Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie PDF

Sex as Synecdoche: Intimate Languages of Violence in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of
a Yellow Sun and Aminatta Forna's The Memory of Love

Author(s): Zoë Norridge
Source: Research in African Literatures, Vol. 43, No. 2 (Summer 2012), pp. 18-39
Published by: Indiana University Press
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Sex as Synecdoche: Intimate Languages
of Violence in Chimamanda Ngozi
Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun and
Aminatta Forna’s The Memory of Love
Zoe Norridge
University of York
zoe.norridge@york.ac.uk
ABSTRACT
In the 1990s, women’s writing about war in Africa took a new turn as
Yvonne Vera and Calixthe Beyala began to publish texts interweaving
explicit sexual descriptions and graphic violence. With their examination
of sexual relationships in the context of the Nigerian and Sierra Leonean
civil wars, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun and Aminatta
Forna’s The Memory of Love continue this trend. Why is it that female African
writers are currently turning to sensuality as a means to explore conflict?
This article argues that sex and violence are intricately interwoven and that
the examination of sexual pleasure in these novels forms both a language
and strategy with which to explore and contest violence against women. In
doing so, it draws on theoretical insights about the sexual nature of out-
sider perspectives on conflict, the political choices involved in describing
gender-based violence, and the crucial role of intimacy in representing war
and wounding.
S
exuality has always played a role in African writers’ accounts of conflict:
from anticolonial struggles to postindependence civil wars, from Ngũgĩ
wa Thiong’o’s Weep Not, Child to Emmanuel Dongala’s Johnny Chien Méchant.
Descriptions of sexual attraction have proved fundamental to explorations of both
male and female experiences of war and survival. It is surprising, then, that recent
reviews of sexually explicit texts by writers from West Africa seem to downplay
such a connection. Abdulrazak Gurnah, in an article praising Adichie’s “unflinch-
ing account of life behind the [Biafran] war”—Half of a Yellow Sun—claims that
• REsearch in african literatures, Vol. 43, No. 2 (Summer 2012). © 2012 •
ZOE NORRIDGE • 19
the “powerful thrust of the novel is dissipated by a melodramatic domestic plot

of half-hearted sexual transgressions.” Similarly, Michela Wrong, reviewing The
Memory of Love, is quick to reassure readers that “Aminatta Forna’s magnificent
second novel is not really about love. Its themes are far grittier, and all the more
compelling for it: war, loss, and how a society emerging from civil strife must
reinvent its own history.” These reviews appear to suggest that sexual interac-
tions, and indeed loving relationships, are out of place in the representation of
conflict—that these novels communicate the traumas of war somehow in spite of
their romantic leanings.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Aminatta Forna are both fascinated by the
personal cost of conflict. In their respective novels about the Biafran struggle and
Sierra Leonean civil war, they focus on the individual, the civilian, and the ways in
which the long-term threat of violence, alongside physical and emotional wound-
ing, reconfigures the daily lives of their characters. Such lives, like any others, are
necessarily built around deep emotional attachments to companions, many of
them sexual in nature. As Adichie has commented: “I was determined to make my
novel about what I like to think of as the grittiness of being human—a book about
relationships, about people who have sex and eat food and laugh” (“Authenticity”
50). How different from Wrong’s grit, which seems to suggest that war and loss
can exist apart from the physical and emotional pleasures of life. For Adichie, the
reader must become familiar with the passions of her characters’ daily lives if
they are ever to intimate the negative impacts of civil war and begin to appreciate
the privations of conflict. If readers and critics have found both texts to be utterly
emotionally absorbing,1 it is in part because the characters each novelist depicts are
so quintessentially human and easily recognizable. I would argue that in contrast
to Gurnah’s assertion that “the book could have done with less souping-up,” much
of this sense of humanity is achieved precisely through Adichie’s sensual and
sexually explicit descriptions. But is the quest to create sympathetic and changing
characters the only reason Forna and Adichie include such graphic descriptions of
sexual encounters in their work? Or are there other dynamics at work—dynamics
that do not merely offer sex as an antidote to conflict, something that continues in
the face of adversity, but instead suggest fundamental links between the literary
representation of civil violence and sensual touching?
In the five years since Half of a Yellow Sun was first published, Chimamanda
Ngozi Adichie has become adept at fielding questions about “sex and decency” in
her writing. At a creative writing workshop in Lagos in 2008 she went so far as
to assert: “I don’t know how you write about Nigeria without dealing with sex”
(Lasisi). Many of her Nigerian colleagues would appear to agree. With precedents
dating back to Cyprian Ekwensi’s racy Jagua Nana published in the early sixties,
and in more recent work ranging from Lola Shoneyin’s novel of polygamy, The
Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives, to Chika Unigwe’s examination of Nigerian sex
workers in On Black Sisters’ Street, sex has become a recurring theme of contempo-
rary Nigerian literature.2 Indeed, over the last decade, descriptions of sex, and in
particular sexual pleasure, have flourished in the work of African writers across
the continent. See for example Sello Duiker’s The Quiet Violence of Dreams, Yvonne
Vera’s many novels exploring sex and conflict in Zimbabwe, or Calixthe Beyala’s
graphic descriptions of desired and undesired sexual encounters in Cameroon.
Strikingly, many of these texts exploring the dynamics of sexuality also negotiate
20 • Research in African Liter atures • Volume 43 Number 2
the infliction of violence. This article will examine whether these two themes—sex
and conflict—are somehow aesthetically intertwined.
War has long been an intrinsic theme of African literature. We can trace
its path from the regionally focused war songs of the Dinka, the Acholi, or the
Ashanti (Okpewho 151–56) to Achebe’s exploration of violent colonial contact, from
the struggle for Zimbabwean independence in the novels of Shimmer Chinodya
or Alexander Kanengoni to the disillusionment of the postindependence period
in the work of Ayi Kwei Armah. Although many of these conflict narratives have
been penned by men, there is also a long history of women writing about war.
Flora Nwapa’s account of the Biafran conflict, Never Again, was published in 1975
and followed by many more accounts of that struggle, including Buchi Emecheta’s
Destination Biafra, Rose Adaure Njoku’s Withstand the Storm: War Memories of
a Housewife, and Phanuel Egejuru’s The Seed Yams Have Been Eaten. While such
accounts have been examined in the critical literature by Obioma Nnaemeka and
Odile Cazenave among others, many of the texts themselves are now out of print
and no longer taught on university courses. Instead, these texts of the seventies
and eighties with their focus on gender politics and the nation have been followed
and perhaps to a certain extent superseded by more recent women’s writing such
as Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins or Véronique Tadjo’s The Shadow of Imana. Such
novels and memoirs tend to feature increasingly aestheticized narratives, a con-
cern with the physical and emotional nuances of experience, and a foregrounding
of violence against women. They can be further located alongside a trend for testi-
monial autobiographical writing from Africa that gives voice to female survivors
of conflict and gender-based violence. Here a sampling of authors might include
Helene Cooper (Liberia), Alexandra Fuller (Zimbabwe), Khady Sylla (Senegal), and
Yolande Mukagasana (Rwanda).
Adichie and Forna’s novels display many of the common characteristics of
recent women’s writing from Africa: they both focus on individual narratives told
from multiple perspectives; they both employ a range of narrative strategies to
explore complex character portraits; they both emphasize interpersonal relation-
ships and sexual desire; they both engage with histories of violent conflict. They
have also been highly critically acclaimed and unusually commercially successful.
Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun made the New York Times list for the 100 notable
books published in 2006 and went on to win the Orange prize for fiction. The novel
follows the lives of female twins Olanna and Kainene across the course of the
sixties. Born to a wealthy Igbo family, the twins have just returned from studies
abroad and are in the process of choosing their different paths. Olanna, sweet-
tempered and beautiful, takes up a job at Nsukka University where she lives with
her “revolutionary” partner Odenigbo and his houseboy Ugwu. Kainene, more
business-minded and assertive, manages her father’s factories and falls in love
with Richard, an aspiring, if rather ineffectual, English writer. Charting a series
of political events, massacres, and upheavals, the novel describes the responses of
these characters to the onset and duration of the Biafran conflict (1967–1970). The
result is an absorbing and detailed set of character portraits told from the perspec-
tives of Olanna, Richard, and Ugwu. Achebe has praised her work, commenting
that “we do not usually associate wisdom with beginners, but here is a new writer
endowed with the gift of ancient storytellers” (front matter, Half of a Yellow Sun).
Half of a Yellow Sun builds on the descriptions of love and pain, family and desire
ZOE NORRIDGE • 21
that Adichie first explored in her debut novel Purple Hibiscus, creating a novel of
sustained aesthetic brilliance and emotional complexity.
Aminatta Forna’s The Memory of Love (2010), winner of the Commonwealth
Writers Prize and shortlisted for the Orange prize in 2011, explores the aftermath
of the more recent civil war in Sierra Leone. While Adichie’s novel examines
her characters’ responses to the onset of the Biafran war, Forna approaches her
protagonists’ histories retrospectively, grounding her text in a period of peace
and probing the past through narrative explorations of memory. Set in Freetown,
the novel follows the story of Adrian, a British psychologist volunteering with
the city’s (extremely stretched) mental health services. Adrian befriends local
orthopedic surgeon Kai who is tormented by nightmares and memories from
the war. Through his travels he then meets and falls in love with a woman who,
unbeknownst to him, is the daughter of one of his patients and Kai’s former lover.
The narrative—told from the perspectives of Adrian, Kai, and Mamakay’s father,
Elias Cole—explores various levels of elite complicity during the civil war and
strategies for coping with the aftermath of mass trauma. Forna knows first-hand
the cost of Sierra Leone’s enduring conflicts. Her first novel, The Devil That Danced
on the Water, explores the events leading up to her father’s execution when she
was just eleven years old. She explained to me (African Studies Book Group) that
one of her motivations for writing this her third novel was to examine the ways
in which some of her father’s generation profited from their involvement with the
oppressive politics of the day. The narrative passages recounted in the voice of
Elias Cole—a character similar in age to her own father—take us back to a period
contemporary with Adichie’s novel (the Nigerian civil war is mentioned in passing,
75) and their location on a postindependence university campus results in some
similarities in conversations and tone.
Arguably however, the most striking similarity between these two novels is
the writers’ willingness to describe sexual encounters in detail despite, or I will
argue because of, the backdrop of conflict. Adichie offers sensual and detailed
accounts of sexual desire and intercourse between her principle adult characters
and a tender and yet disturbing description of the houseboy Ugwu’s awakening
sexuality. Forna overlays descriptions of sexual relationships between the older
generation (Elias Cole, Vanessa, Julius, Saffia), the next generation’s younger selves
(Nenebah and Kai) and the current relationship between Adrian and Mamakay.
Both use language that is unusually explicit. My argument here will examine
how and why such descriptions might function in terms of plot, group identity,
and political protest. I then move on to examine how descriptions of intercourse
create new aesthetic languages that are mobilized to probe the extremes of bodily
sensation and explore the sensuality of loss.
CROSSCULTURAL ENCOUNTERS
Susan Sontag, an inimitable commentator on bodies in conflict, suggested in her
last text, Regarding the Pain of Others, that
[p]ostcolonial Africa exists in the consciousness of the general public in the rich
world—besides through its sexy music—mainly as a succession of unforgettable
photographs of large-eyed victims, starting with figures in the famine lands
of Biafra in the late 1960s to the survivors of the genocide of nearly a million
Rwandan Tutsis in 1994 and, a few years later, the children and adults whose
limbs were hacked off during the program of mass terror conducted by the RUF,
the rebel forces in Sierra Leone. (63–64)
For several years I cut the aside—“besides through its sexy music”—from my
presentations and writing about pain narratives in Africa. The phrase seemed
irreverent, trite, a consolidation of stereotypes. But as I return to Sontag now, I
see a more deliberate intention to her interjection. She later goes on to claim that
that “all images that display the violation of an attractive body are, to a certain
degree, pornographic” (85). Read in conjunction with that assertion we could
argue that when Sontag refers to Africa’s “sexy music,” this is not in opposition
to Africa as a locus of victimhood in the international imaginary. Instead, sexual-
ity and awareness of suffering are intricately interlinked. The networked global
audience, accustomed to viewing various African bodies through news channels,
films, and photography experience an attraction to such bodies not only in terms
of a tug of human sympathy (ineffective though, Sontag argues, that may be) but
also through the frame of desire.
The manner in which desire intersects with perceptions of pain and responses
to conflict has recently been explored in a number of texts examining the complexi-
ties of international NGO work. Most memorable perhaps is Kenneth Cain, Heidi
Postlewait, and Andrew Thomson’s Emergency Sex (and Other Desperate Measures):
True Stories from a War Zone—an account of high libidos, international aid work,
and crushing disillusionment responding to conflicts in Rwanda, Bosnia, Soma-
lia, Haiti, and Liberia. Adichie and Forna echo this idea of outsider desire. In The
Memory of Love Kai, the local doctor, reflects:
It was errantry that brought them here, flooding in through the gaping wound
left by the war, lascivious in their eagerness. Kai had seen it in the feverish eyes
of the women, the sweat on their upper lips, the smell of their breath as they
pressed close to him. They came to get their newspaper stories, to save black
babies, to spread the word, to make money, to fuck black bodies. (218)
The intention to assist is steeped in physical desire—from the flooding of the post-
conflict wound with its associated imagery of penetration and ejaculation to the
bodily manifestations of the female NGO workers’ desire. With deep cynicism Kai
observes the transactional nature of these visits, interweaving actual penetrative
sex with a list of other, arguably intimately interrelated activities. Similar, even
more grossly manifested “lasciviousness” is seen in Adichie’s novel when Richard
guides around two American journalists who have just flown into Biafra. As one
of them remarks, “She looked like she was real interested [. . .] I hear there’s a lot
of free sex here” (369).
Adichie and Forna’s narratives both recognize and extend the notion that
sexual desire motivates, or at least characterizes, the experiences of European
and American visitors to Nigeria and Sierra Leone. Both Half of a Yellow Sun
and The Memory of Love probe the ways in which sexual encounters can increase
self-awareness and a sense of (imperfect) connection with other cultures. When
Richard encounters Kainene, the twin who is to become his lover, Adichie stresses
the visual nature of his first impressions, suggesting that Kainene resembled
ZOE NORRIDGE • 23
a mistress—with “her brazenly red lipstick, her tight dress, her smoking” (57).
Richard’s first desire is to move beyond this realm of the specular towards physical
contact. Gazing at her necklace, he wishes to “reach out and touch it [. . .] to lift it
off her neck and then let it settle back against the hollow of her throat” (58). This
desire is echoed just a few pages later when Richard first sees photographs of the
roped pot that will become his passionate object of study—he “ran a finger over
the picture and ached to touch the delicately cast metal itself” (62). This aching to
touch might initially be read as a fascination with an erotic object, with a desire to
possess, particularly if we examine such desire in the context of colonial and neo-
colonial gestures of possession and exploitation as suggested by the juxtaposition
of Kainene with the pot Richard sees in Colonies Magazine. But this assumption is
complicated by Richard’s tentative approach to the world; the gesture seems more
one of reverence—how you might touch a beautiful statue or flower—than one of
appropriation. Richard goes on to fall deeply in love with Kainene and remains
with her throughout the Biafran conflict. It is Kainene who is often portrayed as
being in a position of power—her extraordinary strength contrasting with the
Englishman’s timidity.
In Forna’s novel, Adrian never forms such an enduring commitment to
Mamakay or to Sierra Leone. But his relationship with her does fundamentally
transform the way in which he perceives his surroundings. As Forna writes:
“Through Mamakay the landscape of the city has altered for Adrian. For the first
time since he arrived, the city bears a past, exists in another dimension other
than the present” (255). This is not a reading of a woman’s body as analogous
with landscape, but instead a discovery of alternative and very personal histories
through sharing the way in which another person inhabits a space—a bed, a room,
a city. With this new knowledge, though, comes an awareness of its imperfection,
its incompleteness, the emotional spaces the other person keeps at arm’s reach. At
the end of the chapter containing Adrian’s observation about changing landscapes
he asks, “What does Mamakay think of him?” and replies—“he has no idea” (258).
It is through the intimacy of the sexual encounter that the irreconcilable distance
of the other person is realized. In Adichie too, Richard’s experiences of touching
Kainene are repeatedly figured as moments of imperfect connection: “He ached
to know what she was thinking. He felt a similar pain when he desired her and
he would dream about being inside her, thrusting deep as he could, to try and
discover something that he knew he never would” (65). The clarity of perception
that sexual intimacy yields is here not any unforeseen knowledge of the other
person, but instead the realization of an inaccessible otherness. In opposition to
assumptions about the availability of the personal story, as seen in news media
and the earlier descriptions of NGO workers, in the extended encounters Adichie
describes, sex leads to increased self-awareness about distances in perception—a
distance perhaps common to all couples (and certainly apparent in the Nigerian
and Sierra Leonean relationships described), but one that may be obscured in
narratives of crosscultural sexual discovery.
Why introduce such characters and such contact in texts that could have
stood alone, peopled only by African actors? The answer lies perhaps in the poten-
tial audience for Forna and Adichie’s texts. While they are both read in Nigeria
and Sierra Leone, the largest commercial markets for the publishers exist in the US,
the UK, and other developed anglophone countries, alongside the international
translation market. Forna lives in the UK; Adichie is currently based in the US.
If the majority of Adichie’s audience is not Nigerian, if the majority of Forna’s is
not Sierra Leoneon, then the figure of the cultural outsider provides the narrative
opportunity to give historical information, to explain the context of conflict, to
show how the visitor moves from puzzlement to something resembling under-
standing over the course of the novel. Such protagonists open up a possibility
for reader identification and do so from within the comforting caveat that these
characters are in love with a Nigerian and a Sierra Leonean woman, that they have
an emotional investment in these narratives that offsets and softens their at times
narrow, potentially racist, and culturally essentialist assumptions.
What I have also found fascinating, based on my experiences working with
reading groups on both texts and teaching Adichie’s novel in Oxford and in York,
is that (to varying extents international) readers studying at UK universities tend
to report identifying not with Richard or Adrian, but instead overwhelmingly
with Olanna, Nenebah, and Kai. Where the white British male is perceived to be
steeped in a difficult history of racial and cultural prejudice, readers prefer to
align their own identities with those of the articulate Nigerian and Sierra Leonean
elite. This places the reader both as an insider within an unknown culture and,
frequently, as the object of desire for a cultural outsider (Richard, Adrian) with
whom, in many cases in the UK at least, they share more history. My sense is that
this identification with the desired is crucial in disturbing the potential voyeur-
ism of the images that still circulate about West Africa—the gaze identified by
Sontag earlier in this discussion. By placing the reader in the center of a narra-
tive, by identifying with characters who both view and are viewed, Adichie and
Forna disturb any potentially homogenizing or blithely sympathetic approaches
to viewing the conflicts they depict.
GROUP ACTS AND VIOLATIONS

If Adichie and Forna’s descriptions of sexual encounters rework some of the more
troubling aspects of a homogenizing Western gaze, they also function to compli-
cate the reductive dehumanizing strategies of civil war. In lectures, Adichie con-
sistently protests the dangers of the “single story,” asserting that the danger with
stereotypes is not that they are necessarily wrong, but that they are incomplete
(“Danger”). Half of a Yellow Sun explores both the endemic racism of some ex-pat
circles in postindependence Nigeria and the growing ethnic prejudice amongst
groups of the Nigerian population. This sets the tone for the homogenization and
polarization that is then taken to another level during the descriptions of the Nige-
rian civil war. We know that popular and official war narratives, particularly civil
war narratives, with their emphasis on essential differences between groups, often
depicted in terms of religion or ethnicity, homogenize. The enemy is reduced to a
grotesque single or small set of identities; the home group is encompassed in a nar-
rative of collective belonging (Mamdani, Newbury). These dehumanizing gestures
serve to create clear in-group and out-group demarcations and enable the inflic-
tion of violence (Midlarsky 51). Alongside depictions of hunger and prolonged and
intense apprehension that we find in many of the texts about both Biafra and the
Sierra Leonean conflict, one of the consequences of war more frequently depicted
in both Adichie and Forna’s novels is the constant threat of rape.
ZOE NORRIDGE • 25
Sexual violence is pervasive in both Half of a Yellow Sun and The Memory of
Love. While statistics for such violence in Biafra are hard to obtain, researchers
have estimated that there were around 64,000 incidents of sexual violence in Sierra
Leone between 1991 and 2001, with the actual figures probably much higher.3 In
Adichie’s novel, such violence occurs both as part of the interethnic conflict and
within the Biafran state itself. For example, Okeoma reports that the white mer-
cenary commander he works for “throws girls on their backs in the open, where
the men can see him, and does them, all the time holding his bag of money in one
hand” (323). Forna also describes the daily threat of rape during civil war and the
particular vulnerability of displaced women. Her characters see women lying in
rows at the edge of the refugee camp, “blood leaking from between their open
legs.” She continues: “[O]n many mornings to come the bodies of young women
were found dumped behind the tents, their lappas bunched around their waists
(310). Adichie and Forna’s descriptions both display the objectification of women
who are violated, who are perceived as disposable—to be thrown, to be “dumped.”
Reflecting the horrors of collective violence, they describe the wounded women in
terms of groups. Neither writer, however, stops here. Adichie goes on to explore
both the act of raping and the horror of witnessing the aftermath of violent sexual
acts. Forna explores a first-hand account of sexual violence. I shall draw on these
accounts to examine first how sexuality is used to explore group acts of violence
and then how sex is used to confound and contest such representations.
An individual perspective on perpetration is offered through the character
of Ugwu, Odenigbo and Olanna’s houseboy. The very opening chapter of Half of
a Yellow Sun is told from the narrative viewpoint of Ugwu and he functions as a
key character for the development of the narrative, even if socially he holds little
power. Still a child when he begins working for Odenigbo, across the course of the
narrative we watch his sexual fascination with Nnesinachi, from his home village,
transform into an arrangement of sexual convenience with Chinyere, who works
in a nearby home, and finally transmute into a potential courtship with Eberechi—
a girl living opposite Olanna’s household in Umuahia (296). His sexual coming of
age, though, is written through with the daily presence of sexual violence and
unequal power dynamics. Eberechi is coerced by her parents into having sexual
relations with an army officer. After she tells Ugwu what happened, he reflects:
He felt angry that she had gone through what she had, and he felt angry with
himself because the story had involved imagining her naked and had aroused
him. He thought, in the following days, about him and Eberechi in bed, how
different it would be from her experience with the colonel. He would treat her
with the respect she deserved and do only what she liked only what she wanted
him to do. (294)
Ugwu reveals the uncomfortable dynamic that I pointed towards through the
words of Susan Sontag earlier: that the depiction of violence may be porno-
graphic—arousing. He also, as a young man, hopes to rewrite this story, to
place himself in the position of the sexualized male but within a rather different
narrative.
Sadly, later in the novel, Ugwu does indeed come to occupy the position of
the sexually powerful, but in an abusive rather than a protective context. Abducted
and forced to become a soldier, Ugwu is involved in the gang rape of a bar girl with
his comrades. After the boys urge “High-Tech,” the instigator of the incident, to
“discharge and retire,” Ugwu, or “Target Destroyer,” as he has become known, is
invited to take his turn. Initially resisting but not wanting to be seen as a coward,
he participates without much hesitation:
On the floor the girl was still. Ugwu pulled his trousers down, surprised at the
swiftness of his erection. She was dry and tense when he entered her. He did
not look at her face, or at the man pinning her down, or at anything at all as he
moved quickly and felt his own climax, the rush of fluids to the tips of himself:
a self-loathing release. He zipped up his trousers while some soldiers clapped.
Finally he looked at the girl. She stared back at him with a calm hate. (365)
The pure mechanical physicality and emphasis on the presence of the other boys
result in a passage that is radically different from any of the other descriptions of
intercourse. This is rape depicted both as an extension of the sexuality of young
boys—they chose, after all, to have sex with a young girl—a girl whom they might
have found attractive under any other circumstances—and rape as depicted as a
bonding male exercise in the practice of war.4 The gang rape is not, however, a mili-
tary tactic—the soldiers are located in Biafra, raping one of their own, with none
of the strategic purpose of abjection, marking, and pollution attributed to many
sexual war crimes (Diken and Lausten, Gottschall). What I find fascinating in
Adichie’s description is both that the character feels “self-loathing” at the moment
of “release” and that this is a character who the reader knows well. Adichie’s audi-
ence is encouraged to continue to identify with Ugwu despite his sexual violence.
We see his act as a moment of unacceptable but exceptional group conformity and
are told only of the victim that “she stared back at him with a calm hate.”
Obioma Nnaemeka has traced the depiction of sexuality across a range of
texts examining the Biafran conflict. She finds that “[i]n contrast to male writers
who focus on consensual sex and raise moral questions about the promiscuity of
girls during the war, women writers foreground painful and graphic depictions of
sexual violence and rape as a weapon of war” (255). Contrasting Achebe’s title story
in Girls at War and Emecheta’s Destination Biafra, she argues that the unemotional
and transactional nature of sex in the male-authored text is radically different
from the hurt and humiliation of Emecheta’s rape descriptions. Both Adichie and
Forna’s agendas are rather different. Representing a new generation of female
West African writers engaging with the topic of sexual violence, these novelists
seek to explore varied and unpredictable aspects of the experience. Adichie is
intrigued by both the perpetrator perspective (as seen in the description of Ugwu
and gang rape above) and the apprehension of other women who are not raped.
Forna contrasts the horror of wounded populations of women with the experiences
of two characters in particular. This shift in representation echoes wider changes
in feminist thought. As Zoe Brigley Thompson and Sorcha Gunne observe, “[F]or
second-wave feminism, the primary objective was to put rape on the agenda in
an effort to prevent it from occurring.” By contrast, “now what is at stake is not
just whether we speak about rape or not, but how we speak about rape and to what
end” (3).
ZOE NORRIDGE • 27
PROTESTING SEXUAL VIOLENCE

If an earlier generation of female African writers sought to place rape on the
agenda in a West African context, then Adichie, Forna, and others of their gen-
eration seek to explore the varied nuances of how and why rape is experienced
in specific situations. I wish to argue that one of the key manners in which they
examine both the aftermath of rape and the context of the ongoing wartime threat
of sexual violence is through the depiction of pleasurable sexual relations. In Half
of a Yellow Sun, loving sex is pictured not as antithetical to rape but as related to the
traumatic imaginary associated with sexual violence. After much space dedicated
to descriptions of both twins’ sexual pleasure, Olanna’s return home after witness-
ing the carnage left by the massacres in Kano is explored through her ongoing
sexual relations with Odenigbo in Nsukka:
‘Touch me.’ She knew he didn’t want to, that he touched her breasts because he
would do whatever she wanted, whatever would make her better. She caressed
his neck, buried her fingers in his dense hair, and when he slid into her, she
thought about Arize’s pregnant belly, how easily it must have broken, skin
stretched that taut. She started to cry. (160)
This is how the information about the raping and cutting of pregnant women
is introduced. Not through a direct assertion of events—that account is voiced
a while later by Odenigbo during an argument—but instead through Olanna’s
identification with Arize through the act of intercourse, the contrast between the
ease with which Odenigbo enters her and the imagined skin of the taught belly
breaking. The idea of another’s violation is experienced through the tenderness
of volitional acts of intimacy.
Diken and Lausten in their article “Becoming Abject: Rape as a Weapon
of War” comment that “the prime aim of war rape is to inflict trauma and thus
to destroy family ties and group solidarity within the enemy camp” (111). The
authors argue that beyond the physical damage caused by sexual violation, the
enduring wounds of rape are psychological. Drawing on the work of Kristeva and
Bataille, they assert that nonconsensual sex is psychically wounding because it
places the victim within the realm of the abject: the indistinct formlessness that
threatens normality, dissolves boundaries between the inside and the outside of
the body, provokes disgust and resists articulation in language (116–17, 120). While
the perpetrators of rape in wartime experience a joining together in their sense of
guilt—a group identity formed around group acts as seen perhaps in the earlier
description of Ugwu’s involvement in a multiple rape—the person who is raped,
according to these authors, experiences a sense of shame. Why should the victim
of sexual violence experience such a damaging emotion? Agamben’s conception
of shame could be seen to provide a partial answer. In Remnants of Auschwitz, he
argues: “There is certainly nothing shameful in a human being who suffers on
account of sexual violence, if he is moved by his passivity—if, that is, auto-. is
produced—only then can one speak of shame” (110). Diken and Lausten conclude
from this that the shame involved in rape is linked to social myths about female
rape victims “seducing” men, the socially circulating idea that the victim in some
way draws pleasure from rape results in guilt and silence: “the myth of the willing
rape victim blocks the attempts to verbalize the act” (123).
These ideas are clearly rooted in deeply misogynistic social structures that
both deny women sexual autonomy—the authority to say no—and depict all
women as sexually available. Is there an uncomfortable link here between early
male-authored depictions of female promiscuity during the Biafran war and
female authors’ insistence on placing rape on the agenda? Adichie and Forna’s
work complicates any such possible association by showing women desiring and
asking for sex in one setting and both men and women refusing and resisting
nonconsensual violent sexual relations in others. While Ugwu earlier alerted us
to the idea that imagining forced sexual acts may at times be uncomfortably erotic,
the merging of Olanna’s sexual intercourse with an empathetic visualization of
the violence done to her cousin Arize contains no such sense of shame. Through
Odenigbo’s tenderness she is able to access a sense of the sadness, the horror of
her cousin’s probable rape, mutilation, and death. But as we see from the text, this
is not figured as a sadomasochistic fantasy, but instead as a confluence of tension
and release, sensuality and penetration, the inside and the outside of the body not
as rooted in disgust but care.
Such descriptions become possible because sex, in nearly all cases extra-
marital sex in both novels, is repeatedly figured as pleasurable, supportive, loving,
and empowering. It also plays an integral role in the characters’ response to the
onset of war. Adichie describes Kainene and Richard’s “new ritual since the war
started”—sex on the veranda at the end of the evening: “When she climbed astride,
he would hold her hips and stare up at the night sky and, for those moments, be
sure of the meaning of bliss” (308). Sex here is pictured as a haven, a space for joy
in the midst of tragedy. A similar experience is depicted by Forna as the young
couple, Kai and Nenebah, find greater intimacy with the onset of the Sierra
Leonean civil war:
War gave new intensity to their lovemaking. On the floor, facing him. Nenebah
with her legs around Kai’s waist. He, inside her, a nipple in his mouth. One hand
squeezes the surrounding breast, his tongue flicks back and forth, round and
round. The fingers of his other hand, in the warm V of her thighs, imitate the
same motion. Her breathing rises and quickens. As she comes, he holds on to
her, an arm around her shoulders, pressing her down on to his cock. With the
slowing of her shudders he rolls Nenebah on to her back, his fingers in her hair,
moving forward and back until he loses himself. Afterwards he lies, still inside
her, slowly softening, her hand stroking the back of his neck. In time they both
sleep held in the same position. (235)
There is no sense of shame in such descriptions. Instead, what is foregrounded is

a matched desire, an equality of orgasm, a reciprocity of sensation. Although we
are aware that there are parental restrictions that determine some of the settings
for the young lovers’ encounters, the descriptions of their intercourse are both
leisurely and adult.
The mutual desire and participation we see in Kai and Nenebah, Olanna
and Odenigbo, and Richard and Kainene’s relations make it abundantly clear by
contrast that in descriptions of sexual violence the person who is violated in no
way desires the violation, is in no way complicit with her or his own rape. Indeed,
ZOE NORRIDGE • 29
the horrifying social currency of the violated woman who “was asking for it” is
further complicated in Forna’s novel by the description of a man who is sexually
violated, reconfiguring conceptions of agency and indeed the aftermath of trauma.
Kai, having been forcibly taken from the hospital with a young nurse Balia, is
kept by rebel soldiers and, as the fighting in the city worsens, beaten and stripped
naked. The ensuing scene is the harrowing kernel at the center of The Memory
of Love, a memory so traumatic that it is kept hidden from everyone until at the
very end of the novel, under hypnosis, the story is finally revealed to Adrian, the
psychologist. While the reasons for deciding to share this experience at the very
end of the narrative remain a little hazy, the account itself is brutal in its clarity:
‘Fuck her or I fuck you.’ First spoken and then screamed into his ear, combining
with the ringing in his head to make him dizzy. ‘Fuck her or I fuck you.’
The gun was removed from his temple. Kai tried to force himself to think.
He was helpless. He felt something—the gun barrel—being pushed between
his buttocks, heard the laughter, felt the end of it being rammed into him. The
pain was acute and rippled through his body. Clapping. Cawing laughter. The
gun barrel was thrust further into him. He flopped forward and was forced up,
back on to his hands and knees. He was aware of Balia only peripherally, as she
lunged, the sharp report of the gun, the shallow arc described by her body in
the air as she fell backwards. (433)
The male doctor is raped with a gun barrel for his refusal to rape the young nurse.
He resists his potential for agency, the potential to participate in what Diken
and Lausten describe as “a brotherhood of guilt,” with its performative and self-
denying dynamics, and in so doing achieves a different form of self-determination,
one that asserts the individuality of refusal. For such a refusal he is brutalized,
sodomized as punishment.
The experience has a profound and enduring effect on Kai. Unlike Olanna,
he is unable to seek solace in loving sexual intimacy with his partner, even if this
is what he continues to desire. Instead, having personally experienced sexual
trauma, he finds that when Nenebah approaches him sexually, he is overwhelmed
with memories of before: “He tried to gain control, to re-engage his mind with
his body, with her hand. But it was impossible, the images crowded into his mind,
jostling for control, squeezing out the present” (287). The past squeezes out the
present, potential pleasure is replaced with pain, sexuality reframed as loss. Even
in Adichie’s text, a text in which sex is consistently described as profoundly free-
ing, as filling the protagonists with “a sense of well-being, with something close
to grace” (234), the wounds of war and the changed behavior of the protagonists,
Odenigbo in particular, result in a sense at times of repulsion, at others of lost
intimacy. But sexual contact remains desired, remains remembered as a source of
pleasure, remains integral to the texture of the text.
LANGUAGES OF THE BODY

Why is sexual intimacy so integral to both of these novels? I have argued that it
forms a point of identification for the reader and a way into the lives of individual
characters. I have also argued that it functions as a protest to some of the more
homogenizing effects of war and to the narratives of shame pervasive in social
stigma surrounding sexual violence. In addition, as I began to intimate above, it

opens up a language of intimacy, a language of the body, a way of speaking about
close physical and emotional contact.
Drew Leder, in his text The Absent Body, explores the idea that our bodies
are not present to us in every day life, that, as he puts it, “one’s own body is rarely
the thematic object of experience” (1). Instead, during perception, the perceiving
parts of the body are obscured by what is being perceived and those parts of
the body not being used for perception fall into the background and disappear.
Leder argues that the body makes itself known again mostly through aversive
experiences, through experiences of pain (69–99). He is doubtful of the power of
pleasurable experiences to produce such attention to physical experience, assert-
ing that “even strong pleasures, such as those of a sexual nature may leave one’s
thoughts wandering” (73). However, I would like to suggest that in Adichie and
Forna’s novels, sex functions as the nexus through which the body is made present,
a body that is then wounded, a physicality that is then used to explore painful
experiences precisely because we are already conscious of the body as sensation.
Early in Half of a Yellow Sun, Adichie describes Olanna’s early sexual encoun-
ters with Odenigbo, writing: “When she finally felt that desire she was surprised
above everything else. She did not know that a man’s thrusts could suspend
memory, that it was possible to be poised in a place where she could not think or
remember, but only feel” (29). In addition to narrative strategies of empathy and
political resistance to sexual shaming, the sexual body here is described from the
very outset of the text as a way of foregrounding the physical and of interweav-
ing this physicality with the intimacy of emotion. For Adichie, such physicality
becomes a language, a means of signifying beyond conscious thought, a manner
in which the narrator can explain interpersonal contact and bypass the need for
pedestrian accounts of emotion. When the two sisters greet each other after a long
period of no contact, Adichie writes: “[T]heir embrace was brief, their bodies barely
touching” (343). Two pages later when Olanna travels to see her twin, Adichie
comments that “their embrace was close, their bodies pressed warmly against each
other” (345). Such an example is so straightforward as to almost seem facile, but
the integrally bound emotional and physical language opens up narrative spaces
for exploring both the present and the past.
In Forna’s account, too, the tenderness of sexual descriptions of the body adds
human dimensions to the more clinical accounts of the wounds Kai encounters
in the hospital. Forna describes how these fall into two categories, firstly the gun-
shot and mortar wounds of those trained for involvement in violent conflict, and
secondly the wounds of the rural poor, “the peasants [. . .] who somehow made it
from their villages and were admitted with a C scrawled heavily on their charts”
(121). This “C” stands for Cleaved—wounds sustained from machetes. Later in
the war, amputees begin to arrive at the hospital. Kai and other surgeons practice
“the Krukenberg intervention, unused since the First World War, fashioning out
of the muscles and two bones of the wrist a pair of blunted pincers” (122). The text
expands: “Ugly, it was true. But Kai had seen a man once again able to hold his own
penis when he pissed, a mother place a nipple into her child’s mouth” (122). It is
no accident that Forna foregrounds the penis and the nipple here in this account
of rehabilitation from injury. It lends to her descriptions a tenderness and sense
of intimacy. Despite the dismissive tone of “pissed,” the language of the passage
ZOE NORRIDGE • 31
remains one of love. The humanity of descriptions of Nenebah’s nipple, of Kai’s

own “cock” in their sexual encounters provides a context for these descriptions
of injury. The sexual is what is most intimate and most personal—the loss of self-
determination is here perceived acutely in the contrasting horror of losing both
hands.
The links between sexual intimacy and the description of wounding in war
are intricately examined by Santanu Das in Touch and Intimacy in First World War
Literature. Both WWI and the civil wars in West Africa share an intimacy of con-
tact—injuries mostly inflicted within seeing range and at times within arm’s reach.
Das asserts that the texts he examines are “obsessed with tactile experiences” (5)
and describes his critical purpose as seeking to “recover and analyze the ‘sensu-
ous’ world of the trenches and the war hospitals” (6). Touch is fundamental to this
project because, he argues, it can “be said to open up the body at a more intimate,
affective level, offering fresh perspectives on certain issues that repeatedly sur-
face in war writings and have become central to contemporary cultural thinking:
ideas of space and boundaries, questions of gender and sexuality or the concept
of trauma” (6). While Das warns that “amidst the daily death and degradation, the
body was primarily an object of pain rather than that of desire” (25) and the same
could be said of the experiences of mass starvation in Biafra and horrific wound-
ing in Sierra Leone, in the texts he examines and in the novels I am exploring here,
sexual touching is fundamentally bound up with descriptions of violence.
The clearest example of this is perhaps seen in the experiences of Ugwu. A
young and sexually active adolescent, Ugwu is absorbed by sexual fantasies that
color his waking life. These fantasies are not dispelled by his involvement in the
fighting, but become intertwined with his own narrative of war. Describing the
onset of battle, Adichie writes: “Ugwu thought of Eberechi’s fingers pulling the
skin of his neck, the wetness of her tongue in his mouth. The vandals began to
shell” (262). Later on the same page, having successfully detonated his ogbunigwe,
Ugwu goes to undress the dead bodies of the enemy soldiers, and Adichie writes:
“Ugwu bent over a lean body. He yanked off the boots. In the pockets, he felt a
cold, hard kola nut and warm, thick blood” (362). One description creates a tactile
context for the more graphically violent contact that follows, the adolescent’s fan-
tasy maps onto the warm blood of the dead soldier, the hardness of the kola nut.
In common with the narratives Das examines, Ugwu’s experiences in the trenches
are fundamentally tactile, characterized above all by physical sensations. Ugwu
lies in a trench, “pressing himself into the mud, luxuriating in how close and
connected he was to the mud” (366). The pairing of what reads like desire with
the horrors of warfare continues even when Ugwu himself is injured. Treated
as a medical body by the hospital staff, he is haunted by confusing desire in his
dreams: “In his delirious moments, he saw Eberechi wearing her tight skirt and
making gestures to him that he could not understand. And in his lucid moments,
death occupied him” (393).
If touch and intimacy provide a vocabulary with which to remember and to
describe such pain and violence, they also, as seen in this final quotation, provide
a way into exploring the loss inherent in warfare. In addition to foregrounding
the body and generating a language with which to explore pain, sexuality also
functions in both novels as a mnemonic—as a physical experience that opens up
pathways to the past, as a trigger for emotion and the recounting of history.
SENSUALITY, LOSS AND CODES OF MEMORY

At the very opening of Forna’s novel, Elias Cole reflects on the loss that is inherent
in all relationships. Talking about the first glimpse of a woman you “know” you
could love, he comments: “People are wrong when they talk of love at first sight.
It is neither love nor lust. No. As she walks away from you, what you feel is loss. A
premonition of loss” (1). Adichie and Forna are both adamant about the potential of
sexual encounters to open up pleasurable connections between characters—con-
nections that are interwoven in intriguing and sometimes disorientating manners
with descriptions of violence. But they also acknowledge the transience of love, the
waning of desire, the complexities of betrayal. Such impermanence is played out
physically in the act of sex itself where the coming together of bodies also signals
their coming separation. Forna depicts this concept graphically in a remembered
scene between Kai and Nenebah:
They’d been lying in bed, spooned against each other, he was still inside her,
savouring the slipperiness of semen and sweat. Once she described for him the
sensation that followed his withdrawal from her body if it happened too soon,
his abandonment of her body. Loss, she said. It felt like loss. (260)
The daughter’s words echo those of her father, Elias Cole: the interpersonal con-
nection is shaded through with loss. Yet in the sexual fort da Nenebah describes,
Forna uses a different form of language. Not the abstract conceptually vague
references to “a woman you know you could love”—a tone that characterizes the
emotionally distant Cole throughout the novel—but the specificities of one very
personal postcoital conversation. The “slipperiness of semen and sweat” ground
this passage in the particularity of the physical, overlaying the emotional with the
biomechanics of intimacy.
Moments of honesty and revelation linked to sexual intercourse in The Mem-
ory of Love are overlaid with memories of Kai’s inability to maintain an erection
after his traumatic experiences during the war and the subsequent breakdown of
language between the two lovers. Sex again is used as a form of coding for com-
munication, its loss symbolic of emotional as well as physical distancing. Such
techniques are also used extensively in Half of a Yellow Sun. If Adichie returns to
descriptions of sexual intercourse between Olanna and Odenigbo, Kainene and
Richard so frequently over the course of the novel, it is partly to explore the chang-
ing nature of their relationships: to focus around a repeated act—weighty in its
intimacy—which is transformed by the conflict situation. Part four of the novel,
“The Late Sixties,” opens with such a passage. After a brief description of Olanna’s
concern at the rising food prices, their dwindling savings, and Odenigbo’s blithe
optimism Adichie writes: “That night she was silent as his thrusts became faster.
It was the first time she felt detached from him; while he was murmuring in her
ear, she was mourning her money in the bank in Lagos” (262). Olanna’s physical
responses to Odenigbo signal distancing more eloquently than any conversations.
After Ugwu is reported dead, Odenigbo’s touch makes “her skin crawl” (382). After
they receive news that their university friend Okeoma has died, Adichie writes:
Olanna reached out and grasped Odenigbo’s arm and the screams came out of
her, screeching, piercing screams, because something in her head was stretched
ZOE NORRIDGE • 33
taut. Because she felt attacked, relentlessly clobbered by loss. She did not let go of
his arm until Dr Nwala stumbled back into the rain, until they climbed silently
onto their mattress on the floor. When he slid into her, she thought how differ-
ent he felt, lighter and narrower, on top of her. He was still, so still she thrashed
around and pulled at his hips. But he did not move. Then he began to thrust
and her pleasure multiplied sharpened on stone so that each tiny spark became
a pleasure all its own. She heard herself crying, her sobbing louder and louder
until Baby stirred and he placed his palm against her mouth. He was crying
too; she felt the tears drop on her body before she saw them on his face. (391–92)
The intense pain of grief remains linguistically unarticulated in the moment—

Olanna screams in response to news of Okeoma’s death, drawn to an intellectual
and emotional breaking point by yet another loss. How does Adichie choose to
explore the depths of this sensation? Again through language steeped in physi-
cality. Olanna’s screams are followed by the description of something in her head
being “stretched taut,” by her feeling of being “clobbered by loss.” She physically
connects to Odenigbo through holding his arm and it is their conjoined bodies
that the passage goes on to explore. There is a desperation to her thrashing and
pulling, a frightening edge to the stone sharpened pleasure, the uncontrolled tears
that follow echoing the earlier personal abandonment in screams, yet differently
nuanced within the sexual embrace.
If sexuality, then, is figured as being intertwined with loss, its changing
nature is also used to articulate loss, notably through the ways in which sexual
intercourse changes over time—providing a physical language with which to
probe emotional transformations. In Adichie, such descriptions tend to be located
in the same temporal period as the overarching narrative—sexual encounters
form part of the fabric of the lives she describes, changes are seen as contempo-
rary with events even if they also evoke the intimacies of the past. In contrast,
The Memory of Love takes the opportunities offered for temporal linking through
differently nuanced descriptions of a repeated act and uses them as a spring-
board between different periods. In Forna’s writing, then, the sexual flashback
becomes a device the author uses to invoke stream of consciousness memories,
to unveil connections in the plot that only become apparent as characters in the
present re-recognize figures from their past. So when Kai sees Nenebah, both
in the hospital grounds and later in the library, he is transported back to an
earlier happier time, his physical surroundings morph, his recall of the past is
involuntary and transporting. Forna makes use of this technique to reveal that
the woman Adrian loves, hitherto known as Mamakay, is the same person as
Nenebah, the woman Kai remembers in the past. The narrative perspective at
this point is entirely focused through Kai’s mind, through his remembrance of
his former relationship, relived as if he has been transported back to that time.
The reader is encouraged to empathize with this temporal travelling, to see the
present through the eyes of a man with a particular past. Adrian later comments
with unusual perceptiveness:
How alike they were in many ways, Kai and Mamakay, like siblings really. In the
way they both resolutely occupied only the present, kept doors closed, showing
only what they chose to reveal. Both Kai and Mamakay had places from which
all others were excluded, from which Adrian was excluded. Even now the fear
coiling around his heart is that in those closed-off places is something the two
of them share from their past, some arc of emotion, incomplete, requiring an
ending. (391)
Some of the exclusive intimacy that Adrian intuits is built around the sexual
encounters of the past, the moments of intense sexual touching that Forna evokes
repeatedly in her narrative. These moments are those that Kai returns to invol-
untarily on seeing his former lover precisely because they belong to a period that
he keeps shut away. Adrian’s fear is that such a practice is melancholic, that the
incomplete stories of the past keep these characters grounded in another time, in
other moments of their lives.5 For Kai this is experienced as pleasure—even after
the death of his former lover he returns to memories of their relationship, jour-
neys backwards sparked by hearing the laughter of her daughter, the mnemonic
of sound returning him to his physical encounters with the mother—“the playful
bite during a morning’s embrace” (443). Loss continues to be negotiated through
the sensuality of contact with people who persist in the present. In the penultimate
chapter of Half of a Yellow Sun, Richard visits Kainene’s parents in Lagos. As her
mother accompanies him into the living room, she holds him tightly and Richard
has “the glorious and uncomfortable feeling that she thought she was somehow
holding on to Kainene by holding on to him” (429).
Ultimately, then, it is perhaps the presence of death that renders the emphasis
on physical intimacy so necessary and compelling, the absence of the body that is
mourned, resulting in a desire to ground memories in the material. Adichie refers
to the funerals of family members after the massacres in Kano as being “based
not on physical bodies but on her words.” Death during conflict is at times expe-
rienced with the immediacy of graphic wounding, as we saw earlier in descrip-
tions of Ugwu in the trenches or in Forna’s novel when Kai holds the dying nurse
in his arms. At others, though, it is perceived at a distance, without a corpse as
the focus for mourning. At such times, sexual contact, or the memory of sexual
contact, reconnects characters with a past physical reality. Exploring the medical
language of wounding and recovery, Forna takes the example of phantom limb
pain to stretch this further:
The memories come at unguarded moments, when he cannot sleep. In the past,
at the height of it, he had attended to people whose limbs had been severed.
Working with a Scottish pain expert years later, he treated some of those patients
again. They complained of feeling pain in the lost limbs, the aching ghost of a
hewn hand or foot. It was a trick of the mind, the Scotsman explained to Kai:
the nerves continued to transmit signals between the brain and the ghost limb.
The pain is real, yes, but it is a memory of pain.
And when he wakes from dreaming of her, is it not the same for him? The
hollowness in his chest, the tense yearning, the loneliness he braces against
every morning until he can immerse himself in work and forget. Not love.
Something else, something with a power that endures. Not love, but a memory
of love. (184–85)
The physicality of the limb, of love, feels real. But it is a trace of its former self.
Remembered intimacy provides a language with which to negotiate such loss.
ZOE NORRIDGE • 35
CONCLUSION
Reviewing The Granta Book of the African Short Story, edited by fellow Nigerian
Helon Habila, Tolu Ogunlesi observes that sex is “almost always summarized.”
These writers, he informs us, “have a habit of flitting past the bedroom on the way
to Something More Important.” For Adichie and Forna, however, sex is integral to
the texture of the text. In Half of a Yellow Sun and The Memory of Love descriptions
of sex serve to provoke a response in the reader and function as an aesthetic lan-
guage with which to explore the legacies of conflict. Both novels proffer a political
agenda, asserting their characters’ right to sexual pleasure alongside their right
to refuse. In terms of the study of relationships, sexual contact is used to bridge
distance and explore intimacy, while simultaneously revealing the limitations of
such a gesture and the inherent potential for loss. Sensual touching brings with
it not only an awareness of physical closeness—of proximity between the charac-
ters—but also the realization of bodily disappearance—of missing limbs, of the
absent body, of the corpse.
Both narratives return repeatedly to descriptions of sexual contact, using
these passages to evoke the characters’ changing relationships under the stresses
of ongoing conflict. Such descriptions feature alongside other details about the
business of daily living—details that render novels such an evocative medium
for exploring everyday existence in wartime. But the passages about sexual inter-
course demand particular attention from the reader—invite a more intimate form
of involvement. Each person engaging with these novels must negotiate his or her
own responses to the erotic content of the texts with their potentially arousing
descriptions. Such a negotiation takes place within a web of enduring social taboos
about the representation of physical intimacy—taboos that are challenged by the
explicit vocabulary favored by these authors over alternative more conservative
euphemisms. In responding physically and emotionally to these texts, we engage
in feeling with the characters, an embodied form of reading where we connect
with the changing emotional landscape of the narratives experientially as well
as intellectually.
Martin Crowley and Victoria Best, in their volume exploring pornography
in recent French fiction and film, identify multiple ways in which explicit descrip-
tions of sex correspond with wide-ranging cultural trends. Drawing on the work
of Michel Crépu and Laura Marks, among others, they suggest that postmodern
artworks are fascinated by “the cult of the individual, which in turn promotes a
highly developed focus on the intimate monologue” (12); a “general gloominess
in relation to meaning-making structures’; and “a wave of nostalgia [. . .] for that
which is experienced as real and immediate” (14). The descriptions of sexuality
I have been exploring in relation to Adichie and Forna also speak to these con-
cerns, but with a rather more overt sense of purpose and social relevance. They
focus on the particularity of the personal (in the face of homogenizing civil war)
and emphasize the importance of sensual interpersonal connection in the face
of, and indeed in response to non-sensical loss and violence. In the introduction
to The New Pornographies, the authors ask: “What could be more ‘material’, more
intense, more vividly present and resistant to cerebral causality than the graphi-
cally depicted sex act?” (14). While it is tempting to answer this question with
“war,” theories of conflict suggest otherwise. Equally, this is the point where the
representation of sex in the novels I have been discussing departs from any poten-
tial confluence with pornography. If pornography suggests that everything there is
to see is put on display with no hidden subtext, only the immediacy of the image,
then the mapping of sexuality within Half of a Yellow Sun and The Memory of Love
is very different. In these novels it is precisely the intimacy of sexual touching that
signals the existence of other complex systems of meaning.
I refer in my title to sex as synecdoche because while the encounters described
by Forna and Adichie are at times overtly sexually explicit, they are also by nature
partial. Each account of sexual intercourse is told from the perspective of one
member of the couple, never both. Sexual episodes, laden as they are with sym-
bolic meaning, are interspersed with accounts of other events, rarely both pre-
ceded and followed with directly chronological material. In addition, and perhaps
most important, the sexual intimacy described in both novels is used to provide
just a small insight into the wider experience of war. It functions both as an experi-
ence that signifies beyond itself—outwards into the context of daily life—and as an
experience that is only ever described as a fraction of itself—fleeting moments of
encounters that last much longer. I have tried to capture the synecdochal relation-
ship between the necessary partiality of descriptions of sexual intimacy and the
inaccessible fullness of experience. Nevertheless, I have asserted that incomplete
as these episodes may be, they offer a unique set of insights into the experience
of living with conflict, insights made possible by the very aspects of sexuality
that render its representation controversial—its deeply personal nature, its usual
framing “behind closed doors,” and its innate physicality.
While these novels do a great deal, what they do not do is offer much insight
into the actual gender politics of the periods described. Neither author was present
during the conflicts they recount and it is notoriously difficult to gain accurate
research insights about past sexual encounters from interviews. In addition, the
actual sexual politics of the time—and I am thinking particularly here of Biafra
in the late sixties—might not have been reconcilable with the aesthetic objectives
of the writing. Nor do these texts give many insights beyond the experiences of a
university-educated elite. While there are characters from other classes—Ugwu in
Half of a Yellow Sun, the patients Adrian treats in The Memory of Love—their sexual
exploits are not described with as much tenderness, consistency, or maturity as
the intimate lives of the more educated protagonists. The narratives do, however,
function to contest reductive representations of sexuality in “Africa,” including
tropes such as the colonial notion of the hypersexualized black identity, the more
simplistic aspects of Gender and Development (GAD) discourse, and Christian
notions about the immorality of sexual intimacy. These discourses are examined
in some detail by Signe Arnfred in her introduction to the edited collection Re-
thinking Sexualities in Africa, but much work remains to be done aligning literary
accounts of sexuality with the work of the social sciences. As Arnfred herself
observes: “Even if sexuality and (white, male) sexual desire have been active fac-
tors in establishing the very notion of Africa and Africans, sexual pleasure and
desire have rarely been objects of study for scholars studying Africa—female
sexual pleasure and desire even less” (20).
What I have done is explore why the sexually explicit is vital to both novels,
counteracting some critics’ assertions that it forms an unnecessary aside, and
instead placing it at the core of the text. Derek Attridge has observed:
ZOE NORRIDGE • 37
It is in [the] apprehension of otherness and in the demands it makes that the

peculiar pleasure of the literary response (over and above the pleasure to be
gained from new information, sensuous patterning, stirring of memory, moral
exemplification, and so on) is to be experienced. (131)
In this article I have argued that sexually explicit descriptions open up the possi-
bility of this encounter with otherness and that they do so alongside and arguably
as intertwined with the thrill of the new, the sensuality of literary language, the
“stirring of memory” and the invitation towards identification. This combination
of features perhaps lends to Adichie and Forna’s popular appeal. There is some
confluence here with the crosscultural sensuality of other novels shortlisted for
the Orange prize: Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows, Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-
English Dictionary for Lovers, and Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, for example.
The description of sensual and sympathetic personal relationships has certainly
lent to Adichie and Forna’s accessibility—the ease with which undergraduate
students seize upon these texts with fascination. But the sustained focus in both
texts on sex as synecdoche is also a radical aesthetic and feminist gesture.
NOTES
1. Kiran Desai remarks that The Memory of Love is “profoundly affecting” (Forna
2010, front cover). Margaret Forster says of Half of a Yellow Sun, “[R]arely have I felt so
there, in the middle of all that suffering” (Adichie 2007, front matter).
2. The case with Sierra Leonean literature is not so clear. Many of the internation-
ally consumed narratives about Sierra Leone in the last five years have focused on
the experiences of child soldiers (Jarrett-Macauley, Beah, Kamara). These novels and
memoirs tend to avoid sexually explicit descriptions, which sit uncomfortably with
conceptions of interrupted childhoods that the authors seek to depict.
3. In Sierra Leone, the number displaced women who had experienced war-related
sexual violence from 1991 to 2001 was as high as 64,000 (Vlachova 114).
4. Such incidents align with biosocial theories of rape, which stress both “bio-
logical drives” to rape women of peak physical attractiveness and “sociocultural
consideration[s],” which are helpful for understanding the immense variation in rape
descriptions (Gottschall 134).
5. For an exploration of the melancholic in relation to postcolonial literatures, see
Durrant.
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Sex as Synecdoche: Intimate Languages of Violence in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of

a Yellow Sun and Aminatta Forna's The Memory of Love

• REsearch in african literatures, Vol. 43, No. 2 (Summer 2012). © 2012 •

the “powerful thrust of the novel is dissipated by a melodramatic domestic plot

GROUP ACTS AND VIOLATIONS

PROTESTING SEXUAL VIOLENCE

There is no sense of shame in such descriptions. Instead, what is foregrounded is

LANGUAGES OF THE BODY

stigma surrounding sexual violence. In addition, as I began to intimate above, it

remains one of love. The humanity of descriptions of Nenebah’s nipple, of Kai’s

SENSUALITY, LOSS AND CODES OF MEMORY

The intense pain of grief remains linguistically unarticulated in the moment—

It is in [the] apprehension of otherness and in the demands it makes that the

the-african-short-story-edited-by-helon-habila-2377139.html. Accessed 26 Jan.

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