OTHER WORDS - Chimamanda Adichie’s Fiction and India’s Northeast : Aruni Kashyap

Adichie’snovel about the Biafra War and its parallels with our region could be a pointer to how diverse narratives from here should be placed before the mainstream

Nigerian author Chimamanda Adichie writes in her essay, “The Colour of an Awkward Conversation” that she was offended when a black man called her “sister” at a Brooklyn book store in the United States because “To be called ‘sister’ was to be black, and blackness was the very bottom of America’s pecking order. I did not want to be black”. Towards the end of the essay, she writes, “There are many stories like mine of Africans discovering blackness in America”. When I read this essay, I was struck by the relevance it could have to many Northeastern migrant students in Delhi who had discovered their “Northeastern-ness” in Delhi in different amusing and offensive situations, that pointed towards the deep-rooted prejudice mainland India had towards people from this region. I had never considered myself as a Northeasterner before moving to Delhi. It was in this city I was told so and, gradually, I started accepting that label.

In her famous TED Talk titled, “The Danger of a Single Story”, Adichie enumerates how demeaning and damaging the single story about Africans is. How it stifles the diversity of African life and projects the helpless, hapless images of Africans repeatedly. She illustrates this with several personal anecdotes, in a language tinged with humour and warmth. She mentions how her first American roommate was highly disappointed when she fished out Maria Carey from her bag because the girl was expecting Adichie to listen to “tribal music”. It resonates with a personal incident of mine when we had gone to Himachal Pradesh on a trip from my college in Delhi. Our bus had suddenly stopped in the middle of the night on a lonely road that had forests on both sides. Jokes about “wild tribals” attacking us were cracked by many. But the laughter had reached a new decibel when a friend of mine had said,“Don’t worry, no tribals would kill you, we aren’t in the Northeast.” I didn’t find that statement funny. I couldn’t participate in the laughter. Adichie’s speech suggests that a balance of stories from both sides promote understanding among richer and poorer nations, between under-represented and visible communities in the world. Ultimately, the human experience is the same everywhere. Her most famous work, Half of a Yellow Sun, narrates this idea most beautifully and is relevant to the reader from India’s Northeast.

Half of a Yellow Sun is set against the Nigerian Civil War (1967-70) that Adichie prefers to call“the Nigeria-Biafra war”. Under a flag that had half of a yellow sun on it, the Igbo-speaking parts of Nigeria had seceded, establishing the Republic of Biafra. It is against this conflict that the story of the twin sisters Olanna and Kainene and their lovers Odenigbo and Richard (an Englishman) unfolds. Uguwu, Odenigbo’s precocious houseboy who we meet in the first chapter connects the four characters and matures throughout the war from an illiterate villager to a literate person. The lives of these characters are changed irreversibly by the war but yet they survive, live through the conflict in different ways and it is their resistance and survival Adichie seeks to celebrate. By underlining the small things they lost because of the major event at the backdrop she paints a haunting picture of the war.

While reading the novel, I couldn’t stop thinking about the similarities the Nigeria-Biafra War had with the Assam-India conflict. The novel’s title, referring to the flag of the short-lived country of Biafra, reminded me of ULFA’s flag: divided in the middle into yellow and green, the yellow, upper-portion of the flag contains half of a red rising sun with seven rays. Biafra is called “The Land of Rising Sun”. It is an epithet the Assamese people use to refer to their state, made famous by many songs among which Bhupen Hazarika’s “Asom Aamar Rupohi” is the most popular one : “Our Assam is Beautiful/ In the eastern part of India/ it is The Land of the Rising Sun.” This is one of the reasons why this novel is close to my heart. Just like the Assam Movement — an important phase in the history of the Northeast where answers to many contemporary problems in the region rest — the subject of Biafra is a sensitive matter in Nigeria that people are reluctant to engage with. Apart from rejuvenating discussion on that period, Adichie’s novel extends the tradition of literature on Biafra by joining the long line of books such as Chinua Achebe’s Girls at War and Other Stories and Beware, Soul Brother (poems) and Buchi Emecheta’s Sunset in Biafra (civilwar diary). The Assam-India conflict is indeed much different and the tragedy hasn’t reached a similar scale, but the parallels are unmistakable. Biafra was forced to starvation and famine by the federal forces, which had led to a deathtoll of nearly one million.

As a ‘Northeasterner’, I was struck by the character of Uguwu, who extends the idea of what Adichie refers to as ‘the danger of a single story.’ Among Professor Odenigbo’s regular guests is his friend Okeoma who visits often, stays longest, wears shorts often and drank Fanta. A poet, he is hailed by Odenigbo as the “voice of our generation.” It’s curious that very little of the poetry that is so often read in Odenigbo’s house is shown in the book. But throughout the novel, another book called The World Was Silent When We Died unfolds, charting the genesis of Nigeria, the ethnic tensions, the war and starvation. At the end of the book, it is revealed that the book was written by Uguwu, the houseboy. It is as if Adichie, through the story of Uguwu, is telling that it is necessary to know many stories about a community and a country, but it is also necessary to have the stories told from below. Uguwu, lowest in the social class among the characters depicted in the novel, in fact provides a unique perspective to the events in the book and about the war through this ‘book’ within Half of a Yellow Sun.

To integrate the Northeast with the rest of India, more and more stories (journalism, fiction, poetry, movies) will have to be told about and from the region. This diversity of narratives would tell landladies in Delhi that Assam isn’t in Nagaland and that women from Northeast aren’t drug abusers or easy lays. At the cost of sounding clichéd, might we say that stories are the best way to promote understanding because, ultimately, the human experience is the same everywhere. That said, aren’t clichés also true?