Summary
Chapter 1 is delivered from the perspective of Ugwu, a young man whose "aunty" has recently found him employment as a houseboy. A man noted for his bookish and self-absorbed ways, Ugwu's new employer is Odenigbo, a mathematics professor at the Nigerian university in Nsukka. Ugwu is eager to please Odenigbo, but is surprised by the amenities - running water, books, abundant food - in the professor's house. Odenigbo is serious but generous; he learns that Ugwu has not had a chance to get an education and decides to enroll Ugwu in a primary school.
Eager to please his new employer, Ugwu keeps Odenigbo's car and house exceptionally clean. He even irons and in the process melts a pair of Odenigbo's socks. Soon, Ugwu's duties include serving drinks to Odenibgo's academic friends - Dr. Patel, Professor Ezeka, the poet Okeoma, and Miss Adebayo - when they visit. After the first four months of Ugwu's employment, there is a shift in the household. A woman comes to live with Odenigbo, and Ugwu is impressed by the musical English that this alluring guest speaks. She helps Ugwu with some of his cooking and laundry duties. Ugwu, for his part, feels conflicted; he does not want to give up his responsibilities in taking care of Odenigbo but feels an affinity with Odenigbo's new companion. Late in the first day of this new arrangement, he also hears Odenigbo making love to the new woman.
In Chapter 2, the narrative shifts to the perspective of Olanna, the woman who came to live with Odenigbo in Chapter 1. Olanna is catching a flight from Nsukka to Lagos, where she will visit her parents. While waiting for the plane, she begins to talk with a Nigerian family who is waiting for a relative - the first person from the family's village to go overseas. When a plane begins to land and does not stop, the family's grandmother begins to panic, but Olanna calms this older woman down. Olanna also reflects on when she first met Odenigbo. They had been waiting for a theater performance; Odenigbo had spoken out in anger when a white man was invited to skip to the front of the line. Then, he had introduced himself to Olanna.
Olanna arrives for dinner with her parents, her twin sister Kainene, and Chief Okonji, a possible business contact for the family. When Chief Okonji gets Olanna mostly alone, he tries to seduce her; Olanna rejects his advances. Olanna and Kainene later talk about how Kainene's love interest, Richard, is moving to Nsukka. Olanna then travels to Kano to visit her relatives Uncle Mbaezi and Aunty Ifeka, people whose simpler lifestyle she finds refreshing at times. She also pays a visit to Mohammed, the wealthy, modern Muslim who was her boyfriend before she became Odenigbo's lover. Eventually, Olanna moves to Nsukka, where she begins teaching and settles into Odenigbo's household, though she resists the idea of marriage.
Chapter 3 pivots to the perspective of Richard, a British expatriate who has settled into life in Nigeria. An aspiring writer, he is romantically attached to Susan, who introduces him at parties and becomes jealous when he talks to white women but not to women of African descent. At one such event, Richard meets Kainene and learns that she is the daughter of Chief Ozobia, a rich and well-connected Nigerian. Richard is intrigued by her. The two meet soon afterwards at a hotel; in the course of their conversation, Richard reveals that he lost his parents when he was nine and was raised by his Aunt Elizabeth. These hotel meetings continue and a sexual attraction grows. Richard, however, fails to have an erection each time.
Eventually, Richard and Susan break up, on mostly pleasant terms. Richard's sex life with Kainene continues to be problematic, but they stay together; she offers him the use of her large house in Port Harcourt and gives him advice on how to settle in at Nsukka, where he will be pursuing his writing career. In these new settings, Richard finds himself on good terms with his cook Harrison, his gardener Jomo, and his new contacts Olanna and Odenigbo. Still, he is troubled by Kainene's contact with Major Madu Madu, an imposing military man who is clearly a longstanding business and family contact for Kainene - and may, as Richard suspects, be her lover.
The chapter ends with Excerpt 1 of The World Was Silent When We Died. This excerpt explains that an undefined "he" has heard a story from Olanna - the story of a woman carrying a child's head in a calabash container. In other historical catastrophes in Germany and Rwanda, women also fled with parts of their children's bodies.
At the beginning of Chapter 4, Ugwu is going about his duties in Odenigbo's home and cleaning up a meal of chicken bones. Ugwu then turns to his studies; his teacher, Mrs. Oguike, has begun praising his "innate intelligence." Unfortunately, news arrives through Ugwu's aunt that Ugwu's mother is sick. Odenigbo decides to handle the situation personally. He drives to Ugwu's village to retrieve Ugwu's mother, obtains medicine from Dr. Patel, and lets Ugwu's mother rest at the house in Nsukka before she returns home.
Odenigbo's own mother also visits the university community. Accompanied by a young woman named Amala, she arrives at the house and begins to talk with Ugwu; though pleasant towards him, she also takes over the cooking. Olanna arrives and is greeted with an outburst from Odenigbo's mother, who accuses Olanna of being a witch and of brainwashing her son. Offended, Olanna goes to her personal flat. Odenigbo soon arrives home and prevents Ugwu from following Olanna.
Odenigbo goes to see Olanna as Chapter 5 opens. Although Odenigbo attempts to apologize, Olanna remains offended by how she was treated. After he leaves, Olanna places a call to Kainene and tries to talk about the distant relationship between the two sisters, only to be greeted with Kainene's apparent silence. Olanna then reflects on her desire to have Odenigbo's child, and, when Odenigbo returns to the flat, she decides to return home with him. The two continue to have an active sexual relationship, yet Olanna intuits that she is not becoming pregnant.
In the early portions of Chapter 6, Richard is eating Nigerian pepper soup in the company of some of Odenigbo's regular guests for drinks and debate. Even though Richard's cook, Harrison, gravitates to European cuisine, Richard is eager to fit into African culture. While Odenigbo and Professor Ezeka debate political events, Okeoma asks Richard about Richard's own writing. The Englishman feels that his manuscript is not quite coming together; upon his return home, he crumples his written pages. Then, he leaves for Kainene's house in Port Harcourt, where he spends an easygoing morning yet admits that his writing is a source of personal confusion. While Kainene is willing to open up about her past misbehavior - spitting in her father's glass of water, for instance - Richard refrains from talking about his earlier life.
The chapter ends with Excerpt 2 of The World Was Silent When We Died. This segment describes how the British took control of an area near the Niger River; these colonizers preferred the more arid and apparently more orderly North to the more tumultuous South. In 1914, these regions were joined under the common name Nigeria.
Analysis
Readers who are not familiar with the direction that the novel will ultimately take - evolving into a harrowing account of Nigeria's civil war - may approach Part 1 of Half of a Yellow Sun expecting a psychologically observant but rather benign narrative of modernization. In its early stages, this text seems akin to Chinua Achebe's novel No Longer at Ease or to Adichie's own short story "The Headstrong Historian." The story of Ugwu, Olanna, and their companions is, at least so far, a minutely detailed but somewhat easygoing depiction of Nigeria's educated professionals. Characters who represent village traditions - here, Ugwu himself and Odenigbo's mother - create tensions in all of these texts, as do Nigeria-based Europeans whose reactions range from genuine sympathy to veiled prejudice. For narrative interest, Ugwu's intellectual growth, Olanna's romantic entanglements, and Richard's attempted assimilation all hold promise - just not the promise of tragedy so far.
Without abandoning these sources of complex characterization, Part 1 offers a few pointed thoughts about the course of history and the evolution of political violence. Odenigbo, in the course of one conversation with his academic friends, develops a line of reasoning that his listeners find counterintuitive: "What people fail to see is this: If Europe had cared more about Africa, the Jewish Holocaust would not have happened [...] In short, the World War would not have happened" (62). Miss Adebayo does not find this argumentation convincing; the reader, as well, can be forgiven for wondering whether Odenigbo is trying too hard to connect forms of oppression that, though similarly terrible, are ultimately disparate in time and place. Still, a reader who knows the general direction of Half of a Yellow Sun will intuit that Nigeria is headed for its own catastrophe of daily horrors and European neglect. The themes that Odenigbo raises will prove disturbingly relevant within a few years.
These early stages of the novel entail a balancing act between providing enough foreshadowing for a coherent novelistic design and withholding enough information to leave the evolution of the characters open to suspense during the later wartime chapters. Here, the first of the two short excerpts from The World Was Silent When We Died is instrumental. This fragment of writing explains that Olanna, at one point, saw a severed head in a calabash bowl and relayed her memories of the sight to the narrator. Though the description is already intensely detailed, the significance and origins of this fragment are not entirely clear, partially by design. Who is the "he" who recorded Olanna's thoughts? And how did Olanna become a witness of suffering? The answer to the first question - Odenigbo? Richard? Ugwu? - could direct the reader to a few present options without offering immediate clarity. For its part, the answer to the second could hinge on hints about Olanna's sense of social activism and opposition to her parents' materialistic ways; however, there is a long way between finding Chief Okonji's advances repulsive or finding Odenigbo's politics alluring and becoming a witness to suffering.
Instead of rushing to answers for these questions, Adichie investigates the interaction of tradition and modernity as a worthy subject - a subject, moreover, that can inspire ambivalent reactions. After listening to the outburst from Odenigbo's mother, Olanna reflects on the experience: "She should be above it; she should just shrug it off as the ranting of a village woman; she should not keep thinking of all the retorts she could have made instead of just standing mutely in the kitchen" (128). Olanna is apparently convinced of the value of modernity, represented for her by educated culture on a somewhat European model. The older ways nonetheless have remarkable force, both in conjuring positive memories (the family in Kano) and in calling forth distressing emotions (Odenigbo's mother). While modernized and arguably Europeanized Nigerians such as Olanna and Odenigbo acknowledge their distance from their more traditional kindred, these educated young people cannot disown or disregard the villages as European colonizers would.
Richard, of course, hails from a former colonial power, but perhaps the most remarkable thing about him in these early chapters is how little of an air of dominance he actually exerts. By his own admission, he is something of a loner. He also appears to be running away from an alienating childhood in Britain and towards a milieu of polite, thoughtful Nigerians who may never fully accept him. Impotent (with Kainene) and intimidated (by Madu), Richard Churchill ironically bears the last name of a politician who embodies forceful, stubborn triumph. With all this, he represents an intriguing departure from the willful missionaries and confident administrators who are among the most significant white characters in Chinua Achebe's writings and in some of Adichie's own shorter fiction. Richard will not command the Nigerian political system as his British predecessors did; he is there to observe a culture that, as the book eventually shows, will never feel truly his.
