Genocide and Hubristic Masculinity in Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun.

Half of a Yellow Sun (Book); Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi, 1977-; Genocide; Masculinity

This paper presents a reassessment of Chimamanda Adichie's feminist vision in her award-wining 2006 novel, Half of Yellow Sun. Through a reading of the novel as genocide fiction, I argue in the paper that the feminist vision in Half of a Yellow Sun contains a major flaw in how it portrays Igbo men. The image of the "Igbo man" in the novel, as I contend, is presented as what I describe as hubristic masculinity. I trace the image of this hubristic Igbo masculinity as exemplified in Half of a Yellow Sun to Chinua Achebe's hero in Things Fall Apart —Okonkwo. I argue that the masculinity epitomized by Okonkwo has been misappropriated as normative Igbo maleness in Half of a Yellow Sun , leading to a misrepresentation of the Biafra tragedy, a failure to hold perpetrators of violence accountable for crimes, and, importantly, a representational practice of blaming Igbo men for the tragedy of Biafra. Accordingly, this paper rejects the critical reception of this image of the Igbo man, especially in feminist scholarship on Biafra, writing that accepts it as an accurate and unproblematic representation of Igbo maleness and Igbo men's historical place during the conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]