Ugwu's New Lifestyle
When Ugwu is taken for the first time to Odenigbo’s house, he marvels at all the luxuries he has never seen before. Accustomed to sleeping on floors and living in a hut built out of dirt, Ugwu regards the houses with running water and Odenigbo's shelves of books almost as elements of a fairytale setting. Electricity itself is a source of enchantment, when Ugwu first explores Odenigbo's house: "[Ugwu] turned the light on and marveled at how bright the bulb that dangled from the ceiling was, how it did not cast long shadows on the wall like the palm oil lamps back home" (8). This imagery has the purpose of portraying just how hard life was for Ugwu. He never slept on a proper bed before becoming a worker for Odenigbo; even meat was for him a luxury.
Olanna's Trip Through Lagos
In the Part 1 and in the early portions of Part 2, Olanna visits the bustling city of Lagos. The imagery that Adichie uses to conjure this city is based on a sense of movement, with Olanna glimpsing an urban landscape defined by busy crowds: "Olanna watched Lagos careen by: the tumultuous traffic, the rusty buses and exhausted masses waiting for them, the touts, the beggars sliding on fat wooden trolleys, the shabby hawkers thrusting trays toward people who either would not or could not by" (166). This description is given an even stronger sense of dynamism by the fact that these sights, already loaded with activity, are glimpsed through the windows of the moving taxi that carries Olanna through the metropolis. Though not by any means perfect, Lagos is alive with everyday squabbles and negotiations that are far preferable to the ethnic and political violence that will eventually consume Nigeria.
The Aftermath of a Bombing
After the bombing raid that disrupts Olanna and Odenibgo's wedding has passed, Odenigbo's family and gathered guests must navigate through a landscape that has suddenly been populated with nightmarish sights. The visual descriptions in this scene are powerful, but Adichie's prose relies on other senses as well: "Men and women gathered to help and to stare; some dug through the rubble too, other stood and looked and still others shrieked and snapped their fingers. A car was on fire; the body of a woman lay next to it, her clothes burned off, flecks of pink all over her blackened skin" (254-255). While paying keen attention to gruesome colors, Adichie also deploys auditory imagery by combining snatches of dialogue with a reference to the shrieks and finger snapping of some members of her crowd. The sense that the atmosphere has become oppressive, surreal, and panic-struck is further heightened by description premised on smell: here, a reference to the "smoky smell of burning" (255) makes the impact of the burning car and burnt flesh linger in the reader's mind.
Richard's Impressions of the Landing Strip
At the end of Richard's stint escorting two American reporters through Biafra, Richard observes the activity near the landing strip where the journalists will catch their plane. Through imagery defined by both color and motion, Adichie helps to convey Richard's disorientation at this point in the novel: "On the tarmac, a lorry was repairing the bomb craters, filling them with gravel. The runway lights blinked on and off and the darkness was complete again, absolute; in the blue-backness Richard felt his head swimming. The lights came on for a little longer and then off. On again and then off. A plane was descending; there was the bumpy trailing sound on the tarmac" (467). Details such as the "bomb craters" are reminders that Richard is not simply observing details to distract himself from a wearying day or from vexing companions, though his trip with the journalists has indeed had deeply unpleasant moments. Instead, "swimming" observations that would normally convey weariness and wooziness are accompanied by visual reminders of persistent war-zone danger.
