The dynamics of historical memory is a subject that increasingly attracts the interest of many African writers who turn to fiction, not only to illuminate the nexus of history, memory and the contradictions of constructing collective identities but also to highlight the role of various forms of spatial morphologies, such as home, land, landscape and nation in representing, reordering or even subverting established spatial economies. Such a preoccupation is evident in Chimamanda Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun,an engagement with the politics of memory of the Nigerian-Biafra Civil War. Adopting a decolonial approach, this paper examines the intersections between power, subjectivity and the spatial order and their implications for narrating traumatic historiesin Adichie's text. I argue that Adichie's deployment of visual imagery, innovative narrative modes and Igbo cultural aesthetics through a nuanced interaction with spaces that characters inhabit and traverse, framing nonhierarchical social relations as the site of value and meaning.The novel thus challenges hegemonic national and transnational narratives about the war, privileging subjective memory and experiential perspectives in order to recuperate disenfranchised subjects. By bridging the vacuum between official history and victims' subjective memories, Half of a Yellow Sun invites readers to re-imagine memory as an important representational index that renders legible how subjects in crisis participate in the negotiations of space and identity.
