Synmemory: civil war victimhood and the balance of tales in Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun and Habila’s Measuring Time

This paper proposes the concept of synmemory as a response to the implication of what Edward Said describes as “theoretical closure” for mainstream memory studies that privilege victimhood exclusively from the perspective of the vanquished. Synmemory is defined here as the synthesisation of antagonistic memories to form a traumatic whole. The paper argues that because victory, especially in war and other violent conflicts, is not absolute, synmemory invites us to consider in comparative terms the fusion of victimhood from both ends of a hostile divide in order to affirm the inherence of victimhood in instances of victory. The paper reads Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) and Habila’s Measuring Time (2007) as a set of twin narratives against the recollection of victimhood in the Nigerian Civil War. It contends that, rather than seeing such comparison as insurrectionary about the reception of Igbo and Biafra suffering in the war, the approach facilitates an understanding of Habila’s tragic vision about the parallel suffering and loss in Northern Nigeria. The paper also shows how constant violent irruptions in Northern Nigeria continue to underscore the region’s continual victimhood in the wake of the war and illustrate how aggressor victimhood can linger longer than is ordinarily envisaged.