Book Review
Oseloka Obaze*
Wednesday November 30, 2005
Beasts of No Nation
Uzodinma Iweala
(ISBN: -13 978-0-06-079867-3; HarperCollins Publishers, New York, NY, 2005; pp. 142; Price, $$16.95)
Available at: http://www.harpercollins.com and http://www.barnesandnobles.com
“All we are knowing is that before the war we are children and now we are not”.
Uzodinma Iweala's Beasts of No Nation derives its title from a coinage made famous by Afrobeat King Fela Anikulapo-Kuti in his popular critical song of the same title. This debut novel about children in armed conflict has striking parallels with Fela’s song for its social commentary and poignancy.
The book is about the egregiousness of allowing the most valuable asset of our humanity –children- to be sucked into the horrors of war. It is about lost innocence and a children’s story replete with horrors and realities of contemporary African politics and the destructive consequences of its unending civil strife.
Just as it began, Iweala’s book ends with a whimper, “And I am saying to her, fine. I am all this thing. I am all this thing, but I am also having mother once, and she is loving me”.
What the end does not capture, is the torment and conflicting emotions embedded in this pint sized but powerful book. And neither does the end capture the blood-soaked reality of children caught in the vortex of armed conflict, of which cause they are none the wiser.
This book is just as much about lost innocence as it is about failed societies and their decrepit values. Child soldiers, their hellish lives and the mayhem they cause on the African continent is no longer an aberration. Anyone lucky enough to have been shielded from this gory reality needs to pick up this book for some lessons learned- “All we are knowing is that before the war we are children and now we are not”.
Using with great dexterity a mix of refined Pidgin English, truncated syntax, and a flourish of nuanced and flowing style befitting of his Harvard pedigree, Iweala entraps the reader, as if one is entranced on a vivid life-sized play, which unfolds in a macabre fashion. The slanted reportage form, coming as it were from an innocent but transformed child adds vigor and panache to the storytelling. This is clearly a script cleverly written from an insider’s perspective or wealth of research, but it is invariably the handiness of Iweala's language that gives this debut work of fiction its powerful enchantment and unquestionable originality.
Set in an unstated war ravaged country in West Africa (There are many from Sierra Leone to Liberia) the lead character, a teenage boy Agu (Nigerian?), is conscripted – indeed kidnapped- into the ranks of a guerrilla unit as the drums of war engulfed his homestead. Having lost his father to another set of brigands, and hunted incessantly by that reality, from which he had narrowly escaped, Agu elects to survive by the laws of the jungle and the conventional wisdom of beat them or join them after the rest of his family had been evacuated by the UN. But his youth renders him inescapably susceptible to the machinations and dodgy, yet protective nature of his new commander. This was by itself a recipe for disaster. And so the miseducation of Agu and boys of his kind begins that soon enough, the victim become the oppressor as Agu rehashes the wickedness visited on his father by taking on the wicked ways of war and the seemingly normal tendency to commit remorseless atrocities, if that was indeed the only way to stay alive and survive the vicissitude of a war without norms.
Iweala has certainly
drawn from the richness of the homeland of his ancestors in writing this book.
Born well after the Biafran war, he must have tapped richly into the residual
tales from his family about that gory civil war in which young lads were
abducted from their defenseless parents and from refugee camps and deployed as
spies (Boys Company) into enemy camps on reconnaissance missions. In reality,
however, this work is a poignant reminder of the collective failure of societies
to protect children from the scourge of war. It is also about the mindlessness
of combatants to win every battle at all cost, even if it means the annihilation
of pubescent broods, who in seeking out to kill, become themselves easy targets
of friends and foes alike.
Beasts of No Nation in essence, straddles Fredrick Forsythe’s Dogs of War while mimicking of Milton’s Paradise Lost. It is a tug of war, in which the combatants and not just the janjaweed-type militants exist in a restive environment and must contend with the drag between rationality and foolishness, reason against futility and abnormality against spirituality. How else does one contemplate and indeed explain, the transformation of an otherwise loving, bookish boy reared by a Christian mother into a zombie, capable of audacious mayhem and indiscriminate and unprovoked killings, safe for his being drugged or brainwashed. As Agu reveals, “But these things are before the war and I am only remembering them like dream”. The essence of abnormality also comes in different forms and modes to the extent that absurdity becomes real and palpable; “Everyone is looking like one kind of animal, no more human”. And in the Miltonese sense, the boy’s mindset and epitaph may well have averred, that Agu partook "Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste Brought Death into the World, and all our woe…”
Inescapably in such a incoherent setting, it is little wonder that Agu metamorphosed into a killing machine clearly distanced from normality and divorced from reality as well as from his days of innocence. His past in its totality is fleeting; merely a cameo recall of the life he once knew – a fun-filled life of schoolyard friends, loving family, religious and church activities, and in sum, a life of unfettered adolescence. Characteristically cultist, Agu’s life follows a dependency spiral to nothingness, except for the braggadocio and gun-backed confidence. Meanwhile, for fear of ostracization and as much as from lack of a credible alternative, his everyday living becomes gang like, and one in which he must survive by his wits, by the trust and camaraderie of his fellow soldiers and the deceptive altruism of his commander, while seemingly oblivious of his descent into the inhumane and bottomless abyss of war.
Beasts of No Nation may also be symmetric to indigenous rites of passage and coming of age. Bloodletting, but certainly not homicide or brutal murder has in the African context, been a way for a child to claim his manhood. Regrettably, some have stretched this notion to its breaking point as a way of proving that manhood is achieved when man can dominate his environ and those around him either legally or otherwise. Hence killing with impunity as rankling as it might be, has become a new niche that amplifies the cliché that all is fair in war and love. But the reality is that no one argues with a mad man with a loaded gun and there are plenty of guns in the wrong hands including children in many parts of Africa –guns that that sustain the profit lines of those who make and trade them.
Agu’s escapism into the throes of war is not incidental nor a matter of rationalized choice. If there was truly a choice, it was not to suffer the fate of his father, who was shot in his presence. Being a boy soldier, however, offered Agu outlets and assurances of food, power, acceptance and perhaps, the guarantee of being alive another day. Soon enough, yielding to the fear of being taunted, he machetes a man to death nonplussed. Later on, he kills a woman and her daughter, as if butchering them were his final induction rite. Perhaps it was his provenance of being a damn good child soldier. Through it all, Agu’s subdued value haunted him unceasingly. Add to this his personal trauma of being a toy boy to those who must satisfy their sexual proclivities and depravity at all cost. Through the seamless strands of roiling guns, blood, sex, hunger and mayhem, Iweala insinuates a twist of serendipity to an already twisted life, when Agu seeks elusive redemption from his very conflicted existence. But hope is furlong and out of reach.
If Agu had a choice it was to live or die. He opted for the former. And given such options, most grown men would probably capitulate and do the same. Unsurprisingly in the face of such an ironic choice Agu validates his role by asking, “What else can I be doing?” In a true show of survival instinct, he befriends Strika – his dumb, dingbat tormentor, who would not dare offer an answer to the question, “What is it like to be killing somebody?”
The bestiality in this book is beyond redemption. Yet it does offer a modicum of redemption by delving into a heinously vexatious subject. What else, beyond mind-warping drugs, psychotic “gun juice’ and blatant bestiality will make it impossible for a person, be it child or man to distinguish between his fellow human being and a goat. But like Agu confirms, “I am not knowing what is farmer and what is goat”. Mind boggling!
Beast of No Nation is a nerve-racking novel that raises more questions than it attempts to answer or shed light on. When Agu for the umpteenth time asks another contemptuous question, “How can I know what is happening to me?” it becomes stark to the reader that such questions are - their simplicity and rhetorical flourish notwithstanding - unrepentantly gut wrenching. Indeed, how can this be happening to Africa? The answer, like the old song says, is blowing in the wind. Otherwise, it’s a validation of Apocalypse Now!
-----
*Mr. Oseloka Obaze, an aspiring writer, is a member of the Kwenu.com Book Review Forum, which is dedicated to the promotion of books with Igbo and Afrocentric themes. He is also a supporting Member of the African Writers Endowment (AWE). From 1999 to 2005 he served on the editorial board of INYEAKA, the journal of Songhai Charities, Inc., a New Jersey community-based charity founded and run by Nigerians based in New York Tri-state area in the United States, first as its founding Publisher and later as the Editor-At-Large. He is also on the editorial board of The Amaka Gazette, the journal of the Christ the King College, Onitsha Alumni Association in America. His collection of poems, “Regarscent Past: A Collection of Poems” was among the top three finalists in the poetry category in the African Writers Endowment Publishing Grant Program for 2004. He reviews books and arts strictly as a hobby.