Author: Uzodinma Iweala
Reviewer: Ogaga Okuyade
Publisher: Harper Perrenial
No of pages: 176
Agu, the protagonist of the narrative, begins as a young boy growing up in a provincial locale with his parents and sisters. His only dream as the narrative begins is to become an engineer.
However, as the violence of war ruptures the techno-moral codes of his society, he drifts from the impressionistic child who wants so much in life into a child soldier.
As Agu develops with a growing brutality, he becomes awakened to his plight as a powerless warrior, who has to reject his plight silently and revolt internally in order to stabilise his altered psyche.
As the novel approaches denouement, Agu begins to dream of numerous things: to kill the men who made his family disappear; to carry a gun; to have food for tomorrow; to grope the girl who serves the drinks; to become a giant tree; to make the man that lives at the moon smile; to find his mother; to go to school and to become an engineer at last.
The novel ends with Agu undergoing the process of rehabilitation facility.
Strika is another child soldier, who like Agu, is conscripted into an army where he has to commit numerous crimes in order to survive. He is the one who discovers Agu in his hide out.
Like Agu, he is sexually abused by the Commandant. He hardly talks because his psychic networking has been altered by the violence of the war. He dies as the novel reaches its denouement.
Commandant is the leader of a unit of the rebel army that discovers Agu after his father’s death and the departure of his mother and sister. Although he promises to protect Agu, he ends up abusing him and other child soldiers like Strika. He is the ‘big man’ who gives orders, and the other soldiers answer to him.
Rambo arranges a mutiny where Commandant is assassinated, and his death eventually creates the leeway for the liberation of the other soldiers under his command.
Rambo is an adult soldier in Commandant’s unit. Initially, he is just a warrior like the other soldiers. However, he becomes Second-in-Command of the unit upon the death of Luftenant. As the war rages on and Commandant continues to abuse and torture the soldiers under his command, Rambo organises a mutiny that leads to his death, which in turn, created room for the soldiers to return home regardless of Commandant’s insistence on their stay at the front.
Luftenant is a weakling and Second-in-Command in Commandant’s unit of rebel soldiers. From Agu’s musings, it is clear that before the war started, Luftenant sold shoes and must have paid his way to obtain the position of second-in-command because he thinks officers hardly fight during wars.
During engagements, he hardly fights; he usually stays behind while the others do battle. He is stabbed to death by one of the girls at the motel in the Town of Abundant Resources. At death, his corpse is abandoned and he is stripped of his uniform, and Rambo takes over his position.
Army is the white lady at the rehabilitation camp where Agu is undergoing psychotherapy that will enable him return to society and perhaps meet his mother and sister. She painstakingly listens and his experiences as a child growing up in a bucolic ambiance until war plucks him from the comfort zone of the familial to the horrors of the front.
Agu’s father is a teacher before the war started. He brings his children up under strict religious and moral ethical codes. He dies alongside other men in his community struggling to protect their village from the destruction of war.
Though a fictional narrative of the crisis of growing up in a turbulent space, Beasts of No Nation aptly captures the essential traits of the child-soldier. The novel gives expression to how children suffer disproportionately from the perils of military life because of their tenderness and vulnerability. Physically, they suffer higher casualties and more horrendous injuries than adults.
Child-soldiers get exposed to severe health hazards resulting from poor diet, insanitary living conditions, untended injuries (both physical and psychological).
Iweala has fictively given expression to a universal problem, especially the one associated with violence and the failure of humanity to protect the future of human life signified in the identity of the child.
Beasts of No Nation is arguably a harrowing narrative of a boy’s coming-of-age and a stunning account of the horrors of war. It announces the emergence of an amazing new writer.
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