Her experimentation with the dual mandate of English and Igbo in perennial discourse is a case in point. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie knows what is at stake, and what to do about it. Chinua Achebe, the great Nigerian man of letters, upon reading Half of a Yellow Sun was moved to offer this laudation about Adichie: “We do not usually associate wisdom with beginners, but here is a new writer endowed with the gift of ancient storytellers. Chris Albani, Uzodinma Iweala, Helen Oyeyemi, and Adichie make up a boomlet of unlikely interest in African literature. This seems to be a fertile time for African writers in America. Nigerian-born novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie ( Purple Hibiscus) has written her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, about the memories of that awful time and of many victims from her homeland. The Biafran War from 1964 to 1967 was the first internecine genocidal conflict to play out on television. Or at least it seems to, unconscionably, take the so-called international community (is there a more meaningless term?) far longer to respond-Guatemala, Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, East Timor, Afghanistan, Sudan, Darfur, and countless other spots on the world map go unheeded. Harrowing and gory images and reports of man’s cruelty to man have apparently lost their power to galvanize, to move people to action.
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