The Guardian Book Club with John Mullan discusses Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s latest, Half of a Yellow Sun, providing an in-depth analysis of Adichie’s use of different languages and syntax, particularly with regards to the portrayal of violence:
There are many novels written in English whose characters are speaking, or even thinking, in some other language. Half of a Yellow Sun, set in Nigeria in the 1960s, describes a world in which characters are divided from each other by their several languages. In the first section of the novel, set in the post-independence years of the early 60s, the clashes between ways of speaking are often comic. In the second section, which dramatises the violent secession of Biafra from Nigeria in the late 1960s, the splits between languages are fatal.
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Image by courtesy Beowulf Sheehan/PEN American Center
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