Craft Essay

A map of northern and southern Nigera from the UN.
|

Language Could Kill You: Adichie, Code-Switching & the Biafran War

Bye.v. de cleyre

  Language plays a crucial role throughout Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novels, but nowhere is it more decisive than in the author’s second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun. Written against the backdrop of the Biafran War, two wealthy sisters return from England to a nation on the cusp of revolution and choose two different paths:…

Daily Details Made Monumental
| |

Daily Details Made Monumental

Bye.v. de cleyre

Exterior details lend themselves to the interior landscape of a character or narrator. What one chooses to notice, how one describes an object, says more about the speaker than it does about that thing. A character who spends a whole paragraph noticing someone’s unwashed, unkempt hair tells the reader that hygiene is an obsession. The…