Half of a Yellow Sun by Ngozi Adichie Chimamanda

Author:Ngozi Adichie Chimamanda [Chimamanda, Ngozi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: prose_contemporary

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The blurred days crawled into one another. Olanna grasped for thoughts, for things to do. The first time Odenigbo came to her flat she was unsure whether to let him in. But he knocked and knocked and said, "Nkem, please open, biko, please open," until she did. She sat sipping some water while he told her that he had been drunk, that Amala had forced herself on him, that it had been a brief rash lust. Afterward, she told him to get out. It was grating that he remained self-assured enough to call what he had done a brief rash lust. She hated that expression and she hated the firmness of his tone the next time he came and said, "It meant nothing, nkem, nothing." What mattered to her was not what it meant but what had happened: his sleeping with his mother's village girl after only three weeks away from her. It seemed too easy, the way he had broken her trust. She decided to go to Kano because, if there was a place where she could think clearly, it was in Kano.

Her flight stopped first in Lagos, and as she sat waiting in the lounge a tall, thin woman hurried past. She stood up and was about to call out Kainene! when she realized it could not be. Kainene was darker-skinned than the woman and would never wear a green skirt with a red blouse. She wished so much that it were Kainene, though. They would sit next to each other and she would tell Kainene about Odenigbo and Kainene would say something clever and sarcastic and comforting all at once.

In Kano, Arize was furious.

"Wild animal from Abba. His rotten penis will fall off soon. Doesn't he know he should wake up every morning and kneel down and thank his God that you looked at him at all?" she said, while showing Olanna sketches of bouffant wedding gowns. Nnakwanze had finally proposed. Olanna looked at the drawings. She thought them all to be ugly and overdesigned, but she was so pleased by the rage felt on her behalf that she pointed at one of them and murmured, "O maka. It's lovely."

Aunty Ifeka said nothing about Odenigbo until a few days had passed. Olanna was sitting on the veranda with her; the sun was fierce and the zinc awning crackled as if in protest. But it was cooler here than in the smoke-filled kitchen, where three neighbors were cooking at the same time. Olanna fanned herself with a small raffia mat. Two women were standing near the gate, one shouting in Igbo-"I said you will give me my money today! Tata! Today, not tomorrow! You heard me say so because I did not speak with water in my mouth!"-while the other made pleading gestures with her hands and glanced skyward.

"How are you?" Aunty Ifeka asked. She was stirring a doughy paste of ground beans in a mortar.

"I'm fine, Aunty. I'm finer for being here."

Aunty Ifeka reached inside the paste to pick out a small black insect.

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