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BOOK
Turning children into killers
 Beasts
of No NationUzodinma Iweala
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PART of the power of this debut novel is its
simplicity. Written from the point of view of a young boy (the age is
undisclosed, but he appears to be below 10), this sparse and poignant
narrative provides an amazing insight into the horror and brutality of
war, and how it disrupts a child’s simple world.
The use of the continuous tense not only reflects the
child’s clumsy grasp of English (with which he is acquainted because his
father is a school teacher) but also shows the continuous violent
activities during the war.
Unapologetically thrusting the reader into an
atmosphere of fear and hostility even from the first page, the novel
remains inexorably visceral in its depictions of atrocities inflicted on
humanity. Once again, the simple language merely underscores these
descriptions.
Set in an unnamed African country, the novel offers a
profound glimpse into the civil strife that continuously plagues the
continent’s fragile nations already encumbered by socio-economic
problems (often, it is these problems that lead to war in the first
place). In the case of Iweala’s novel, the genesis of contention seems
to be class struggle, which explodes into rebellion and guerrilla
warfare.
One moment, the protagonist finds himself a happy
child with a bright future, and in the next, he is a reluctant soldier
involved in a war he does not even understand. His once childish vision
of the grandeur of soldiering is devastatingly shattered when he finally
realises what it entails – killing and raping the innocent, looting,
being hungry and cold, and periodically being sexually violated by his
superior.
Characteristic of most African novels is the
interweaving of realism with myths; in The Beasts of No Nation, the
frequent reference to animal mythology to comment on contemporary
circumstances foreground the bestial existence of individuals trapped in
internecine unrest: homeless, solitary and always negotiating between
being predator and prey. Yet, these stories also serve as an ironic
counterpoint to the main frame: for whilst they have important moral
connotations, the narrator’s story merely reflects the meaninglessness
of it all (hence the title). For the young protagonist, his entire
existence is movingly summarised in these simple, stark lines:
Soldier Soldier
Kill Kill Kill
That is how you live
T
hat is how you die
It is the narrative’s ability to capture the boy’s
hopelessness that renders it such an impressive first novel.
Despite the frequent passages on violence, there is
something almost poetic in the narration due to the lilting quality
effected by the continuous-tense structures. In saying this, I am not
suggesting that violence is made aesthetic in the novel, thus muting the
horrors experienced by those involved in such moments. Yet, such poetics
of transgression do illuminate the dialectical relationship between the
private and the public.
In Beasts of No Nation, encountering the atrocity of
war from the viewpoint of a child not only affords a radically different
dimension to what war does on the level of the perceptible, but it also
represents the unspeakable that occurs within an individual. The
transformation of a happy, naive child to that of a cruel, heartless
murderer is nothing short of terrifying. The religious dilemma the
narrator faces (“if killing is a soldier’s duty, then killing cannot be
sinful if I am a soldier”) further compounds the erosion of stable
identity markers in such a harrowing time.
Sparing in its prose, Beasts of No Nation refuses to
censure the obscene but portrays it with relentless force. To read it is
to be arrested by ugly images. I would say that this book is not for the
squeamish, but to not read it is to rob oneself of a valuable insight
into human evil. War, in the end, is never a solution.
Review by Andrew Ng
2 June 2006
http://thestar.com.my/lifestyle/story.asp?file=/2006/6/2/lifebookshelf/14389159&sec=lifebookshelf
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