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• Sunday, June 17th, 2012

Lloyd Jones was born in Lower Hutt in the Wellington region of New Zealand in 1955. He studied at Hutt Valley High School and Victoria University in Wellington. In 2009 he received an honorary doctorate from Victoria University and has worked as a journalist and a consultant as well as a writer.

In 1989 he received the Meridian Energy Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellowship, one of New Zealand’s long-standing and prestigious literary awards.

Lloyd Jones has written several novels, short stories, children’s books and non fiction. Mister Pip, which is part of post-colonial literature, was published in 2006. It is Lloyd Jones’ best-selling novel and the one that made him internationally known. It won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, Overall Winner, Best Book and was short-listed in 2007 for the Man Booker Prize for fiction. It also won the Kiriyama Prize and the Montana Medal for fiction the same year. It has been adapted into a feature film which will be released later in 2012. Lloyd Jones now lives in Wellington, New Zealand.

The story of Mister Pip has an historical background as it relates the 1990’s Bougainville blockade by Papua New Guinea, Bougainville being rich in copper. This was an event which led to a civil war covered by Lloyd Jones who was then a journalist.

The novel starts in the early 1990’s. The narrator is the thirteen-year-old black girl, Matilda Laimo, the main character in the novel, who lives with her devout mother Dolores in a shack in Bougainville, a small tropical island in the South Pacific and a province of Papua New Guinea. The island is torn by civil war between the befuddled rebel forces called the Rambos and the atrociously inhuman government soldiers, called the Redskins. Matilda’s father, who was out of a job due to the closing down of the copper mines, left the island a few years before the blockade like several natives. He was hired to work for a mining company in Townsville, Australia and his wife Dolores and daughter Matilda were hoping to join him later but were held back by the imposed blockade.

Matilda is a child lacking paternal presence and support in her teenage life. She has a difficult relationship with her mother whom she loves and feels loyal to despite being ashamed of her reasoning, behaviour and difficulty understanding simple things.

In order to escape the atrocious reality and the horror of war surrounding them, Matilda and the other children allow themselves to be transported by the novel, Great Expectations, into an imaginary Dickensian world of 19th century Victorian England. Thanks to Mr Watts’ astuteness in transmitting his great admiration for Charles Dickens to his pupils, he takes pleasure in reading them a chapter from this well known novel every day.

Matilda says: “He kept reading and we kept listening” and when “the flow of words had ended, slowly we stirred back into our bodies and our lives”. Mr Watts sums it all up in these few words: “A person entranced by a book simply forgets to breathe. The house can catch alight and a reader deep in a book will not look up until the wallpaper is in flames. For me, Matilda, Great Expectations is such a book”.

The children were mostly fascinated by the main character, the orphan teenager, Pip, whom they could relate to. Matilda was especially under Pip’s spell. She was writing his name in the sand and with shells on the beach. Little did she know at the time that her deed would provoke the savage butchering of Mr Watts, followed by her mother’s by the Redskins who thought that Pip was one of the rebels concealed by the natives. A gruesome tragedy to intensify the abhorrent deeds carried out during these civil wars. As Lloyd Jones says about the Bougainville blockade: “the most unspeakable things happened without once raising the ire of the outside world”. Starting from 1989 and for ten years, the island was completely cut off from the world.

The skinny, solitary, Mr Watts or Pop-Eye, as everybody calls him in the village because of his protruding eyes, “eyes that wanted to leave his face”, is the baffling, self proclaimed teacher. After all the teachers leave the island, he is the only white person who remains despite the civil war, because of his native black wife, Grace, whom he met in New Zealand while she was studying dentistry and followed her home. They both live in the old mission house. Mr Watts is from New Zealand and is a bizarre, elusive, mysterious person. Matilda says: “Mr Dickens was easier to understand than Mr Watts” who “was whatever he needed to be”, a teacher, a magician, a clown with a red nose and ends-up being a saviour for the community when the Redskins needed a scapegoat to slaughter and set as an example.

Later in the novel, Matilda reads Great Expectations and discovers that Mr Watts had read his own version of the novel, rather than reading the original text to the children. “His Pacific version of Great Expectations” as she calls it, or “Pip in the Pacific” as he had named it a few years earlier, proving his gift as a story teller. He shows this talent when he gathers the whole community to recount his own story and keep them all mesmerized by his recounting: “On hearing Mr Watts’ voice the creatures shut up as well. Even the trees listened. And the old women too and with the respect they once reserved for prayer… And the Rambos were as enthralled as the rest of us”.

The author treats several powerful themes in his novel and enhances his story with his description of the natives’ naive characters, their desperation mixed with a feeling of helplessness, their uncomplicated basic existence, living of picked fruit and fishing, their gullibility, their pidgin Bible, their superstitions and their simplistic life and beliefs and their power of endurance. Nature is portrayed in a bright, colourful, enchanting way which contrasts with the sombre subject of loss and atrocious bloodshed. The once peaceful, beautiful, tropical island becomes a nightmare place.

A fascinating, original, thought provoking, poignant and captivating novel inside another novel, demonstrating the power of imagination and the effect of literature on people’s lives and how it can be an essential tool providing escapism and survival, whereby fiction and reality intertwine.

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Category: Book Reviews  | One Comment
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• Monday, September 28th, 2009

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born in Enugu, Nigeria in 1977 from Igbo parents. She is the fifth of six siblings. Her father worked as first professor of statistics, then became a deputy vice-chancellor at the University of Nigeria in Nsukka where her mother also worked as a first woman registrar.

After successfully completing her secondary education, Adichie briefly studied medicine and pharmacy at the University of Nigeria. She obtained a scholarship to study communication at Drexel in Philadelphia for two years. Afterward she moved to Eastern Connecticut State University, to be near her sister who lived there and continued studying communication and political science.

She obtained a degree in 2001, which was complemented by a master degree in Creative Writing at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. She also obtained an MA in African Studies from Yale University in 2008. Adichie lives between Nigeria and the U.S.A. where she teaches creative writing.

Adichie has to date written three novels:
Purple Hibiscus, published in 2003 was short-listed for the 2004 Orange Fiction prize and long-listed for the Booker Prize. It was awarded the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for First Book and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award.
Half of a Yellow Sun was published in 2006 and was awarded the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2007.
The Thing Around Your Neck was published in June 2009.

She also participated with a short story in “One World: A global anthology…” which was published in May 2009.

The title of Half of a Yellow Sun refers to the Biafran flag emblem, a sun halfway through rising. The story is set in the 1960s in southeastern Nigeria. It is a fictitious story based on fact, before, during and briefly after the three-year Nigerian-Biafran war, which lasted from 1967 to 1970, between the Muslim Hausa-Fulani tribe from the north and the Christian Igbo tribe from the south east and also the Yoruba tribe: An armed conflict that was triggered due to economic, ethnic, cultural and religious tensions and due to the fragile balance and enmity between the different tribes.

The novel is divided into four parts, relating the events between the early and late sixties switching, in alternation, back and forth in time.

Olanna and Kainene, the Igbo privileged twin sisters, who come from a wealthy and powerful family, are obliged to survive through hardship and starvation. Although twins and well educated, they are very different in every way, not only in looks but also in mentality and in their life expectations. Olanna is an intellectual, while Kainene is a businesswoman, who successfully runs the family affairs.

The third main character, is Ugwu, the thirteen-year-old hard working, ambitious and highly intelligent houseboy, inspired in part by Mellitus, who was working as a houseboy for Adichie’s parents during the war. The other part was inspired by Fide, who was the houseboy when Adichie was growing up.

There is also the passionate, ideological professor Odenigbo, the maths lecturer at the university of Nsukka and Olanna’s partner, who becomes her husband later in the story. He is politically and radically minded, he holds an intellectual salon in his house with his colleagues, where they debate about the day to day problems Nigeria is facing and the post-colonial steps that should be taken.

The fifth character is the English expatriate writer, Richard Churchill who is Kainene’s lover. Richard loves the country, the culture and has the feeling of belonging to the Igbo tribe.

The story evolves around these five lively, interwoven, Igbo characters who are resilient to their fate and don’t convey any self pity.

Half of a Yellow Sun is a deeply moving novel with many themes : The African culture, the Biafran war with its violence, harshness, famine and oppression. It also depicts dignity, love, hatred, tribal loyalty and ethnic allegiance, but also human failure and hope among family members.

Through her innate gift as a storyteller, her compassion and her four-year effort of searching and writing the book that she always wanted to write, Adichie succeeds in producing Half of a Yellow Sun in memory of her grand-parents, whom she never saw and who died during the war, before she was born.

In her novel, Adichie takes her readers to an emotionally haunting, heartfelt and profound scenes of the sixties in a complex Nigeria, which had to suffer a brutal and savage civil war, like many other African countries are suffering even today. Adichie says in one of her interviews that : “many of the issues that led to the war remain unresolved today”.

The novel ends on a very poignant and sad note, the title of Ugwu’s written book about the Nigerian-Biafran war : “The World was Silent When We Died”.