Spiral of Destruction: War, Silence and Environment in Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun and Ike’s Sunset at Dawn

This essay examines two literary evocations of the interrelationship between violence, silence and environmental destruction during the Nigerian-Biafran War (also known as the Nigerian Civil War or the Biafran War), fought between 1967 and 1970. Two novels that dramatize features of this interrelationship, Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Sunset at Dawn (1976) by Chukwuemeka Ike, are explored. Half of a Yellow Sun unfolds one prosperous family’s struggles before, during and after the Biafran conflict, while the much earlier Sunset at Dawn is the literary rendering by Ike of the same war, which he witnessed in part while working on behalf of the Biafran cause. Ike’s novel likewise focusses on one privileged family’s wartime ordeal. The relationship between these two novels has been noted by Adichie herself. She acknowledges in an Author’s Note that follows Half of a Yellow Sun the numerous volumes that guided her in the creation of the story and specifically identifies Sunset at Dawn, published less than a decade after the war’s end, as one of two novels that were ‘indispensable in creating the mood of middle-class Biafra’ (542).1 Although environmental destruction, or ecocide, is not a central theme in either Half of a Yellow Sun or Sunset at Dawn, each novel does, indeed, portray the wartime assault on the environment and the relationship of this assault to other forms of militarized violence. Each portrayal of such assault carries important implications for understanding human orientations to the environment and life itself during a time of war.