Chronotopicity in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun
The epigraph defines Bakhtin’s idea of the literary chronotope, which is characterized by the intersection and connectedness of the elements of space and time that form the textual plane where meanings can be mapped out in the novel.2 In the representation of childhood, the literary chronotope is significant because the time of childhood is defined in relation to the worlds and cultures within which it is generated, coded and contextualized. Most importantly, it is reified through the attachment to place and spaces which are partitioned and often navigated through adult-mediated regimes of authority. In private spaces, childhood finds meaning through identification with specific people, functions, attitudes (of the body) and ways of doing things. Moreover, there is the concentricity of place, which stretches into public spaces like the University of Nigeria Nsukka in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun. In this novel, Adichie explores the consciousness of place (Nsukka) in the time of the Nigeria-Biafra war (1967-1970) to construct a tension-filled narrative terrain. Informed by autobiographical aspects of her time of childhood (at Nsukka), she presents the figure of the child as a psychological journey that helps her grapple with her contemporary migrant identity. Most importantly, the figure of the child also works as a useful aesthetic subject, who is woven into the text to articulate and mobilize other ways of thinking/experiencing Nsukka and the Biafran war. Through Ugwu, the houseboy in Half of a Yellow Sun, the figure and image of the child is positioned in a matrix of memories, functions, places and times that play an instructive role in the production of meaning and political possibilities for both the author and the novel’s readers.
