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ABSTRACT
This article examines the continuity between Chinua Achebe's rural novels and Chimamanda Adichie's 2007 novel Half of a Yellow Sun. Based on the concept of complementary dualism, the article explores the affinity between the two authors and their works through several sets of dualities: individualism and collectivism, natural and supernatural, and tradition and change, which gradually becomes the duality of African and Western. Suggesting that these dualities allow us to see how Achebe's legacy has reincarnated into a nuanced engagement with the categories of specificity and typicality, I suggest that Adichie's conscious engagement of Achebe is pertinent to the contemporary critical discussion on Africanness as it is constructed through literature. Moreover, I explore how realism, as a genre entailed with its own engagement with typicality and specificity, engages with Africanness to illustrate the circularity of interpretation, where historical events are infused with new meaning in a process of reciprocal influences between new and old representations.
In recent years, Chimamanda Adichie has become so successful that the inevitable link made between her and Chinua Achebe, which may once have been described in terms of their tribe and style of fiction, can now safely be recognized in terms of their success and centrality within African literature.1 This does not only reflect on Achebe's influence on Adichie, or, for that matter, the anxiety of such an influence, but also on our understanding of Achebe and his legacy. Adopting a proverb favored by Achebe-"wherever something stands, something else will stand beside it" (Achebe Morning 133)-Adichie is now firmly standing beside him.
In this article, I will examine Adichie's novel Half of a Yellow Sun as "standing beside" Chinua Achebe's historical novels, Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God. I will argue that the affinity between the two authors emphasizes myriad parallels between Adichie's treatment of the Biafran war and Achebe's engagement with colonialism; for what colonialism was to Achebe's generation, the Biafran war was to Adichie's generation. These parallels, I believe, are significant in understanding the way in which the historical process continues to enfold in the imagination of a community, particularly through its literature. The publication of Achebe's There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra (2012) highlights the unremitting need for representation of the...