A SILENT SONG AND OTHER STORIES | 'GHOSTS'| CHIMAMANDA ADICHIE | THEMES | WAR◇| CORRUPTION ●| OTHERS

THEMES IN CHIMAMANDA ADICHIE'S 'GHOSTS' FROM THE ANTHOLOGY A SILENT SONG AND OTHER STORIES
1) WAR AND ITS EFFECTS
Through flashback, the story shines some light on the Biafran War. Ikenna Okoro, a colleague Professor of the narrator, James Nwoye's, is believed to have died during the evacuation and the ensuing occupation of Nsukka campus on July, 6th 1967.
The effects of the war include:
(i) Displacement of persons
On July, 6 1967, Nsukka is evacuated and the federal soldiers of Nigeria seeks to topple the occupation of Biafran soldiers. The narrator, James Nwoye, and his family ride in his Impala and are waves through the campus gates. The local villagers are walking along, hundreds of them, women with boxes on their heads and babies tied to their backs, barefoot children carrying bundles, men dragging bicycles, holding yams. (p.60)
(ii) Destruction of property
As the narrator, James Nwoye, and his wife, Ebere drive back to Nsukka, they are treated to a landscape of ruins, the blown-out roofs, houses that are riddled with holes that Ebere compares to Swiss Cheese (pg.62). On arrival to their house on Imoke street, they find their books charred on a pile in the front garden, under the umbrella tree. They find lumps of calcified feces in the bathtub strewn with the pages of Professor Nwoye's Mathematical annals, used as toilet papers, crusted smear blurring the formulas he had studied and taught. (p.61) Ebere's piano is gone, the narrator's graduation gown which he had worn to receive his first degree at Ibadan has been used to wipe something and now lies with ants crawling in and out, busy and oblivious of the narrator watching them. Photographs are ripped, their frames broken.
(iii) Trauma
War brings psychological torture to the survivors. When James Nwoye and his wife, Ebere, return from America, they are assigned a different house on Ezenezwe Street and for a long time,traumatized, they did not want to see the old house. They, therefore, avoided driving along the Imoke Street. (pg 61)
(iv) Death and killings
When Ikenna Okoro asks James Nwoye of his daughter, Zik, he says that war took Zik. (p.61). On the day of their evacuation from Nsukka, James Nwoye receive the tidings from a relative of Professor Ejike's. Nsukka has fallen the very day of evacuation and that two lecturers got killed. One of them is said to have argued with the federal soldiers before being shot. This, they conclude, is Ikenna Okoro. (p.60)
The dialogue between James Nwoye and Ikenna Okoro also lets us into the knowledge that a poet, Chris Okigbo, who the narrator pays a tribute of as a genius, star, colossus in the making, and one whose poetry moved them all including those in sciences who did not always understand it. (pg. 62)
As James Nwoye and his wife, Ebere, drive back to Nsukka, at the road that runs to Aguleri, Biafran soldiers stopped them and shoved a wounded soldier into their car; his blood dropped onto the backseat, and because the upholstery had a tear, soaked deep into the stuffing mingled with the very insides of their car. (pg. 62)
(v) Misinformation
During the war, the clear-cut channels of communication lack, thereby leaving room for innuendos and unverified messages and rumours. It is Profess Ejike's relative who bears the news of the fall of Nsukka as well as the death of the two lecturers who died at the height of Nsukka's fall. There seems to be implied the challenging of this information as the narrator asserts that many, like Ikenna Okoro, have had sand thrown to them in ascertaining whether they belong to the realm of the living or if they are ghosts. (pg 60)
(vii) Famine
Some people, saboteurs- or what the narrator calls the 'sabos' , betrayed the Biafran soldiers, the Biafran just cause, the Biafran nascent nation, in exchange for a safe passage across to Nigeria, to the salt, meat and cold water that the blockade kept the Biafrans from. (pg. 60)
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