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In Half of a Yellow Sun, Kainene, Mama, and Olanna define Nigeria's struggle for nationhood. I argue that Kainene represents the future and Mama, the traditions. As unacceptable extremes, the two are eliminated, leaving Olanna as the allegorical female symbol of nationhood. European-educated Olanna gets caught up in the Civil War, embodying both Kainene's bravery and Mama's traditional ways. By the end of the novel, she comes to represent the woman as nation in the new Nigeria.
Postcolonial scholarship about the Nigerian Civil War largely focuses on the victimization of civilians, especially that of women and children. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun deals with issues of civilian survival during the Nigerian Civil War.1 She uses Olanna as the female allegorical symbol of the nation, juxtaposing her with her twin sister, Kainene - a strong, modern woman - and with Mama, another strong but custom-bound woman. Mama, Odenigbo's mother, disapproves of the live-in relationship her son has with Olanna. Each of these three female characters can be seen as embodying only part of the nationalist image of women - the modern or the traditional, respectively - rather than the whole image. A closer look at the events in the novel reveals that Adichie, whether she intended to or not, drew on modern Kainene and traditional Mama before eliminating them from the story, leaving Olanna as the pivotal character embodying both aspects. While Olanna's Western education marks her as an outsider, Adichie brings her back into the fold of Nigerian women as she adapts to gender-specific tasks, such as caring for children and cooking food in the refugee camps, while negotiating her outsider status within the changing boundaries of Nigerian womanhood. In "Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism," Frederic Jameson writes that "All third-world texts are necessarily, I want to argue, allegorical, and in a very specific way: they are to be read as what I will call national allegories, even when, or perhaps I should say, particularly when their forms develop out of predominantly western machineries of representation, such as the novel" (69). Thus, in Half of a Yellow Sun, Olanna becomes the female allegorical embodiment of the nation.2
Feminist readings of Olanna generally represent her as a strong female...