Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has written a moving piece about taking her family to watch the film adaptation of Half of a Yellow Sun, although the movie is still being withheld from the Nigerian public by censors.
Nigeria’s National Film and Video Censors Board recently released a list of 35 films approved for release in May, but Half of a Yellow Sun – which deals with the Biafran War – was nowhere to be seen:
The still-snubbed Half of a Yellow Sun — starring Oscar nominee, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Thandie Newton — was scheduled to be premiered in Nigeria on April 25, 2014, but NFVCB denied the movie certification, claiming that “certain aspects of the film have some unresolved issues, which have to be sorted out in accordance with the law and laid-down regulations”.
Prominent Nigerian filmmaker Tunde Kelani even took to Twitter to appeal the censorship:
This is an appeal to the DG of the National Film and Video Classification Board to release the film Half Of … http://t.co/9j9HWVAq0W
— Tunde Kelani (@tkelani) June 5, 2014
In response to the censorship of the film, Adichie wrote a piece for The New Yorker, in which she called the action a “knee-jerk political response” in the context of upcoming elections and the Boko Haram crisis. But she insisted: “we cannot hide from our history”.
On a personal level, however, Adichie admits she found this difficult. Writing for The Telegraph, the author describes her trepidation in taking her mother and father, and extended family, to the Lagos premier of Half of a Yellow Sun.
Despite not suffering much in the way of “material deprivations”, Adichie lost both of her grandfathers in the Biafran War, and it was a harrowing time for her family – although it was rarely spoken about afterwards. Adichie says before she began asking questions about the war, while writing Half of a Yellow Sun, her parents’ memories “had long lay untouched”.
But after watching the film Adichie says parents “referred to Biafra more often in a week than they had in years”. In addition, the film jogged her siblings’ memories of the war, and even brought some new, untold stories to light:
In the new version of the story, told in the aftermath of the film, my mother added that the soldiers had threatened to beat her, and that my father, to protect her, had jumped on one of the soldiers, and that she begged him to stop, terrified that they had survived the war with their three children only to have her husband killed at a checkpoint. I was surprised. I had never heard this before. I turned to my father. He mumbled something, an acknowledgement of the memory, and looked away. He said nothing else. I tried to imagine him, tired and worried and afraid, lungeing at an armed soldier. What had been a story about soldiers doing what soldiers have done at the end of many wars – harass civilians – now became something entirely different: the specific story of a husband keen to protect his wife, of a wife keen to preserve her family.
The film rights for Adichie’s most recent book, Americanah, have been snapped up by Kenyan actress Lupita Nyong’o, who won this year’s Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her role in 12 Years a Slave.
Book details
- Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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EAN: 9780007200283
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- Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
EAN: 978000736262
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