Postwar Trauma and Memory in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun

This study examines the representation of postwar trauma and collective memory in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun, analysing how the novel constructs the Biafran war as an event whose traumatic meaning continues to be processed and contested in contemporary Igbo and Nigerian cultural consciousness. The Biafran war of 1967 to 1970 remains one of Nigeria's defining national traumas, and its relative absence from official national memory contrasts sharply with its persistent and often painful presence in Igbo cultural life, making Adichie's literary engagement with the war a culturally significant act of memory work. The study applies trauma theory and theories of postmemory to a close reading of the novel, examining the formal strategies through which Adichie represents the disruption of individual identity and communal life by wartime violence. Analysis focuses on the novel's dual narrative temporality, the use of the character Richard as an outsider witness to Biafran suffering, and the recurring motif of books and intellectual life as fragile containers of a culture under existential threat. Findings reveal that Adichie's narrative structure performs the fragmentation of trauma by repeatedly interrupting forward chronological progression with returns to the pre-war world, enacting the temporal disorientation characteristic of traumatic memory. The study argues that the novel constitutes a significant act of unofficial national mourning and historical recovery. Keywords: trauma, Biafran war, postmemory, Chimamanda Adichie, Nigerian fiction.