Summary
At the beginning of Chapter 29, Ugwu has heard from Pastor Ambrose that a charitable foundation is giving away water and food. When he leaves the compound to check the truth of this rumor, he is intercepted by soldiers who try to force him into the Biafran army, but Olanna bribes the soldiers to set Ugwu free. The relationship between Ugwu and Olanna becomes tense until Ugwu cleverly convinces Baby not to join other children in eating roasted lizards; this gesture begins to win back Olanna's confidence. Ugwu also pursues a relationship with Eberechi. When he is walking home from seeing her one day, he is intercepted by soldiers again. This time, he is forced into the Biafran army. Ugwu gets to know a young soldier nicknamed High Tech (since this soldier can apparently spy on enemies better than a high-tech device could) and reads a new book, the autobiography of Frederick Douglass, during his training.
Ugwu becomes skilled at using the obunigwe, a field device that delivers a localized explosion when activated. He earns the name Target Destroyer. During a trip to a bar, the soldiers in Ugwu's group force the bar girl to have sex with them, and Ugwu feels forced to join in raping her. After participating in more attacks on enemy forces, Ugwu is deployed alongside Captain Ohaeto. The two of them are caught in a deadly explosion.
Chapter 30 finds Richard escorting two American journalists, both named Charles, through Biafra. Richard finds that these two men smell bad; one of the journalists (a redhead) makes racist comments, but the other (a plump man) seems more troubled by the suffering that he sees among Biafra's refugees. When Richard returns to Kainene, he tells her that he has thought of the title for a book, The World Was Silent When We Died. Richard and Olanna also meet again, in a moment that is surprisingly free of tension.
The chapter concludes with Excerpt 7 from The World Was Silent When We Died. This chapter features a poem modeled on one of Okeoma's. Here, the narrator calls attention to the kwashiorkor ailment that afflicted Biafran children and indicates that journalists photographed this problem. Nevertheless, the foreign response seemed to be one of quick sorrow and subsequent disregard.
In Chapter 31, Olanna sees soldiers carrying a body that she fears is Ugwu's. Worried about the course of the war, she has been receiving letters and occasionally goods - including chocolate - from Mohammed. There is, however, domestic discord. Mama Oji indicates to Olanna that Alice might be seducing Odenigbo, and Odenigbo himself has been drinking heavily since the death of his mother. Prompted by Kainene's own advice and by fears that the forces from the North are advancing, Olanna considers relocating to Kainene's house.
One day, a messenger from the community of Asaba arrives at the compound. This man summons Alice and informs her that her entire family has been killed off. Alice is distraught, and Odenigbo puts his arm around her. Olanna and the rest of her household relocate to Kainene's house near the refugee camp soon after. While there, Olanna and Odenigbo are informed of the death of Okeoma. The two have sex in a sad, troubled manner afterwards, and Odenigbo tells Olanna that she is "so strong."
Ugwu is found alive and rescued from the field of battle at the start of Chapter 32. Delirious at times and uncertain whether he will survive, he is left in a hospital, until Richard finds him and bring him home. Ugwu asks Richard to find Eberechi; he also learns about the book title that Richard has formulated. Though Ugwu helps out at the refugee camp, he is haunted by the fact that he raped a girl and is disillusioned with the Biafran war effort, including Ojukwu's leadership. He watches the children in the camp pretend to be figures from the war, and he is aware that some of them will in fact die.
In Chapter 33, Richard is pleased that his domestic life with Kainene has become harmonious. Kainene is determined to participate in the trading across enemy lines known as afia attack, even though Odenigbo warns her that the process could be dangerous. On the morning that Kainene leaves, a fleeing soldier is found taking food from Kainene's garden. She and Richard treat the soldier kindly, and then Kainene departs. When she does not return as planned and the days start to drag on without her reappearance, Richard becomes distraught, but Olanna tries to reassure him that Kainene has simply been delayed.
Chapter 34 begins Olanna braiding Baby's hair (which is falling out) and Ugwu working on his writing. Kainene still has not appeared, and Olanna and Odenigbo have begun to consider that perhaps she has been killed. Commotion breaks out due to an important radio announcement: Gowon's declaration that Biafra and the North are ceasing hostilities and negotiating an armistice. Conditions quickly improve. When she goes to a local market, Olanna is amazed to find that food is available in abundance. Soon, the roads open up, and Odenigbo's family leaves for Nsukka. Odenigbo is aware, however, that Nigerian soldiers are hostile to the "book people" from the university and takes off his glasses in order not to be targeted as an intellectual. On the road, he is stopped by soldiers, and he and Olanna are forced to carry some wood. They pass through safely otherwise.
In Chapter 35, Odenigbo, Olanna, Ugwu, and Baby arrive in Nsukka and find the house in disarray. To some extent, Odenigbo's papers and other documents have been destroyed. Ugwu then travels to his hometown. Here, he learns that his mother has died, that Nnesinachi became the mistress of a Hausa soldier, and that Anulika was raped by invaders; he sits alone and cries before leaving. In Nsukka, Ugwu talks with Richard. The young man asks Richard to look for Eberechi. Richard promises to do so, and explains that he has a title - The World Was Silent When We Died - on his mind. Ugwu feels that the story of Biafra's downfall is not Richard's story to tell. Richard agrees.
Richard returns to Kainene's old house in Chapter 36. The woman who now occupies the property refuses to let him in to retrieve photographs as he had hoped. Afterwards, Richard goes to the house of Kainene's parents. Madu is there, and he and Richard talk briefly about Kainene's mysterious disappearance. Richard then asks whether Madu had ever touched Kainene. When Madu brushes off this inquiry, Richard strikes him; Madu hits back, causing Richard's nose to bleed. After Madu walks away, Richard is overcome with the feeling that Kainene will not return.
Chapter 37 finds Olanna feeling a deepening pain and disorientation over Kainene's absence. She consults a dibia, a traditional master of superstition and lore, in hopes of bringing Kainene back, but this effort is futile. Olanna talks to Odenibgo about the possibility of reincarnation. Though she asserts that she and Kainene will be sisters in the next life, Olanna begins to cry, and Odenigbo embraces her.
The chapter ends with Excerpt 8 from The World Was Silent When We Died. Here, the narration indicates that Ugwu has dedicated the book to "Master," Odenigbo.
Analysis
The various books that Ugwu reads on the way to composing The World Was Silent When We Died resonate with some of the key concerns of Half of a Yellow Sun. Before the outbreak of the war, the sharp-minded houseboy often has a classic of 19th-century British literature - The Pickwick Papers, The Mayor of Casterbridge - in his hands. Bringing these titles into her own narrative could be Adichie's way of reminding readers of the legacy of British rule, a force that no longer oppresses as it once did but continues to guide Odenigbo's political musings and Ugwu's sense of classic literature. With the appearance of The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Adichie presents Ugwu with a new kind of book: an autobiographical tale of oppression and liberation that, perhaps too easily, connects with the narrative of Ugwu's conscription and near-death escape.
However, the operations of this allusion are not that simple. Douglass courageously freed himself by fleeing the American South at a time when escaped slaves were treated as missing property; Ugwu was the unlikely survivor of a battlefield disaster. Beyond differences in agency, there is the question of humanity and inhumanity in each text - and it is here that Ugwu's sad narrative most radically departs from the inspiring flight of the great 19th-century abolitionist. At first, Ugwu connects to the book: "He finished it in two days and stated again, rolling the words around his tongue, memorizing some sentences" - in particular, a sentence about physical punishment and constant sleeplessness that rendered slaves submissive (452). These cruelties are, of course, inflicted by white overseers. But Ugwu has seen the extent of inhumanity that Africans can inflict on other Africans even in a modernizing country - and, not long after discovering Douglass's text, takes part in this cruelty by raping a bar girl. Half of a Yellow Sun does not deny the violent legacies of European colonization, yet the novel does demonstrate that inhumanity is not the special property of any one continent or ethnicity.
Without entirely rendering her characters unsympathetic, Adichie uses the final chapters of the novel to show how war succeeds in bringing out the worst personality traits of her small group. Ugwu - already eager to fit in and interested in sex when he first meets Odenigbo - becomes a distorted version of his Nsukka self. After meeting Alice, Odenigbo himself seems to backslide towards the philandering that disrupted his life with Olanna in Part 2. Here, though, the possible affair between Odenigbo and Alice barely registers. It is possible to look at the misdeeds of these characters and feel something like what Richard feels for the redheaded journalist, "both angry with and sorry for" this tactless, prejudiced man who recently lost his brother in Vietnam (469). The extent of suffering linked to dislocation, starvation, and wartime violence cannot excuse betrayal, sexual exploitation, or racism - but the overwhelming nature of that suffering makes a humane response, at least for some characters, harder to muster.
Nonetheless, there is one reassuring element of the character dynamics of these trying final chapters. After being sundered by affairs and further separated by their different paths through the war, Olanna and Kainene once again grow close. Ugwu reflects on the configuration of the joint household that Kainene, Odenigbo, and the other central characters form: "He listened to the conversations in the evenings, writing in his mind what he would later transfer to paper. It was mostly Kainene and Olanna who talked, as though they created their own world that Master and Mr. Richard would never quite enter" (499). A candid circle of intellectuals that recalls the group at Nsukka has re-emerged at Kainene's house near the refugee camp. The difference, this time, is that Kainene is present and apparently willing to open up to a sister whose choices and personality were not compatible with hers in peacetime.
This intensified communication between the sisters is not bound to last, and the final chapters of Half of a Yellow Sun swiftly complicate the growth, identities, and prospects of happiness of the characters even without the onset of new warfare. In returning to Nsukka, Odenigbo and Olanna return to a world that has been turned mercilessly upside down. The intellectual gifts that should make Odenigbo a man worthy of respect make him a target, a "book people" enemy of the occupying forces. Other characters face their own forms of savagely backwards logic. Any readers who are inhospitable to Richard will finally have an opening for criticizing him as more than insecure and presumptuous; his reflections on Madu are inflected by a hostile sense of racial difference, if not actual racism. This is a sad final note for a man who has frequently appeared in a much better light than other white characters, from Susan to the red-haired journalist. Olanna, for her part, realizes the extent of her affection for Kainene in the process of losing her sister. Ugwu has lost his mother, his innocence, and the sense that he is fundamentally better than the soldiers who raped his own sister. What he has gained is the ability to put trauma into words, but even that acquisition entails a dark paradox. The World Was Silent When We Died is a powerful and candid account of a terrible moment in African history, at once a realization of some of Ugwu's greatest gifts and a record of what is worst in his country - a potent book that should never have needed to be written.
