Half of a Yellow Sun Chapter 2: Olanna

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Chapter 2 essay: Olanna Olanna has a very distant relationship with her immediate family. She is aware of their superficiality, and the shallow way they live their life. The time she spends at her parents’ house in Lagos is a direct contrast to that spent at her Uncle Mbaezi’s house in Kano, where she feels a “lucid peace”. This is probably because she is not constantly- even if it is subtly- sexualized, as she is by her parents. The contrasts start between the two houses when “Kainene calls their rooms flats”. Later when Olanna visits her relatives we are aware that “she no longer protested when Uncle Mbaezi and Aunty Ifeka slept on mats, next to the many relatives who always seemed to be staying with them, so that she could have their bed.” Apart from highlighting the difference between the two houses, this contrast is a portrayal of the extreme social diversity that existed at the time. These glimpses of the disparity that prevailed at the time are shown to us by Adiche to foreshadow the coming violence and give reason to it. Olanna realises how emotionless the relationship between her and her parents is, and how every decision that is made is in the hopes of a social or financial earning. Her mother only displays affection towards her daughter to promote her social image, like when she “pulled her close as a photographer approached.” Her mother is caught up in all the glitz and glam of Lagos life, that she is not aware of what she should really be valuing. Her mother’s relationship with her father is also strained, as it was most probably a marriage of convenience, since we learn that Olanna’s mother did not come from a privileged background. Olanna realises the superficiality of their relationship, as when she is at her Uncle’s house she says “the artificiality of her parents’ relationship always seemed harder, more shaming, when she was here in Kano.”
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