Epistemic Violence and Familial Archives as Sources of History
This is an exploration of the themes in the context of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun
I wrote this essay for as a term paper for my Voices in the Archives module during my Masters in Creative and Critical Writing. It also includes a piece of fiction that I wrote for the module. (It just happened to be the perfect segue from my review of Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.)
Introduction:
Half of a Yellow Sun (Adichie, 2006) was acclaimed Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s attempt to write historical fiction about the Biafran war, a civil war between Nigeria and the secessionist Republic of Biafra, who declared independence from Nigeria in 1967. The novel is a haunting tale that follows three characters. There is thirteen-year-old Ugwu, an Igbo boy employed as a houseboy by a revolutionary professor, Odenigbo. Next is Olanna, a wealthy Nigerian who moves in with Odenigbo, and Richard, a white Englishman living in Nigeria who falls in love with Olanna’s twin Kainene, in the wake of the devastating violence and trauma of the struggle for free Biafra.
Although Adichie’s family was directly affected by the war, her parents were fighters in the war and both her grandfathers died in refugee camps after the struggle; she found it very difficult to find information when she researched her novel (BBC, 2014). The Biafran war represented the political, cultural and socio-economic conflicts between the Igbo ethnic group and the Hausa-Fulani tribe, the interests of whom were most represented in the federal government. These tensions existed before the formal decolonisation of Nigeria by the United Kingdom, and the roots of the conflict can be traced back to the fact that the colonists created the country to serve imperial interests (Amadi, 2007).
“...my point is that the only authentic identity for the African is the tribe...I am Nigerian because a white man created Nigeria and gave me that identity. I am black because the white man constructed black to be as different as possible from his white. But I was Igbo before the white man came.” (Adichie, 2006, p.p. 34-35)
Along with the Vietnam War, the Biafran War was the first to be televised, with tragic images of the massacres and starving, malnourished children reaching a predominantly Western audience. However, the Nigerian government has always insisted that a hostile international press has grossly exaggerated the stories of starvation and death. Instead, they want to bury the stories since, backed by the British and US government, they want to portray the idea that a united Nigeria is sacrosanct (Meisler, 1969). Therefore, Adichie faced hurdles while researching her novel due to an intentional gatekeeping of information. Gaps exist in official records and authorities have systematically silenced testimonies by victims about the violence that occurred.
As a result, Adichie had to rely on her family’s lived experiences. However, this also came with its own set of problems. “While I think it is wrong, I do not think it is terribly surprising that I did not learn very much about Nigeria (and the Biafran war) from school and growing up as the daughter of people who survived the war… and were deeply wounded by that war I did not know very much either because they did not really talk about it,” she says (BBC, 2014).
“Just retelling the trauma may be re-traumatising” (Sunseri, 2020). Although they may be part of family legacies and archives, it is often too difficult to discuss stories about traumatic events. Using them as a source of research can run the risk of doing more damage than the benefits of giving the marginalised groups a voice. The ethics involved, therefore, are tricky. However, most cannot escape these stories because they are often part of the legacy that families pass on. Conflict-related trauma often results in transgenerational trauma. It affects how individuals understand, cope with and heal from trauma, consequently impacting the next generation (King-White, 2022).
Similarly, in the Indian context, while the impact of the partition of Punjab is well-represented in the mainstream media and official records have concrete numbers of casualties resulting from it, the same cannot be said about the impact of the Bengal famine and partition. While the Government of India has worked extensively to spread awareness about the partition in the North by creating museums and memorials, no such authorised information exists about the violent and tragic history of the East. “There’s a lot of oral history, but there aren’t as many official files, and what official files do exist often remain classified” (Rani, 2018). Consequently, the only way to get any information about these tragedies is by turning to family members that have lived through them. However, culturally people in India are taught to suppress these stories due to a stigma attached to mental health struggles. This silence and lack of acknowledgement further the cyclical nature of transgenerational trauma.
In this essay, I will engage with Adichie’s attempt to confront the hurdles of epistemic violence and family archives while writing Half of a Yellow Sun. I will compare it with the circumstances in India concerning the tragic history of Bengal.
Epistemic Violence:
In her text, “Can the subaltern speak?” Gayatri Spivak (1988) introduces epistemic violence as a way of silencing the stories of marginalised groups, especially in instances where knowledge and stories are dismissed because the alternative, often Western in her study, narratives are held in higher esteem. Due to this, local and provincial knowledge is disappearing since the most common method of executing epistemic violence damages a group’s ability to speak or be heard. Epistemic violence is central to the lives of marginalised societies because it affects their epistemic exchanges and creates an imbalance in societal frameworks (Perez, 2019). However, this violence is not as spectacular as other forms used to suppress marginalised groups. Thus, any discourse about epistemic violence is virtually missing from the social agenda.
Epistemic violence can be an effective tool to further a feeling of Otherness and fester a sense of community that looks at society in binaries of ‘us’ versus ‘them’. Allie Bunch has classified epistemic violence into three distinct categories: discriminatory, testimonial and distributive. Firstly, discriminatory epistemic violence occurs through dehumanising the out-group when the in-group consider themselves superior. Therefore, leaving the Others out of media and historical narratives. Secondly, testimonial violence occurs when the out-group’s stories are discredited and ultimately silenced. For a successful linguistic exchange, any speaker requires being heard by the audience, and epistemic violence is the lack of that reciprocity (Dotson, 2011). Lastly, distributive epistemic violence is the refusal of education to and about the out-groups since the impact of epistemic violence often spills into spheres of life other than just epistemic matters (Bunch, 2015).
The three forms of epistemic violence together result in the complete Otherness of marginalised groups. The epistemic biases that stem from it get ingrained generationally. It can be reversed only when communities actively engage in non-oppressive forms of education, seek out the stifled narratives and provide a platform for them to reach a larger audience. However, for fear of threats to the existing power structures, the in-group fights to maintain the imbalance.
In Half of a Yellow Sun, Odenigbo, the radical, educated Professor tells his houseboy Ugwu, “Education is a priority! How can we resist exploitation if we don’t have the tools to understand exploitation?” (Adichie, 2006, p. 24). One of the significant reasons why marginalised groups find it difficult to fight the consequences of epistemic violence is that they are unaware of its existence. According to Adichie, the official records reflect the truth only from the perspective of the victors of the civil war (BBC, 2014). In her TED Talk, titled ‘The Danger of a Single Story’ (2009), Adichie speaks about being vulnerable to stories because they shape readers’ worldviews and perspectives. Therefore, when a population is exposed to only one kind of history in the national archives, records, and history textbooks, they get a partial idea of the truth. The truth about any conflict is made up of multiple stories. The whole picture can be painted only when all sides get an equal opportunity to be heard and understood.
Adichie’s use of heteroglossia in Half of a Yellow Sun gives us an all round view of the war from perspectives of people from different races, genders and socio-economic strata. The novel alternates between these perspectives but it is never disjointed because each character has something in common with the other: Olanna and Ugwu are both Igbo, Richard and Olanna both belong to a privileged class, and Ugwu and Richard both look at the world from the a writer’s lens, even though it is initially not evident in the case of Ugwu. What ties all three of them together is their feeling of being an outsider throughout the book. Thus, this novel can be held as an example of how multiple truths and viewpoints are the only way for us to get better insight into a conflict, which is possible if we explore familial archives and consider memory as a source of historical evidence.
Familial Archives and Historical Fiction:
The need for multiple perspectives, especially some that oppose the official narrative, can be met by using familial archives and lived experience testimonies during research. Marginalised groups preserve their stories through traditions of oral history, since they are often excluded from formal archives and lack the power to create their own. However, official records are considered to be more credible than the alternative sources. The education system, archives and our official records are inevitably affected by the biases of those who curate them. Decisions are made about which stories are included, and the personal experiences and history of those with power have a great impact on those decisions. These systems decide the stories that the audience is exposed to, and often represent only the side of the victor.
By using historical fiction instead of history to voice her family’s stories, Adichie gives them a face and makes them more accessible. “The no-man’s-land between fact and fantasy becomes a fertile territory, a place to explore and perhaps to change the relationship between our public history and our private lives.” (Margaronis, 2018) Fiction can then become an alternative source of information kept from audiences. Adichie’s novel, though historical fiction, provides us with an opposing voice and a context to the Biafran war we were deprived of.
In the novel, Ugwu acts as a reflection of the readers. Odenigbo encourages him to look for different sources of information to understand the colonial biases that exist. Ugwu goes through a transformation from reader to ultimately writer as he tries to come to terms with the impacts of the war and undergoes the most drastic transformation of all the characters. “For Half of a Yellow Sun, too, reading is transformational in how it provides vehicles for both the reader and Ugwu not only to understand and come to terms with the impacts of the war, but also to enter sympathetically into the lives and the pain of others,” (Boehmer, 2017).
In recent years, an abundance of historical fiction has emerged, especially from countries with a colonial past. However, the opposition to authorised narratives raises questions about the epistemological value of historical fiction. In the postcolonial world no single version of history can be considered as the truth and it is always subject to challenges. “Such controversy demonstrates the extent to which the past is a problem for postcolonial societies – one that shapes how literature is written and read, how novelists choose their subject matter, and how notions of historical truth intersect with aesthetic form,” (Dalley, 2014). In the fictional world of Half of a Yellow Sun, the book The World Was Silent When We Died fills in the gap left by epistemic violence by describing the political forces that resulted in the war and contextualises the pain endured by the characters, and the larger population. When it is revealed that Ugwu is the author of the book the novel has a full-circle ending. According to Kristie Dotson (2011), “Epistemic violence in testimony is a refusal, intentional or unintentional, of an audience to communicatively reciprocate a linguistic exchange owing to pernicious ignorance.” In this case pernicious ignorance stands for any ignorance that harms another person or set of persons. The audience and the writer both have an equally important role to play while dealing with this pernicious ignorance. The biggest question being: Who gets to tell these suppressed stories? This is why the moment at the end of the book when Richard, the representation of the white, colonial figure, gives the manuscript to Ugwu and it is revealed that he is the author it is such a strong statement for Adichie to make.
Context of Bengal:
Based on religion, the roughly drawn Radcliffe line divided the Indian subcontinent into Muslim-majority West Pakistan and East Pakistan, situated on either side of secular India. The effects of the partition were violent in the North. However, in the East, the consequences were long-lasting and continue to have a trickle effect on the politics of the land today. As part of the colonial idea of divide and rule, Bengal was partitioned multiple times, from 1905 to 1971, and this has resulted in cementing the feeling of Otherness between people who culturally and linguistically share many similarities (Banerji, 2022).
Today, even though the media talks about the porous nature of the border between the Indian state of West Bengal and Bangladesh, they ignore the deep-rooted reasons behind the porosity. Unlike its counterpart in the North, in 1947, the partition of Bengal did not see a clear divide in terms of religion. However, only some official records or government organisations attempt to understand these reasons. Over the years, testimonies by the people who have lived through these experiences have been discredited and silenced. As a result, the animosity between the two groups has also been passed to the next generation. In this case, historical fiction that represents these stifled narratives can be an effective tool to understand the history of the land and the current political scenario, in the same way that Half of a Yellow Sun contextualises Nigerian history.
Conclusion:
Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun makes no pretence of being a balanced narrative about the war. It gives us a deliberately one-sided view without going into details about the numbers and nature of the casualties. Instead, through this important piece of historical fiction she attempts to counter the epistemic violence that has silenced her family and the group of people she represents in her novel. The novel tells us how the characters felt and immerses us into the pain in their lives during that period of Nigerian history that is not spoken of. Therefore, it is a commendable attempt at preserving her family history while giving a voice to a marginalised out-group.
In a postcolonial world, it is important to contest every source that claims to provide the whole truth about any historical event. There needs to be a study of who is telling the story and consequently whose story is being silenced. While giving a platform to the silenced stories it is also important to weigh the pros and cons of dredging up the details of traumatic events, especially when it runs the risk of retraumatization. Still, it is essential that we acknowledge the important role that family memory plays in the quest for finding multiple perspectives.
Historical fiction is an effective tool to understand contested histories and contextualise them for the present. The advantage for this genre, especially in a postcolonial world, is that it humanises the tragedies of the past. Therefore, the murky history of Bengal can be understood better with historical fiction based on stories that are preserved by families and communities.
NOT HER LAND
CHAPTER 1
1935
By the time Aparna met Shona Pishi for the first time, she had already had one of the most challenging days of her life. Her nerves were a mess. Her heart was beating against her chest as it did after she challenged her brother to a race from the pond to the banyan tree in their courtyard. A thin sheen of sweat covered her brow, and her throat was parched enough that she could barely croak out her name when asked.
“Aparna,” she somehow managed to whisper.
“Will she show me her face? Or do I have to imagine it through that disgusting sari?”
Aparna almost whimpered at the elderly lady’s brusque tone. Her mother had warned her. Her in-laws were not going to pamper her. She had to develop a thick skin if she wanted to survive in the big house. She had to be ready to suffer through rude behaviour. But most importantly, she had to find her way into the good books of Shona Pishi, the formidable 80-year-old who single-handedly ran the household.
Her mother-in-law stepped in when her fingers shook too hard to pick up the veil that covered her face. She had spent the day being introduced to all the people who inhabited the house, but this was the first time she looked at any of them that was not tinted by the pale yellow of her sari.
Her mother-in-law had a sweet smile, but it was not reassuring because there was a hint of fear in her eyes when she stepped aside. Shona Pishi sat cross-legged on the four-poster bed. She was dressed in a white cotton sari, her uniform since the day she had lost her husband at 14. Her shorn hair formed a grey cap on her head. But instead of inciting a feeling of pity like the widowed daughter-in-law of Charandas next door, Shona Pishi’s hair added to her formidable nature.
Every inch of her face was wrinkled. Yet, if you looked carefully, you could see signs of beauty that had been lost to the years and grief. Aparna had heard rumours around town that Shona Pishi had been the town’s beauty when she was a young girl. People from faraway towns would come to the Rai Bahadur mansion with prospective grooms for her.
Any hint of long-lost beauty was erased when she opened her mouth to speak. Her face crumpled into a frown that showed disgust, “Chee chee chee! The only son of the Rai Bahadur family could not do better than this dark, skinny, ugly girl with a nose big enough for the local strays to take shelter in the rain?”
Tears pricked Aparna’s eyes, and she felt her lips quiver. Her mother had told her never to directly meet the eyes of anyone in the household, so she didn’t see Shona Pishi’s expression become darker.
“Look at the little Maharani. Crocodile tears at the ready. Come here!” said Shona Pishi. Her words dripped with disgust and derision. The accent differed from what Aparna had grown up talking and listening to. It was posh, the words much crisper, unlike her family and neighbours’ rounded vowels and lilting ends.
Aparna felt someone nudge her forward because her feet refused to acknowledge the command. Her knees shook as she took a few timid steps towards Shona Pishi’s bed and stood at what she considered a safe distance.
“Do you not understand Bangla, or do we have a deaf daughter-in-law? Come here!”
Aparna felt claw-like fingers wrap around her forearm and roughly pull her forward. A soft yelp escaped her lips even though she tried to control it. She stood so close to the older woman that she could feel her breath on her cheek. Still, Aparna resolutely kept her eyes on her feet. The prickly tears had turned to pools above her lashes, obstructing her view. She was scared of the moment one drop would escape and fall on the white bedsheet of Shona Pishi’s bed.
The fingers maintained their strong hold on her arm. They would definitely leave blue-green bruises on her skin. She felt another hand grab the veil that sat on her head now and pull it down. Exposing her head and hair was breaking another rule her mother had drilled into her head.
“A good wife and daughter-in-law keep her head covered all the time. Take it off only for your husband and no one else,” her mother had instructed her the night before. Many revelations had come her way the night before her wedding but even thinking about some of the scarier ones made breathing difficult.
Shona Pishi clucked her tongue, “Thin hair. She will be bald by the time she has her last child. This is the disadvantage of bringing a girl from a poor house into the family. No money to feed or clothe their child properly. I told you, get Adhiraj married to that girl from Kolkata. She would have come with trunk loads of jewels. What have you got?”
Aparna’s arm was yanked a couple of times. She had to press her lips together to stop herself from crying loudly as the tears streamed down her cheek. The others in the room stood quietly, afraid to say a word lest Shona Pishi’s spite was directed at them next.
“Girl, do you speak? Say something before I really give you something to cry about,” Shona Pishi spat out.
Aparna struggled to stop her voice from shaking. She could not muster more than a whispered, “Yes.”
“Meek. Weak. Brings nothing more than one gold chain and an earring. Let’s hope she is useful in the kitchen, or she will have to be sent back to the hovel she comes from.”
Aparna was pushed. She stumbled a few steps and then ran the others till she stood behind her mother-in-law, who wouldn’t be any protection against Shona Pishi’s wrath. Still, putting someone between her and the scary woman was nice. Her entire body felt weak. Nothing Shona Pishi had said was a lie. They were things she had heard whispered around town multiple times since the wedding had been announced. But they had never been spoken out loud to her, and she had never been addressed in a tone as hard as Shona Pishi’s.
Done with Aparna and the others in the room, Shona Pishi opened a silver box that revealed treasures beyond anything Aparna had ever seen. Gold necklaces lay entangled with each other. Anklets with ghungroos that tinkled at the slightest touch lay next to earrings that shone. Bangles that were thicker than Aparna’s wrist encircled rings with big stones. Shona Pishi rummaged through them, chewing on her bottom lip the entire time.
“Take this! It is better than anything you have probably seen in your life. Take care of it. One scratch and I’ll make you earn the money by working on the farms with the bulls,” Shona Pishi held out the most beautiful pair of anklets Aparna had seen.
They were delicate, the lightest ones in the silver box, with ghungroos disguised as dainty flowers. As Aparna extended her hand towards them, she was afraid that Shona Pishi would pull it away at the last moment and scold her for ever thinking she was worthy of something so pretty.
When she held it, afraid to even grab it tightly, she was surprised that no one in the room protested at her having it. She pulled it back and stared at it. The room was silent for a moment. No one knew what to do next.
Then with a loud thud, Shona Pishi closed the lid of the silver box, breaking the silence. “Are you going to stand here and gape at me for the rest of the day? No one has any work? Leave!” she commanded.
The people in the room scrambled out. Aparna felt her mother-in-law take her arm, and she was escorted out of the room the way her father escorted her the day she was caught stealing pears from the neighbour’s farm.
Aparna sent one last look towards Shona Pishi on her bed as they got out. Her heart thudded as her eyes met the startling grey eyes of the older woman for a flash before they turned the corner, and she was out of sight.
CHAPTER 2
1952
Some people believe that the weather on the day that a person is born is a prediction of the kind of individual they are going to be. Mild-mannered adults who live their lives according to the unspoken guidelines of society came into the world with merely a whimper on days that were neither too sunny nor too rainy. On days when everything shook due to violent lashings of rain, and the air was filled with the crackling of electricity, the babies who came screaming into the world would grow up to be individuals that would continue screaming at everything around them, pushing against boundaries and always on the verge of starting a revolution. If this logic were true, the day Kalpana came to the world would have been assaulted by hot winds. The kind that leaves you in a daze. The type of day when the sun could drill holes through your skin just by being strong. Only then would it have been an accurate prediction of her life.
But instead, Kalpana was born on a mild day in early February. A part of Calcutta was mourning about a man being elected to the parliament. In contrast, another part celebrated it as the most significant victory. Labourers were off to work, drinking boiled and re-boiled chai out of kulhads on street corners, while the Babus were at home eating a full meal of rice, dal, sabzi and macher jhol. The recently polished shoes of kids on their way to school steadily accumulated a thick layer of dust as they fumbled through the grime of the city. And in the small room, meant only for the delivery of babies and the recovery of a new mother, in the big Thakur Badi, Amna screamed as her mother’s strong hands kept her in place.
The midwife sat on her haunches between Amna’s legs as Kalpana’s wily legs made their way into the world. The mother’s screams were piercing through the otherwise soundless house, echoing in every corner and making the family members gathered in the main room, waiting for news, wince. The entire purpose of the room, separated from the rest of the house, was to keep all the dirty business of birth away from the rest of the family, especially the men. At the end of all of it, the baby was supposed to be brought, cleaned and wrapped to be shown off to them before being whisked off. But this was Amna they were talking about. The baby of their family. The youngest of three sisters.
When they had got her married to a man much more than twice her age at the age of 13, it had been a hit to the family. But that was the way things went. Girls got married and went away to live with their husbands. Then a year later, she returned, swollen with a child. The protrusion of her stomach was a rude surprise when paired with the spindly limbs she had yet to grow into. Another scream pierced through the halls, and Amna’s sisters grabbed each other for support. Having been through the same thing before themselves, they knew the unbelievable pain their younger sister was experiencing. A living thing was tearing out of her body, out of the most intimate, vulnerable part of the body, at an age where her body was not meant to accommodate that kind of pain.
But they also knew that despite the gruesomeness of the process, it was the most natural thing in the world. The birth of a child may not be a pretty thing, but a woman’s sheer ability to bring a living thing into the world was nothing less than a miracle. And Amna would forget all the pain and torture of the last 12 hours the minute she would hold that small child, the perfect child, in her arms. But Amna as she lay, propped up against her mother, drenched in sweat, had no such romantic thoughts about the baby. She hated the parasite that had taken over her life and body for the last nine months. She wanted to feel like her body was her own again, even if a strange man had more of a say on it than she did. Even if the strange man’s family now dictated what she could and couldn’t put into the body. The body would belong to her and not the creature she had felt swimming through her inside, pushing against her organs and making her feel like she had lost all control over her own body.
Even now, as another contraction pulsed through her, she arched up, unable to control her body’s reactions. The pain was searing. All she could think about was the pain. It took over every nerve, every inch of her body and gripped it in its endless torment. “Just a little more,” she heard her mother’s whisper fade compared to the scream that shot out of her mouth. She saw red behind her eyelids. On the next contraction, she pushed because her body left her no other option and the baby slipped out. As the child’s wails filled the room, she sagged against her mother. She felt like the baby in the room who needed her mother’s comforting hug. She sighed with relief as her mother’s cold fingers brushed away the hair stuck to her forehead with sweat. She could feel her eyes closing with fatigue and reassurance in the knowledge that the thing in her stomach was out.
“You have a beautiful girl,” said the midwife, pressing the blankets into her arms. The white blankets, faded with time and the births of several children before the one currently wrapped in it, did nothing to disguise the blood and gore covering every inch of the squalling thing. Amna recoiled at the prospect of holding the bundle that was supposed to be her child. She went deeper into her mother’s embrace as if the baby, going red in the face by the force of its screams, scared her. The midwife turned to the lady of the house with confusion reflected in her eyes. She had seen countless mothers wait breathlessly for the moment they got to hold the baby in their arms for the first time. Others were scared to hold the baby lest they hurt the tiny thing, but it was the first time she saw a mother look almost revulsed at the prospect of holding her own baby.
Amna felt her mother’s arms wrap around her own as she urged her to take the baby from the midwife. Her mother said, “This is your baby, Amna. Your child. She needs her mother.” Amna’s body was preparing for another rush of contractions, the brief moment of relief and calm that had come after the baby was pushed out had faded, and the pain was making its presence felt again. She wanted to scream, “I need my mother.” But the pain made it difficult for her to form words or protest when the midwife placed the baby on her chest. She looked into the eyes of the baby, who had finally stopped screaming but now whimpered with her eyes shut tight. There was no rush of unconditional love or maternal feeling in Amna. All there was a resignation to the idea that had only now struck her. The parasite may be out of her, but her body still did not belong to her entirely. The baby in her arms had a claim on it that she would never be able to outrun.