery" by John Gregory Brown, a writer she thinks should be better known than he is.

Adichie has just moved to New Haven, where she'll do graduate work in African history at Yale. "I still don't think I can earn my living by writing," she says, laughing, "which is why I'm arming myself with degrees so I can teach."

"Half of a Yellow Sun" will be published in Nigeria next month. She's expecting "a lot of angry e-mails" from people who think she has no right to write about Biafra or that she's just "looking for trouble" by doing so. But she's also hoping to start a conversation.

Nigerians have pushed their past under the rug, she thinks. But it really happened, "and I'm just hoping that people will start to talk about it."