Em's Book Review: "Beasts of No Nation"

The Peace Corps transit house has a huge take-a-book/leave-a-book library but you have to spend a lot of time digging through the trashy romance novels before finding a good read. Well, I did some digging and was lucky to come across Uzodinma Iweala's award-winning Beasts of No Nation.

The novel follows Agu, a young boy forced to become a child soldier in an unnamed West African country. In a sort of Pidgen English, Agu describes his horrifying experiences of war, murder, mutilation, rape, cannibalism, starvation and thirst.
 From the depiction of a drugged-up Agu chopping up a woman and her child into bits with his machete to the rape scenes of Agu by his Commander, Iweala gets straight to the point, writing in a raw, crude and explicit style. Iweala hides no details but that's exactly what makes readers understand (well, at least try to understand) the horrors that the narrator goes through.
The scene of Agu's first kill is particularly moving yet disturbing at the same time: "...I am bringing the machete up and down and up and down hearing KPWUDA KPWUDA every time and seeing just pink while I am hearing the laughing KEHI, KEHI, KEHI all around me...Commandant is saying it is like falling in love."

I've read several novels and autobiographies on child soldiers (favorite being Ishmael Beah's A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier) and I'm always struck by the fact that no matter how gruesome, violent or animal-like the soldiers become, no matter how many women and girls they rape, no matter how many men they mutilate with machetes, I'm always sympathizing with them. Despite their brutality you never forget they are innocent children, forced into a horrible situation.
 
Even though he commits unthinkable crimes, Agu fights to remember his previous self and the good son he once was. The novel shifts between the present day's war-torn atrocities and Agu's past life of living peacefully with his family: his love of books, his childhood friends, his village, his school-teacher father and his religious mother. It is by living through his memories that Agu tries to convince himself that he is not a "bad boy."

Why write a novel on something so horrific? As the Nigerian-American, Harvard-educated author says in an interview in the back of the book:
"I wrote and write about violence because of a desire to understand what makes people kill, rape and destroy. I wrote and write about violence because of a fear that one day I might be on either the delivering or receiving end of aggression. I wrote and write about violence because there is something fascinating and inspiring about the human ability to cope with and prevail over the worst of circumstances. In short, I wrote and write about violence because of a desire to understand my own and other people's humanness."