Skip to main content

Half of a Yellow Sun a novel by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I was inspired to pick up this book after listening to Chimamanda's 2022 Reith Lectures on the Freedom of Speech. Chimamanda, argues that it feels like freedom of speech is under attack. She names cancel culture, arguments about “wokeness" (I am old enough to remember when we called this political correctness) and the stabbing of Salman Rushdie as producing this atmosphere. Meanwhile, autocrats, populists and an anti-science identity culture have undermined the very notion of an accepted fact-based truth which lives above politics. So how do we calibrate freedom in this context?

'Half of a Yellow Sun,' is as profoundly human, as it is unsettling. The terror and the domestic are cheek by jowl. They live side by side, in the same spaces. I have heard it said that Iris Murdoch's contribution to ethics is that she (along with other feminist philosophers) reframed ethics from the public to the intimate. Similarly, Adichie's narrative highlights that ethics cannot be confined to an abstract public sphere or mere hypothetical situations like the trolley problem. Instead, ethics permeate our intimate relationships, They are to be found in the smallest of places.

She also has the courage to show us the complexities of the people who struggle in these terrors. They are not immune from participating in these horrors, that destroy the victim and morally mane the perpetrators.

She does not choose to show honour in fights, weakness resides there. In Half of a Yellow Sun, courage is shown as the expression of love in the face of barbarism.

There is no simplicity here, this is all of life's darkness and light, articulated in an exquisitely beautiful book.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

In her poignant account, Rebecca Skloot sheds light on how the biopharma industry has trampled on bodily autonomy, building their empires on the backs of individuals without their consent. Skloot's book tells the stories of unsung heroes in medical science and exposes the atrocities committed against marginalised communities. Skloot sensitively records the tragic loss of Henrietta Lacks, whose fundamental right to bodily integrity was ignored by society. It is a story of incomprehensible oppression and ignorance, where doctors watched patients die, solely to study the disease prognosis. This was evident in the Tuskegee experiments on untreated syphilis, which took place in the United States between 1932 and 1972. The biopharma industry made incalculable sums of money by taking Henrietta's cells without her knowledge or consent. The ongoing ethical and legal battle raises the question of how to balance scientific advancement with individual freedom. Sadly, commercial interests...
Post a Comment
Read more

Republic of Shame by Caelainn Hogan

Caelainn Hogan's Republic of Shame tells us what we all knew. Everyone knew.  Everybody knew and either denied that knowledge or explained away their actions as they took part in it.  Everybody knew but determined that it was a inescapable act of nature, like the rain.  And when we say everyone knew, not only did everyone know women where being unlawfully imprisoned in mother and baby homes and Magdalen Laundries, everyone knew (including the state) that the rates of death in these mother and baby homes far exceeded that of babies and children in any other place in Irish society at the time.  Church, State and public knew they were dying of neglect.  But when circumstances changes and when children could be sold, they stopped dying, then they had a value and could be sold to 'good' families.  As one survivor ruefully observes,   'When we illegitimate Irish Bastards were suddenly worth more than the cows on the farms, we stopped dying by the thousa...
Post a Comment
Read more