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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.

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