A “A Knot in the Chest”: The Somatic Experience of Displacement and Loss in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun

Abstract

This paper analyzes Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun through the lens of trauma and embodiment. The focus is on how physical sensations and bodily metaphors convey experiences of war, displacement, and grief. Drawing on the trauma theory of Caruth, Herman, van der Kolk, and embodiment theory, this analysis highlights the use of visceral imagery and the human body to represent psychological trauma. Close reading and qualitative textual analysis were performed to extract key takeaway passages from the novel. For example, Ugwu’s wounds and thirst, Olanna’s panic symptoms, and the sensory richness of crisis everyday life present somatic experiences of psychological trauma. For instance, the bodies of Ugwu and Olanna became living repositories of coerced violence, and they also created trauma in their post-war life. Olanna took too much time to recover from her panic attacks caused by the horror of the war. Ugwu also experienced physical abuse and was wounded at the end of the war. Olanna helped and pampered him to recover from the traumatic experiences. Adichie’s use of these embodied depictions deepens empathy and underscores the political stakes of the Nigerian Civil War. Through the lens of the somatic approach to Half of a Yellow Sun, this article demonstrates how the trauma of war is etched on the body, which has ramifications for comprehending cultural memory and postcolonial healing of the body, the bodies that survived, who perished, and who contributed to the agony of the conflict. They contend that the somatic portrayal of trauma serves as a kind of testimony that is far more effective than the traditional modes of historical narration. The body asserts that the paper is both witness and archive; it makes collective suffering in the context of the recent Nigerian Civil War part of the private sphere, not the public.