FEMALE AUTHORSHIP, HISTORICAL MEMORY AND THE RECOVERY OF MARGINAL MEMORY IN ADICHIE'S HALF OF A YELLOW SUN AND SYLVESTER'S LONG SHADOWS

Abstract

This study comparatively examines Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun and Mnguember Vicky Sylvester's Long Shadows with the aim of exploring how Nigerian fiction authored by women recovers marginalised histories and challenges dominant historical narratives. The study argues that gender shapes not only who narrates war but how: that women writing about conflict consistently foreground civilian suffering, domestic loss, cultural memory, and the endurance of ordinary lives in ways that male-dominated war literature has too often overlooked. The study addresses the problem of historical exclusion in Nigerian historiography, particularly the marginalisation of minority experiences and civilian voices during the military coups of 1966, the Nigerian Civil War (1967–1970), and the Tiv uprisings of 1960–1964. The research is anchored in New Historicist theory, drawing specifically on Greenblatt’s concept of the circulation of social energy — the idea that literary texts participate in reproducing, contesting, and transforming historical understanding — and on the New Historicist insistence that history is a contested field of multiple competing perspectives rather than a single authoritative account. Employing a qualitative comparative textual analysis, the study examines narrative strategies, characterisation, symbolism, oral traditions, irony, and representations of memory and trauma in the two novels. Findings reveal that Half of a Yellow Sun reconstructs the Igbo-Biafran experience through multiperspectival narration, realism, cultural memory, and proverb, thereby exposing the human cost of war often obscured by official accounts. Similarly, Long Shadows recovers the neglected history of the Tiv uprisings through a hybrid narrative structure that combines oral tradition, symbolism, irony, and psychological realism to foreground the experiences of a historically marginalised community. The study further finds that both novels function as counter-historical narratives that preserve suppressed memories, challenge official versions of national history, and amplify voices excluded from dominant discourse. The article concludes that the two texts constitute important literary interventions in Nigeria’s historical memory, demonstrating that female authorship enables a distinctive mode of historical reconstruction — one that centres the domestic, the communal, and the culturally intimate — and that restoring women’s perspectives to the narration of war and political violence is both a scholarly responsibility and a genuine critical enrichment.