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Embodied Genealogies And Gendered Violence In Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Writing, Antonio Simoes Da Silva

Tony Simoes da Silva

This essay examines two recent novels by the Nigerian writer, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie,Purple Hibiscus ([2003] 2005) andHalf a YellowSun (2006), placing themfirst in a dialogue with each other, and more broadly with selected Nigerian writing on the Biafra conflict. Arguing with Adesanmi that Adichie belongs to a ‘third generation’ of African literary work, it traces the novels’ work of historical revisionism through gendered and embodied discourses of pain and violence. Adichie returns the reader to an aesthetics of excess firmly grounded on potently disturbing images of the ‘body in pain’, in Elaine Scarry’s memorable phrase (1983): the battered, bruised and …