Emerging Themes in Chimamanda N. Adichie’s Fiction: Ethnic and National Identity Narratives in Half of a Yellow Sun and “A Private Experience”

Abstract

Abstract:In "The Danger of a Single Story," Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie reveals how people construct other people's image through the story they tell about them. She explains how power plays an important role in defining one group whose story is told over and over from the perspective of those in position of power. The end result, Adichie suggests, is that a single story reduces people to mere misrepresentations, what is even more dangerous about it, is that how people perceive the defined group is determined by the single story teller, that is, the more powerful. This study argues that Adichie herself comes close to misrepresenting Northern Nigerian identity in her fiction. Using postcolonial theory methods, this paper contends that Adichie's portrayal of the binary opposition Hausa/Igbo, Biafra/Nigeria, Islam/Christianity appears as dangerous as the single story that she claims she despises. The researcher, after acknowledging the many efforts so far made in exploring her Half of a Yellow Sun and "A Private Experience," supports that Adichie's characterization not only points at postcolonial identity dilemma but implicitly reflects her proclivity towards telling a single, unbalanced, story in her identity narrative and her underground Biafran activism.