Creating a New Multicultural Frame: The Cinematographic Suppression of Half of a Yellow Sun

Abstract

In cinematic adaptations, the repression of most of the information in the source material can easily be misconstrued and quickly categorized as a result of the reductionist measures that cinematic adaptations of novels typically go through. I argue that in the case of the cinematic adaption of Chimamanda Adichie’s novel Half of a Yellow Sun, the suppression that pervades the production and the release of the film in Nigeria is more political than aesthetic. Not privileging literature over films, I reveal how the historical suppression of the Biafra story continues in the reduction of aspects of Adichie’s depiction of the Biafran War in the cinematic adaptation of Half of a Yellow Sun by the film’s producers, which perpetuates a tactical pattern of an incomplete representation that dates back to the Nigerian Civil War. The tenets and relevance of this project transcend Nigeria and its environs into a global landscape of discourses on war literature and its cinematic repression.