期刊名称：The Journal of Sustainable Development in Africa (JSDA)
电子版ISSN：1520-5509
出版年度：2012
卷号：14
期号：7
出版社：Institute of Sustainable Development in Africa
摘要：A story is a modest attempt by the writer to make sense of experience. It represents an illumination of social reality. It is also in this sense that we can begin to perceive literature as a national biography, depicting social conditions of certain periods in our history. The artist is a conduit through which old things or issues (the past) are recovered or reconfigured. Stories illuminate the past and offer an insight into its understanding. The world that the writer has created is what we want to savor and enjoy, but we cannot deeply appreciate it unless we comprehend its relevance to the other two worlds, the writer’s world and our world. It is within the context of the foregoing that an attempt is made in this essay to highlight the relevance and power of Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun in the understanding of the Nigeria/Biafra war of 1967-1970.The Nigerian/Biafran war like other wars destroyed hopes and aspirations alongside resources of the people. The Nigerian nation, will for a long time feel the destabilizing impact of the war as both human and infrastructural damage was gargantuan in size and scope. Reading critically into the text with a view to locating and commenting on issues and activities that characterized the war which Adichie tries to reconstruct in her novel, the essay explores the relationship between history and story and concludes on the note that in Africa, given her circumstances, African writers are historically bound to take recourse to their history. In the case of Adichie with the novel under consideration, she ends up producing a work of “faction” in all its materiality pointing out the unsustainable nature of war(s).
关键词：Story; History; Human Development; Sustainability; Social reality; ‘Faction’; Nigeria/Biafra
