Intertextuality and influence: Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah (1987) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (2006)

Abstract

This article explores the apparent influence of Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah on Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s award-winning second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, with regard to the literary re-historicization of the Nigerian Civil War, the representation of Biafra and the renegotiation of post-independence Nigerian nationalism. It foregrounds several compelling intertextual links – stylistic and ideological – between the two works, and argues that Adichie’s novel echoes, complements and transforms aspects of Achebe’s thematization of post-independence and post-civil war Nigerian nationalism. The article seeks to expand our understanding of the evolution of literary renegotiations of nationhood across the “generations” of Nigerian writing represented by Achebe and Adichie. It also highlights the specific ways in which the works of both writers might be linked.

Keywords:

• Intertextuality
• influence
• Chinua Achebe
• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
• Nigerian literature
• African literature

Notes

1. Parallels have been drawn between the social symbolism of the character of Eugene Achike and the disintegration of his family in Purple Hibiscus and those of Okonkwo and the Umuofia clan in Things Fall Apart (Achebe 1958; see Hewett 2005; Andrade 2011; Ogwude 2011). A comprehensive review of the literature on the affiliations between Achebe and Adichie is not, however, the focus of the present study.

2. Similarly, Boehmer (2009) has compared the “textual about-turn” regarding the authorship of the book within a book (“The Book”) in Half of a Yellow Sun with that of the book which the colonial district commissioner intends to write at the end of Things Fall Apart. She notes that the anti-colonial twist in Half of a Yellow Sun can be understood as an inversion of the “colonizing twist” in Things Fall Apart (148). See also Whittaker (2011, 107–117).

3. He cites South African Alex La La Guma’s (1962) novella A Walk in the Night and Ghana’s Ayi Kwei Armah’s (1968) novel The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born as examples of such a vertical link between texts/writers within African literatures.

4. Jonathan Culler (1976, 1381), for example, rejects Bloom’s position that the existence of “source texts” by precursor writers are a necessary condition for exploring intertextuality.

5. The periodization of Nigerian writing into three generations is the subject of lively debates that are outside the scope of this article (see Adesanmi and Dunton 2005, 2008; Garuba 2005; Dalley 2013; Akpome 2016). The notion of “generations” is used here for convenience.