'I Am Not Bad Boy'
BROWN, ROSELLEN
'I Am Not Bad Boy' Beasts of No Nation By Uzodinma Iweala HarperCollins. 142 pp. $16.95. Reviewed by Rosellen Brown Professor of English, the School of the Art Institute of...
...Despite "not wanting to be killing anybody," the boy is forced to commit acts no civilized person of any age should have to see, let alone enact...
...In his interviews, he claims to be headed to medical school...
...Why we are not doing it before I am not knowing," he says, but he is too tired to give much thought to the possibility that they might have resisted sooner...
...The absence of real fidelity to this cause will ultimately declare itself, but he has no way to know that yet...
...Still, what is a child to do when, after urinating on a man he has taken prisoner, the Commandant commands that he kill him...
...If so, it proves once more that constraints—demands, deadlines, other "external" pressures— can often lure from writers their deepest convictions and passions that might otherwise stay unexpressed...
...I am just wearing my short and shirt that I am taking from village we are looting one day...
...But Agu has a far less passive part to play than Sidhwa's Indian-turned-Pakistani child...
...Agu's instinct tells him something is amiss: we are not all wearing the same uniform, then how can we be army...
...To this the Commandant who finds him responds with the kindness of a serpent: "Commandant is sucking his lip and touching my face softly softly...
...I am soldier and soldier is not bad if he is killing...
...That it was originally prompted by the need to deliver a "product" makes it sound accidental, a utilitarian solution to a graduation requirement...
...And then I am just hiding in the bush and running this way and that way not knowing anything...
...Agu has no idea what he is to take from the village he is looting...
...just shining in her eye...
...As Agu says of "a white woman from America" who is working at this haven, she has "water...
...He—and we—are relieved that, however bereft, he can again entertain the idea of a future...
...Finally—the plot, such as it is, is very simple—by virtue of one heroic act, the regiment is set free and Agu is rescued...
...He is taking my hand and pulling me onto my feets...
...This is why I am not knowing why Commandant is always so angry with us...
...Like the Pakistani Bapsi Sidhwa's Cracking India, in which a little girl reacts pretty much the same way to partition, Beasts of No Nation uses the bewilderment and outrage of a child as surrogate for our own...
...At this point, the irony of that present tense, which has been ubiquitous, is hard to read without great pain...
...This slender story is the first (and I would not be surprised, though I would be sorry, if it were the last) novel by a recent Harvard graduate who is a native of two cultures, Nigerian and American...
...Beasts of No Nation is the first-person account of a very young boy who has been made to fight in the civil war of an African country, unidentified because, the author implies, such particulars hardly matter when human atrocities are at hand: Inhumanity is inhumanity...
...In that language he fears he will never be happying again...
...I was really wanting trouser to be stopping the mosquito from biting me on the leg, but I am not finding any small enough for me to be wearing...
...Remember, though, that the little boy who must submit here is not "the enemy...
...For the novel that got Uzodinma Iweala his honors grade is astonishingly good...
...After he mutilates the man, while Agu vomits, "Commandant is saying it is like falling in love, but I am not knowing what that is meaning...
...These books—and Beasts of No Nation is one of them—demand to be quoted from, to speak for themselves without begging much analysis...
...The book closes, as well it should, on the most important evidence the child must confront: that once he had a mother "and she is loving me...
...I am not bad boy...
...It is a remarkably pure performance, and all the more so for being the work of a young man whose circumstances are so different from his character's that it is only youth, and the desire to be honest, they share in common...
...I certainly couldn't blame her...
...he senses that the loyalty and commitment of his fellow fighters is casual, suspect...
...What he is on to is not merely the disappointment of his sartorial hopes...
...It is just like killing goat...
...I am not bad boy...
...His father, before he is killed in a raid on their village, has told Agu to run "far far so the enemy is not catching you and killing you...
...Beasts of No Nation is an axe that cracks that frozen sea within all of us...
...Among other things, it is perfectly scaled—which is to say, deeper than it is long—so that trumping it with a more mature or developed work will not be easy...
...Yet, told that the enemy is killing their mothers and fathers and burning their houses, the children, for whom politics does not exist, are only able to think of all they have lost...
...of Washington and Cambridge on the one hand, and Lagos on the other...
...The book's brevity gives it the feel of a single anguished cry, closer to a slash of crimson paint on a canvas than to a complexly inflected project, a Guernica...
...Just bring this hand up and knock him well well...
...The child here is brutalized for no reason he can understand, without appeal and without mercy...
...I am thinking of before war when I am in the town with my mother and I am seeing men walking with brand-new uniform and shiny sword holding gun and shouting left right, left right, behind trumpet and drum, like how they are doing on parade and so I am nodding my head yes...
...as we already know) unchallenged power stirs the erotic juices as well...
...In the panic and confusion, anyone could be friend or foe or family...
...Every time we are seeing woman or girl, I am looking at them well well to be knowing if they are my mother or my sister...
...Whatever sears the soul of a child (not to mention a country) is horrendous, regardless of the colors it serves...
...the book was his senior thesis...
...He is merely the owned object, the slave, of his own master...
...Iweala has invented a poignant language that has Agu converting adjectives and adverbs into verbs—"I am sadding," "I am angrying," and best of all, though he does not have much occasion to say it, "luckying...
...And if army is made of soldier and we are not army, then how can we be real soldier...
...He is, of course, too small to have a uniform...
...Agu is now in the care of some religious group (like the country, unnamed) whose benign care he questions as little as he questioned his victimizers...
...Do you want to be soldier, he is asking me in soft voice...
...Do you know what that is meaning...
...That leads us, all too predictably, to the indignity against which Agu can only stifle his voice one more time: He must submit to rape, again and again, by his Commandant...
...The scene of his violation is a brilliantly painted and unquestionably accurate report that takes the brutality of territorial and economic rapine and once more, as in every war, brings a parallel sexual violence as close to the heart of the victim as it is possible to go...
...This, I suppose, should not come as a surprise, since (as Iweala has demonstrated...
...A priest assures him that "God is still alive in this place," but who can blame Agu for being skeptical...
...He is asked to swear that he is "hating the enemy...
...author, "Haif a Heart,' "Civil Wars" Some reviews are harder to write than others...
...He is squeezing my hand around the handle of the machete and I am feeling the wood in my finger and in my palm...
...Reviewed by Rosellen Brown Professor of English, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago...
...Their difficulty is not necessarily in proportion to tire abstruseness of the book in question, and is rarely a consequence of its emotional challenge...
...Iweala gives us brief scenes of Agu's classroom, his friendships, his games, his Sunday school, but they are all in the past tense and the boy knows it...
...We are repelled by politicians and their guerrilla minions who sow violence and chaos, tear up the map and, apparently overnight, reassign nationality according to their personal desires...
...There simply are novels that seem, to a degree, to defy comment—beyond plot summary and a general indication of type...
Vol. 88 • November 2005 • No. 6
