Trauma and the Postcolonial Global South: A Study of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun

Abstract

This article examines how Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun represents collective trauma in the postcolonial Global South through a focused framework that joins Frantz Fanon’s concept of colonial psychic violence with Stef Craps’s critique of Eurocentric trauma theory. The study responds to the tendency in trauma studies to privilege individualized and event-centered models of injury that do not adequately explain forms of suffering produced by colonial history, civil war, social dislocation, hunger, silence, and fractured nationhood. Using qualitative textual analysis, the article reads the novel as a layered account of historically rooted trauma rather than as a narrative of isolated psychological shock. An analytical dataset of eighteen coded scene-units was used to organize the reading around narrative phase, trauma trigger, representation mode, embodiment, displacement, memory, and postcolonial issue. The results show that the novel distributes trauma across the entire narrative arc, though the war phase carries the heaviest burden of coded injury. Trauma appears as both collective and intimate, and it is repeatedly mediated through displacement, attritional deprivation, compromised masculinity, gendered harm, broken domesticity, and unresolved mourning. The coding pattern indicates that the novel stores injury in fragmented memory more often than in explicit declaration, while bodily suffering is frequently rendered through depletion and interruption rather than spectacle alone. The article argues that Adichie’s narrative challenges narrow Western assumptions about trauma by showing that postcolonial suffering is cumulative, historically sedimented, spatially mobile, and socially transmitted. It also argues that narration itself becomes a limited but meaningful practice of survival, archive, and ethical witness in the aftermath of violence.

Keywords: Trauma, Postcolonial Literature, Global South, Half Of a Yellow Sun, Frantz Fanon, Stef Craps, Biafra, Memory.