Half of a Yellow Sun

"We all had a bit of a shock when we heard you were alive and at Emekuku Hospital -a good kind of shock, of course. Thank heavens there actually hadn't been a symbolic burial, although there was some sort of memorial service before Umuahia fell."

Ugwu's eyelids throbbed. "They said I was dead, sah?"

"Oh, yes, they did. It seems your battalion thought you had died during the operation."

Ugwu's eyes were closing and would not stay open when he forced them. Finally he got them open and Mr. Richard was looking down at him. "Who is Eberechi?"

"Sah?"

"You kept saying Eberechi."

"She is somebody I know, sah."

"In Umuahia?"

"Yes, sah."

Mr. Richard's eyes softened. 'And you don't know where she is now?"

"No, sah."

"Have you been wearing those clothes since you were wounded?"

"Yes, sah. The infantrymen gave me the trousers and shirt."

"You need a wash."

Ugwu smiled. "Yes, sah."

"Were you afraid?" Mr. Richard asked, after a while.

He shifted; the pain was everywhere and there was no comfortable position. "Afraid, sah?"

"Yes."

"Sometimes, sah." He paused. "I found a book at our camp. I was so sad and angry for the writer."

"What book was it?"

"The autobiography of a black American called Frederick Douglass."

Mister Richard wrote something down. "I shall use this anecdote in my book."

"You are writing a book."

"Yes."

"What is it about, sah?"

"The war, and what happened before, and how much should not have happened. It will be called The World Was Silent When We Died.'"

Later, Ugwu murmured the title to himself: The World Was Silent When We Died. It haunted him, filled him with shame. It made him think about that girl in the bar, her pinched face and the hate in her eyes as she lay on her back on the dirty floor.

Master and Ola

"Ugwu," Master said, shaking his head. "Ugwu."

Baby clung to his hand and refused to let go and Ugwu's whole life suddenly gathered in a lump in his throat, and he was sobbing and the tears hurt his eyes. He was angry with himself for crying, and later, as he recounted the story of what had happened to him, he spoke in a detached voice. He lied about how he had been conscripted; he said Pastor Ambrose had pleaded with him to help carry his sick sister to the herbalist's and he was on his way back when the soldiers caught him. He used words like enemy fire and Attack HQ with a casual coldness, as if to make up for his crying.

"And they told us you were dead," Ola

Ugwu stared at her.

"They said he was killed in action," Ola

Ugwu looked away. Her news provoked him. He felt angry with her for telling him what he did not want to hear.

"Too many people are dying," he said.

"It is what happens in war, too many people die," Ola

"Yes, mah."

He could not sit on one part of his buttocks and so, during the first few weeks in Orlu, he lay on his side. Ola

During the day he helped out at the refugee camp, and in the evenings he wrote. He sat under the flame tree and wrote in small careful letters on the sides of old newspapers, on some paper Kainene had done supply calculations on, on the back of an old calendar. He wrote a poem about people getting a buttocks rash after defecating in imported buckets, but it did not sound as lyrical as Okeoma's and he tore it up; then he wrote about a young woman with a perfect backside who pinched the neck of a young man and tore that up too.

Finally, he started to write about Aunty Arize's anonymous death in Kano and about Ola

"The lizards have become smarter. They run faster now and hide under blocks of cement," the boy who had climbed told Ugwu. They roasted and shared the lizard, shooing other children away. Later, the boy offered Ugwu a tiny bit of his stringy share. Ugwu thanked him and shook his head and realized that he would never be able to capture that child on paper, never be able to describe well enough the fear that dulled the eyes of mothers in the refugee camp when the bomber planes charged out of the sky. He would never be able to depict the very bleakness of bombing hungry people. But he tried, and the more he wrote the less he dreamed.

Ola

"Can you believe who is responsible for that small girl Urenwa's pregnancy?" Kainene asked, and Ugwu almost did not recognize her. Her eyes bulged out of her angular face, filled with rage and tears. "Can you believe it is Father Marcel?"

Ola

"Apparently I've been blind; she's not the only one," Kainene said. "He fucks most of them before he gives them the crayfish that I slave to get here!"

Later, Ugwu watched Kainene push at Father Marcel's chest with both hands, shouting into his face, shoving him so hard that Ugwu feared the man would fall. "Amosu! You devil!" Then she turned to Father Jude. "How could you stay here and let him spread the legs of starving girls? How will you account for this to your God? You both are leaving now, right now. I will take this to Ojukwu myself if I have to!"

There were tears ru

He listened to the conversations in the evenings, writing in his mind what he would later transfer to paper. It was mostly Kainene and Ola