In 2005, Uzodinma Iweala, a medical student at Columbia, published Beasts of No Nation, a fictional account of a child soldier in an unnamed African country. Born to Nigerian parents in Washington, D.C., Iweala started writing the book for his senior thesis at Harvard, and it has now been translated into 11 languages and won several literary prizes.
Below is an edited transcript from the public discussion Iweala had with Mamadou Diouf, the Leitner Family Professor of African Studies at Columbia University, as part of the “Literature and Terror” series sponsored by the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life at Columbia University.
Mamadou Diouf: I would like to begin this conversation by insisting on one important element, which defines — and this is what I’m going to discuss with Uzo — the project behind this book. I am a historian, and usually historians try to find facts; when we read a novel, we know it is a novel, but it is also a written record. We are trying to see what the credible elements are in a book. In particular for this book, there are two reasons. The first is the title, Beasts of No Nation, which announces a thing that seems important to me: that the violence that defines this text is a violence not linked to a political project. The second element that seems very important to me is that this book is really at the intersection of two moments, and, as I said, one of these moments is announced by the title. The idea is that the violence that defines the African condition today is not linked to politics. It is not linked to a project, if we are to think about the military coups in the sixties. It’s not even linked to an army. It’s about groups of people with arms, moving around and killing people.
For me, this is important because it could help us understand the project of the new generation that Uzo’s a part of, many of whom were born or are living outside Africa but are writing about Africa. My first question then is, why are you, someone who is living in Washington, D.C., or in the United States — I’m not going to say that you are an American, because you are one of these hybrid people who define our postmodern condition — why are you not writing about the U.S. or about D.C., but instead about Africa?
Uzodinma Iweala: The funny thing is that I do write a lot about the United States, and, funnily enough, I write quite a bit about Washington, D.C., where I grew up. But why is this book about Africa? I think that it’s a desire to understand and to provide a sort of context for something that you know but don’t know, don’t know intimately. I was born in D.C., grew up in D.C., but we would go to Nigeria every summer when I was younger. If you experience a place in stages — three months every so often — things change, and you’re there to see the changes, but you don’t understand the process of how things change.
Furthermore, there’s the larger context — the larger continent and all those issues. You want to be able to engage with them in some way, maybe engage with the idea of pan-Africanism. I guess when you’re outside of the continent, you can look at it as more of a whole — as absurd as that is to say. If here is this idea, you can visualize it, you can in some way create this idea of Africa. Maybe that’s what this is about: constructing this idea in some sort of way, as artificial as that is, and then trying to explore what that idea means, what that idea has become in the larger popular consciousness.
Diouf: Why are you doing it through the lens of violence?
Iweala: This is the thing: I don’t necessarily see the book as being about violence. One of the biggest issues that comes up whenever you talk about Afrida — and again we’ll just use the term Africa — is the different conflicts. Obviously, there is conflict, there is violence. For my life, it’s been a large part of the discussion about Africa. I guess you can’t get away from trying to figure out how violence or how conflict fits into the larger narrative of this place, of these different countries, of these different peoples that you’re dealing with.
For me and my quest to understand it, I don’t think that I could have done it without writing about violence or without trying, at least, to see where the violence fits in. Does that mean that violence is the only lens through which one can visualize this place, or any one of the places in Africa? Not at all. In terms of my writing, looking at violence is not the only way that I plan to. Just on the larger scale, I happen to be fascinated by the idea of violence and its role in the ways that our lives are shaped. And that’s whether you’re talking about Nigeria, whether you’re talking about a conflict in West Africa, say in Sierra Leone or Liberia, or about the war in Iraq, or any one of these other conflicts, just the everyday struggles and violence that we face.
For example, I’ve written a short story about a soldier coming back from the Iraq War, and that was set in Washington, D.C. I’ve also been, maybe for the last three years, probably not very successfully, writing a story about how people respond to a terrorist attack in Washington, D.C., and what that violence — what the presence of violence — does to the way we behave and to the stories that we tell, the narratives that we construct. This is something that fascinates me. I guess what I read, and the writing that I gravitate towards, shows and addresses violence and conflicts, the question of who has the right to use violence, how we speak about those people, and how who is in power affects whether that violence is legitimate or not.
Diouf: I have already discussed with you how we interpret violence and how violence is an instrument through which you try to trap ways of expressing a kind of black humanity. When we read the book carefully and, in particular, [analyze] the character Agu, we see clearly what you are trying to do. Still, I’m sure you know Achebe’s paper on Heart of Darkness, and you know his discussion about the image of Africa and the imagination. In relation to your book and your fascination with violence, your reader is forced to go in two directions. One direction is Fanon and the redemptive role of violence, which is not the direction you take, though we can imagine this possibility at the end of the book when Agu’s making sense of his journey. The other — and, it seems to me, it’s important for you to look at your image of Africa — is in relation to the modes of not only imagining Africa but also writing about Africa as this dysfunctional continent.
Again, if we follow your discussion and description of the violence, of the act of brutality Agu is going through, one of the most interesting aspects is precisely what your reader has to ask: What is the imagination behind this, and how does it relate to this general presentation of what Africa is? I think it’s important in relation to what you say and to your project. It’s interesting that you use an expression that is the title of V. Y. Mudimbe’s book, The Idea of Africa, and say the idea of Africa is, as it is in Mudimbe, “revealed in the Western text.” It is this continent that is the locus of disaster, where people are not even able to fight a clean war. One of the most powerful descriptions is when you describe Agu’s first act of killing, when the body dissolves into something indescribable. So how do you even negotiate these different tensions?
Iweala: Let’s see if we can walk back and start with the idea of Africa and the conflicts in writing the two directions. One way to explain this is to start with my own dichotomous existence or ideas that I have. Having grown up here, and having been raised here, and being an American in that sense, I was exposed to all of those ideas or themes that come up again and again when you read about Africa or when you speak about Africa. Unless you grow up in a vacuum, there’s no way you cannot imbibe them and let them affect the way that you think.
That obviously creates an internal conflict, because you also know something very different from that, very different from the way this place is represented, and from the lack of differentiation in the representation of the place. That conflict definitely drives a lot of my writing, both the way that I want to write about it and the way that I want to examine it. It’s not just that you want to get up and write a book that says, “Oh, this is not true. This doesn’t happen. This is not the way it is; let me correct it.” I think I’m more interested in writing about or examining the internal conflict that goes with multiple representations of a place.
That said, when writing a book like Beasts of No Nation, I think that one of the main worries was, of course, knowing and being very angry about representations that you feel don’t have a counter to them, or are very simplistic in their analysis, or don’t acknowledge the existence of conflicts. You don’t want to fall into the same trap. Then the question becomes: How do you justify writing such a book that does, presumably, fall into the same trap? My argument is that the whole point of writing it was that it doesn’t. It was written, in a sense, to address a number of questions.
One is the idea of a clean war. You bring up — which I think is a really interesting term in general — the idea that you can have a clean war and that you can have clean destruction. I mean, war essentially destroys and makes nonsense of what is organized. I don’t see how that can be clean in any fashion. The idea that in certain societies we’ve developed rules for conflict that allow and justify certain actions, whereas in other places it’s all savage, it fits into the larger narrative, the larger stereotype. If you see some of the things that we’ve done, that we’ve justified as the country of the United States because we have the voice and the ability to explain and structure the kind of violence that we use, it’s insanity. Let’s put it that way: all of the violence and the destruction that we’re using in any place is insanity. It’s just that in one place we can develop rules as to how we kill — and how we decide to kill, and who gets to die, and who gets a voice afterward, while killing or after being killed — and in another place it’s put forth that there is no organization or there is no structure.
In reading and doing research to write this book, I found this was clearly not the case; in fact, these things are done in a very systematic way. The difference is that people haven’t taken the time to understand the system, so it’s labeled chaotic, savage, x or y. But there is a point, as I think you suggested in your opening remarks, that violence gets disassociated from structure, from political conflict. In my mind, it’s not. In my mind, there’s definitely an association with a political context, with its aims and goals. It’s just that I decided not to have it be in a particular country, because I didn’t want to write about a specific place. What I wanted to write about was the larger idea of violence and the structures that it creates in and of itself. I don’t know if that’s getting at what you’re asking.
Diouf: Absolutely. But, at the same time, you say you have a project that is a way of reconstructing these societies that are going through these experiences, making a kind of experience-revealing of societies to themselves. But one of the problems a reader will have is precisely the language through which the project is expressed, which is the language of a child. And this is something important.
In particular, I compare your book with Ahmadou Kourouma’s Allah n’est pas obligé (Allah Is Not Obliged), which was published in 2000 and is also about a child soldier, Birahima, who is abducted and participates in the Sierra Leone civil war. One thing that is interesting in the structure of Kourouma’s novel is that he is trying to tell a story about this kid who is fighting. This is something that is also important in your book, such as when Agu asks himself if he’s a soldier or a kid. This tension is important, how you make sense of his action. I think you do it quite well, and this brings us back to the clean war in a structure, that a military system is created in a rational way. Here you have [the colonel], who is acting more in relation to how he manipulates these people than how [the system] is organized or “disciplined.” And what Kourouma does is to keep the story of this kid — telling what is happening to him and to people around him — and, at the same time, have the kid create another language, which is also a very interesting twist in your book. [Birahima] has four dictionaries, and he’s translating different things at different levels to create multiple audiences and, actually, to diffract the one project into many. We don’t have that in your book. The interesting aspect is that before the war Agu likes reading, and he likes reading the Bible. That is another interesting tension, a much more spiritual tension.
I read your book as a work that is trying to deal with what one of my colleagues calls a kind of spiritual insecurity, which Birahima is also doing in Allah n’est pas obligé. This is also what is creating the violence: the violence of a language unable to account for the precise experience that these two narrators are going through. Kourouma is able to enter into the narrative and come up with a human-rights project. In your book, the difficulty is — I’m not calling it a difficulty — the interest is the impossibility of finding something. I was amazed by one thing, which is quite funny. When the book was published, somebody said the ending was impossible to accept since Agu was able to reconstruct himself. Years later, in 2007, when Ishmael Beah wrote his book A Long Way Gone, he could have been Agu actually. So if you have a message, where is your message located? How do you deal with the message? Again, following what you’ve said, what is your pan-African message in relation to the story you are telling?
Iweala: I’m going to kind of sidestep your question by answering it this way: I think it’s very dangerous for someone in my position to start saying that there is a definite message one wants to come out of a specific work.
Diouf: It’s not necessarily a political or an ideological message. It also could be an aesthetic message.
Iweala: Again, to just completely skirt around that, I think it’s what whoever picks it up wants to take away — whether it’s the construction of the narrative itself, whether it’s the language used, or whether it’s the cultural context or the political context. I think the beauty of literature or of writing is that once you’re done you’re not necessarily in control of it. It’s for whoever picks it up to read to decide what he likes or doesn’t like or how it affects him, and what direction he’s going to go in when reading it.
In terms of intentions, there are certain things that I wanted to explore in writing. One of the primary ones was, of course, how exactly do you write about violence? What can you use, and what viewpoint do you take? And how then does that viewpoint affect the way that violence is received by whoever reads the book? And how does the limit of language affect how that violence comes through? There are ways, of course, of writing, or of speaking, in which you can completely obscure the horror or the terror, if you will, of violence; you can talk about certain things and clean them. For me, that’s not what I was trying to do. I wanted to get at the fear involved in experiencing this. Of course, having never experienced it, you know, it’s a little absurd to say. But I think you can through other people’s accounts, through engaging with those emotions, and come up with a way of representing, even if it’s not your own life. And, of course, that representation is going to be what it is: it’s going to be fiction. It’s going to be imperfect in a lot of ways, and the language that you’re going to use, then, will also be imperfect in a lot of ways, imperfect in describing, and it will be fundamentally flawed.
That said, I don’t necessarily know that if you have experienced violence the language will necessarily be much smoother. You can say that violence does defy language in a lot of senses; its primary purpose is to deconstruct everything that we’ve put together. In that sense, it will also deconstruct whatever language you try to use to describe it. And that might be why — I suppose I should actually know that is why — the language I use is one that is, in a sense, broken, and doesn’t fit together perfectly, and is rough. It’s intentionally rough, constructed to be rough, even if it does fall apart at times. You’ve got to give it a little bit of leeway; it’s the first book. I’m not even going to try to step up to Ahmadou Kourouma, because that’s a little too much.
Diouf: I’m going to push you.
Iweala: The thing is, though, with Kourouma’s language, it is the same. I read it in French, but I can barely read French, so I’m not quite sure that I understood everything I was reading. But from what I do understand about that book, it is, again, the same thing. In his meshing of different forms of language, and in the confusion that creates, it’s again sort of mimicking the environment in which his character finds himself in a lot of ways. In that sense, if you can’t directly say and through description evoke a certain emotion, I think that you can use language itself and the distortion of language to bring out the emotion that your words cannot describe through their meaning — if that makes any sense.
There are plenty of writers who do that — just in the construction of the language, and the way that things fit together, and the emotions created by it, whether it’s the simple sound of words in a string, or it’s the phonetic mix of the language that’s put together. I think that it is as much responsible for creating the emotional context of the work — or at least in the works that I like to read — as it is the actual meaning of the words themselves. I’m thinking about writers like Faulkner, for example, and how he puts scenes and situations together — actual words, the flow of the sentences, the use of the punctuation and those kinds of things, the actual look of the language itself — and how that affects the mood, how that draws you in or manipulates you as the reader.
I think that Kourouma does that, and that’s the intent behind making his narrator have so many different ways and modes of speaking. It creates that confusion, destabilizes you as a reader in order to create that emotion of tension, the emotion of fear, the emotion of uncertainty. In that sense, that is sort of what I’m trying to do in this text, and it’s sort of what I try to do in the other stuff that I write as well. Although, of course, given the narrator, given the characters and the context, the way the language is going to be used will be very different. For example, the story I wrote about the soldier from Iraq is written in the vernacular, and it’s written in a particular way to evoke the emotions that he has experienced and that he experiences upon returning from Iraq. In other stories, playing around with repetition of words, repetition of whole paragraphs, or repetition of scenes and situations, I get at the same emotional ideas that are put forth and relived and moved.
Diouf: One thing that is interesting about your very creative use of language and what you are trying to do — and I think that about the literature on child soldiers, especially if we consider the memoir — is the relation to language and the importance of language to account for not only a world that’s collapsing, but also a world that’s being rebuilt, one that does not yet exist but which could exist. But also — and I think this is an important aspect about terror — when you try to make sense of terror, one of the most interesting aspects is that you physically describe the actions more than anything else. It’s mostly about people reacting to what is happening to them in a physical way, which pushes us again back to the centrality of language. One of the interesting aspects is the tension between what you create when you try to restitute the sounds of the bush in relation to the world of the household and the world of the Bible, which is a world of peace.
Even if you refuse to accept that you have a kind of project, my question is, do you really think that you came up with an alternative to these usual modes of accounting for Africa? I’m asking this question for the reason that you will never escape it as a writer. Unlike other writers, African writers are always read as ethnographers. You cannot come and say, “I’m a writer, and this is a project that is a literary one.” People will always try to find something behind what you write, something real, something concrete. So how do you deal with that? And, at the same time, you documented, you went to collect documents, and you tried to understand them. What type of documents did you collect?
Iweala: To start from the top, I have two things to say. One is that what I was interested in was the way violence affects people. But I think maybe the emphasis on reactions might also come from the fact that it’s an imaginative experience and one that I have never experienced; therefore, I was very interested in how one would react, what would happen to a person if placed in that situation, and how that situation then affects you physically, mentally, emotionally. That is why there is so much emphasis on the actual reaction of bodies to the environment around or to the actions that are happening.
To move to the second point, the one about alternative representations and being read as an ethnographer, I think that might be where there is a lot of tension in the reading of this book. On the one hand, one is aware that there is a larger context and the book will be perceived or read in a certain way. I get these questions all the time. Just to illustrate, I did a reading in Germany, and someone came up to me afterward and said, “Well, that sucked. You’re misrepresenting yourself. We were here to listen to a real child soldier.” And I was like, “Well, sorry?” I really don’t know what to say in that sense. So there is an awareness that that’s the case. But at the same time, I’m a student of literature. I studied English as my first degree, and telling stories is of primary interest to me. We talked about this before. The stories, in my mind, have to have some bearing, but, at the same time, it is what it is — and that’s a story. It is a literary exercise in a lot of ways.
I think that if you go into it assuming that you’re going to write some grand project that will reveal all sorts of social ideas and political ideas and whatnot, either you won’t write the book, or you’ll write a book that’s so nonsensical that no one reads it. Or, you’ll write a book that’s very simplistic in the way that it deals with things, so simplistic as to be called propaganda, and that’s not what I’m interested in. You know, we keep going back to language, and that’s primarily because I’m interested in language itself and the way that language is used to create stories. But I don’t know. In that sense, I don’t know how one is going to get away from that question if you look the way that I look, and you try to write [what I do], and you have the background that I have. Everything that you write about a particular place will suddenly be interpreted as somewhat biographical or ethnographic. I feel that the only way that I’m going to get away with it is maybe to write a story that’s entirely about white people and have no black people whatsoever in it. In which case, somebody will find some way to analyze it as a social commentary on the existence of whatever, you know?
Diouf: I think you should do that.
Iweala: I will. [Laughter] I’ll try, but I think that it’s a shame. It’s also just emblematic of the culture that we live in. You find that the memoir has been so popular recently and that people have been so interested in stories that are “real.” When they find out that those stories are constructed in some way, there’s a huge uproar, which I can [understand] if you do misrepresent. But, in some ways, I think it gets away from the beauty of language, the beauty of constructing a story, and of the emotional construct you want to put together. Wow, I’m losing my vocabulary. See, this is what happens when you talk to a professor and you’re not one.
To me, that’s something that is very interesting: Why it is that people want so badly to have stories be reflective of some “truth”? Why have we gotten away from the idea of creating a story for the sake of story? The story itself can teach us something about who we are and the world in which we live. That point may be more acute for African writers or writers of African descent, but I don’t think that anyone can get away with it necessarily.
I think that if you’re a 22-year-old or a 23-year-old, and you write a novel about 23-year-olds or about college students, someone is going to ask you, “Oh, is this part of your life? Are you commenting on the life of a college student or of a university student, or are you commenting on the person that you were then?” I don’t think you can get away from it, regardless. I think that it’s more acute if you’re from a place that people, by and large, still don’t really know very much about. Then people look to you as someone who’s bringing truth, however absurd that idea may be. But I think it’s something that affects everyone who writes, especially in this day and age, when we’re so bent on having representations of truth in writing, whether it’s fiction, memoir, or whatever.
Diouf: Even if you accept the idea that it’s not about representing truth but still about representation, we could look at two issues, both of which very important. From your own perspective, what is the basis of, let’s say, your approach, including the aesthetic approach? What actually gives you the right to imagine Africa and Africans? That is a question that will always haunt you. It’s the same as people asking me why I am sitting in New York and writing about African history when I’m not living there. This is a question we have and we always have to deal with.
The second question is a larger one about the environment and the circumstances we are imagining. You know better than I that violence is produced and consumed in a certain way in different sides of a war. So, writing about violence is also participating in a kind of economy of violence and terror, which will always provide clues about the way you are read and the way you are interpreted.
This is where it is interesting to look at — I’m always going back to that — the project. Are you participating in a kind of project to better explain Africa? When I say better explain, I mean that this is one of the interesting aspects of the new African literature, dealing with internal forces. It’s dealing basically with the internal and collective demons of Africa and African societies. You still have to deal with that, how your work is located in an economy of consumption and production of violence in which Africa is presented in a very specific way. What makes your reader friendly to what you are trying to do? What will convince your reader that you are an African writer?
Iweala: Am I supposed to be convincing anyone?
Diouf: No, you love the continent. You can be half, but still, you know…
Iweala: I mean, is there a larger set of people who are writing or who are trying to reconstruct the image of the continent? If that’s what you’re saying, is there sort of a generational shift in that sense? Is that what you’re asking?
Diouf: Yes, but it depends. If you consider Ben Okri and the way in which he’s trying to make sense of what is happening in Africa — or even if you compare him with a very young British writer, Helen Oyeyemi — there is an idea that you have to enter into a kind of narrative that you could consider as an African, but it is, in a way, completely different from, let’s say, Ayi Kwei Armah and his way of documenting the African crisis. You see a shift, and the shift creates a tension.
In the Francophone world, you have an ongoing fight within the new generation of African writers, the majority of them living in France, who are fighting about defining themselves. They write about Africa, or they write about African immigrants, but they don’t consider themselves African writers. So the way you deal with the continent, the way you engage with the different representations of the continent today, is key to defining who writes as an African and who is writing as something else. Many of them are claiming that they are not even Francophone writers, that they are French writers. And this is really important, you know, for understanding how people are defining themselves in relation to the continent and how they are not only imagining but producing the images of Africa that are circulating.
Iweala: You could really spend a ton of time trying to think about where you’re located within the larger structure of things. For a while I spent time trying to figure that out, but during that period of time, I wasn’t really writing anything. So I decided to leave that question behind, because, in the end, maybe it’s for the historians to decide or for the social and literary critics to decide where you are writing from.
The thing for me — and this is just a personal thing — is to pick and figure out what story appeals to me most, what I want to write about, and what I want to tell. Granted, that might be affected greatly by my own personal background and where I’m coming from. In that sense, you could analyze and say that you are clearly writing from an American perspective. Because if you lived in one of these places, then maybe you wouldn’t have focused on the violence, maybe you would have focused on something else. You could say whatever you want, but I’m going to write whatever I want. I think that needs to be said.
I don’t think there is a deliberate desire to reconstruct images. I think, for me, there is a desire to have different voices, and whatever those voices say, I think, is fine. For the most part, the question of who has gotten to speak about Africa is the bigger issue — and what voices have been considered legitimate, and what voices have been spread wide enough to create an actual image of this continent. I think that is changing. The more writers who inhabit both parts, or who have a different view on Europe, or the West, or Africa, or any other part of the world, and who are able to get that view out, I think that’s a very good thing.
Additionally, I think that you will start seeing people writing [about places other than the one they are from]. You know I was making jokes about writing a story entirely about white people, but when it starts to happen, you’ll also see a very big transformation in the way that people think about Africa. It’s not just that the African writer or person of African descent, whatever you want to call the person, needs to write about a particular place or is only licensed to write about a particular place, and therefore his writing is only legitimate if it is about this. What we’re forgetting, and what’s sort of absent in this discussion, is the idea that there is a worldview. There are other places in this world, and people also have fantasies, they have stories, they have interactions with and about these other places.
I think it’s a shame that you’re only allowed or you’re only considered legitimate if you’re focusing on [your particular place]. It defeats the whole purpose of writing and of literature if you’re only focusing on this one place that you happen to have ties to: cultural ties, or family ties, or religious ties, or whatever. If you cannot, or you’re not allowed, to imagine beyond your own life situation, then what’s really the point of writing? That’s the thing. You asked about the issue of rights. Do I have the right to write about violence? Do I have the right to write about this place?
I would say that the whole purpose of writing and, particularly, the purpose of writing fiction, is to imagine, create, construct, and put together ideas about a place and about a situation, about a set of emotions, and about a context. If you get so tied up in the idea of whether you have the right to write about it, you’ll absolutely never write about anything, and that would be really sad. You know, I think that those questions just have to be put to the wayside.
Now, you’ve finished the book, and it’s gone out for whoever reads it; it can be decided whether it was effective or not. That’s what critics are for, and that’s why we’re afraid of them, right? But after you’re done, it’s out there. It will be judged, and it should be judged. If you’re successful in your representation, if you’re successful in creating, you know that’s great. But also, if you’re not successful and not so great, then people will let you know. At the same time, if you write something, and it creates a particular idea that someone is not comfortable with or doesn’t agree with, then this person has the opportunity to construct a narrative himself.
In that sense, you start creating a dialogue about a place, and then different ideas emerge, and a fuller picture of a certain place emerges. I think what has been the case with Africa is that there have been so few voices writing about the different countries, about different cultures, and about different situations. There has been a particular way of constructing the continent. If anything, for the people of my generation or the writers of my generation, the fact that the number of voices is increasing and the perspectives are increasing, whether it’s an internal perspective looking out at what’s happening or a semi-external one — and that’s the label I’ll give myself, perspective, looking in and trying to construct — the more this happens, the better off this whole project of African literature is.
That said, there will be mistakes that are made along the way. Time will tell what is successful and what isn’t successful, and there will be arguments about what is successful and what isn’t successful. But again, it’s in the argument that a new way of thinking and writing is developed. Without that, you’re just not going anywhere. You’re going to be running in circles and having the same talks and debates that have been had for the last 40 years.
Diouf: I agree with you on one thing, but, as professors, we are paid to ask questions. Actually, I agree with your own conception of what you call an African literature. I will come back to that, because it’s something that is very important. If we admit the idea of a pluralization of voices in what we used to call African literature, and if you want to insist on this diversity, then we have to get ourselves out of the idea that an African literature exists. I think it existed probably until the midseventies, when people had a kind of common project of building an African voice, of speaking about Africa as defined by cultural unity. But today I think that if you look at the production, it is more and more interesting to ask — and this is why I was pushing you to this question — are you defining yourself as an African writer, as a Nigerian writer, or as an American writer, or any of these categories?
Iweala: Actually, I have trouble defining myself as a med student, so I don’t know if we’ll get very far.
Diouf: It’s important, because I think it’s what’s going to define the success of your literary enterprise. I would like to know how we measure the success of the representation you are coming up with, because I think the most important development today is precisely that: that Africa is being complicated by different voices from different locations from people who are claiming that they are African in their own way, even if Africans in Africa are telling them they are not. The other approach is quite interesting, and I say that as a historian. It seems to me that creative writers are recounting the African condition better than social scientists are precisely because of that. But still we need to unpack this idea of an African literature, and we also need to see exactly how, as I was saying, the literary project is defined and received.
Iweala: In terms of measuring success, on a personal level, I felt that the book was successful when someone who had been through some of the experiences described in it said, “Thank you for representing what I went through; it’s about time that someone focused on this story.” That for me was a representation of success. Now, in general, success for me as a writer is asking, has someone stopped after they’ve read what you’ve written, and has it done something to them? The reason I can’t describe it well is that you know when you pick up a book, you read it through and it makes you stop, and there’s an indescribable feeling that you just cannot put into words what this book has done to the way you see the world. That’s what I’m going for in the writing that I want to do, as nonsensical as that sounds.
But in terms of the larger question of whether this project will bring a new African writing, or whether a new writing about Africa will be successful, I think that the measure of success for that will be whether or not new voices continue to come out to describe the different situations and the different goings-on, and whether new voices come out that are also allowed to write about the rest of the world in ways that maybe have nothing to do with Africa, or that change the way that Africa is in relation to the rest of the world. I think that that will be a measure of whether or not this project, and the writers that are involved in this project, is a success. If that appeals to people, and that new way of seeing and writing takes off, then you can say that new things are happening.
I also think that what we haven’t talked a lot about is the availability of literature on the continent itself, whether people are able to read about themselves and know that, if they write, those representations will be distributed within their own country and also abroad. So, say that a Nigerian person has an account of what genocide in Rwanda was like or has an account of what day-to-day life in Ghana is like, [and this person] hasn’t gone out and come back in or is somebody who isn’t completely outside. Whether or not that exchange of literature is able to happen between the different places from an internal perspective, I think, is important. If that also starts occurring more and more, people see that there is a space for this writing and there is a space for their views and for their stories. I think that it will push forth a whole new form and style of writing, a new form of interchanges that will further grow from the writing itself. So that’s what I would say in terms of measuring success.
Diouf: This is precisely what makes your book so successful. It’s a great book because it forces the conversation; you are forced to discuss. The second element, which seems to me to be very important and defined, is one of the benchmarks to explain the success of this book. It contributes to a kind of redefinition of autonomy, a redefinition of inside and outside, and it’s opening a larger space. I enjoyed reading it for the third time. When I was asked to participate in this conversation, I found I had forgotten some things. But one thing that came back after I read the book was an anthropology book on violence I had read, which looks at different situations all over the world from Angola to Mozambique, from Mozambique to Sri Lanka, by an American anthropologist, Carolyn Nordstrom. She has this wonderful sentence on the situation in Africa in which she asks a child soldier why he is fighting, and the child soldier replies, “I forgot.”
This is precisely the question with which your book deals very well. What does it mean, forgetting your childhood? What does it mean to be completely unable to make sense of a family structure? Trying to make sense of a domestic culture is what makes your book so powerful. At the same time, it creates a powerful vision of brutality, while presenting a discovery or rediscovery of the human condition by these child soldiers. So thank you very much. We would now like to open the floor to a few questions.
Audience Member: Let me start with a confession. I have not yet read the book, but this is going to be corrected in the next coming days. I very much enjoyed what you had to say about writing and telling stories. I believe in what the French writer and jazz musician Boris Vian wrote as an epigraph to his L’Écume des jours, which I will translate into English as, “The story is true since I invented it from start to the end.” And that’s what I like. Usually when you say, “Well, this movie is based on true elements,” I don’t think I want to go and see it. Or, if you say, “This book is totally true,” I won’t read it, because if it’s reality, it’s not fiction.
So that would be the remark, and I sort of look at it in a broader situation, as Mamadou did, to say that this is probably the shift that I can see in so-called African literature. It becomes more complicated than just African literature being defined by an African project. The fact is that we don’t know anymore what an African project is, but stories are being told, reconstructed for fiction purposes. There is this continent with its different identities and very different places, and there is this idea you remain African wherever you are somehow. That’s a great shift in African literature, and we should be paying attention to that. I would be very much interested in that writing and hoping that people will pick up on that kind of a project. Now, the Bible has been mentioned, and I understand that it plays a role in your book. That is what revelation does: in a totally nonsensical world, it is supposed to bring in sense. You didn’t have a chance to talk about that.
Iweala: About the Bible and the role of religion? I guess it goes back to violence and what is legitimate and what’s not. One of the things that comes up in the book is what Agu focuses on. There’s a scene where he talks about David and Goliath, and the idea of what it is to be a soldier, and how that’s defined in the Bible. To me, that encapsulates the idea of sanctioned violence: who has the right to use violence, how violence is legitimized through the language and the context, whether or not the use of violence is a good or a bad thing.
There is a tension between being a good soldier and being a good boy. In one sense, you’re told that being a good boy means to avoid all of these sorts of things, and that’s how you fulfill your religious duties and obligations. In the other sense, you’re told that this is sanctioned, and that being a good boy is being a good soldier, and being a good soldier is knowing how to use violence effectively, and that is also religiously sanctioned, whether in the Bible or in any other religious text you pick up. I don’t know if I’m going to be able to give you a clear explanation, but that was definitely one of the things that fascinated me when writing and trying to put together this character.
My grandfather was a Methodist minister, and I always find it very interesting when I go back to Nigeria and go back to church. For anyone who’s been to one of those Pentecostal and evangelical church services to see the sort of fervor. In Nigeria there’s this thing that people always say in prayer, “If there are any enemies of mine may the Lord strike them down along the way.” It seems to run completely counter to the idea of forgiving those who do you wrong or who might do you harm. The epic battle is constantly and consistently in religion — at least in Nigeria (I can’t speak to other places, but I can speak to going to church in Nigeria, which is not something I like to do too much, primarily because I find that this tension is a little bit too much to handle and to negotiate). But that’s something that I wanted to be in the book. I just didn’t want it to do it by writing that this is the tension we are negotiating here. I thought that just lightly touching it or just slightly skirting it might be more interesting.
Diouf: Actually, you keep the tension between the book as a book and the physical book. Sometimes Agu’s not really interested in what is inside the book, but is interested in its physicality, which is also an interesting aspect.
Audience Member: One of the things I thought was so interesting about the book was precisely Agu’s voice. You had mentioned that there were four different languages, or four different voices, what was that exactly? It was awesome.
Iweala: Thank you. Well, the language itself is completely constructed, but it’s based off of trying to look at how people speak pidgin in any one of these places, sort of the vernacular. And then I looked at straight interviews that were done with child soldiers and former child soldiers: how they spoke, specifically, about what they had experienced and how what they experienced affected the way that they spoke. I spent a lot of time just looking at the way they put their sentences together. This might be absurd if you’re looking at the larger context, which is the fact that they’re in an incredibly terrible situation. But I felt that in order to write the book one had to be able to pull apart that language and see how it was put together. So for what I was doing, that’s what it came out of.
Then I looked at how other people had written about these situations and the precursors, such as African writers writing in English who have used and played around with and worked with the English language to represent whatever stories they’re trying to tell. You spoke about Achebe briefly and Ben Okri and Amadou Kourouma. There are so many others who have used and manipulated the English or French language to put together their stories. So that’s where that came from.
Audience Member: If you’re so talented at writing stories, why med school?
Iweala: Wow. Um, no comment. You know, it was a rather complex decision. I don’t necessarily know that I’ve figured it out completely. Those people who are closest to me know that I complain almost constantly about medical school. I think the thing is — and this might sort of go into the larger idea of the project of Africa and who has the authority to speak about Africa, or maybe it’s just a Nigerian thing — that you’re not really accomplished until you’re a doctor or an engineer or something. I think the more legitimate you are, in the sense of the more credibility you have, the more likely it is that your voice will be heard. And this is just one thing.
This is completely getting away from the fact that I’m just interested in being able to help people as much as possible and in working directly with people. We’ll just put it that way, as everyone understands it’s the baseline for wanting to be a doctor. But regarding the larger project of what voices get heard, and how you’re able to represent these voices, and who has access to the different kinds of voices. I think, as a doctor, you’re allowed into so many different aspects of life and are so close to the essence of life itself, it can only help you in creating and generating voices and situations. I don’t know if that’s really answering your question, because it’s sort of an absurd answer and one that I haven’t really figured out yet necessarily. If I make it through med school, maybe I’ll be able to tell you a bit more about what exactly the larger project is.
Audience Member: So I get that it’s telling stories, and it shouldn’t be read as historical, but, at the same time, I think that, as someone who doesn’t know too much about what being a child soldier is like, I wonder, what is the basis of your information and the experiences you’re presenting? You mentioned interviews with child soldiers, and I’m wondering what sort of research you did and how much this project reflects the actual, literal experience of child soldiers, and to what extent, and where?
Iweala: I don’t know that it reflects, in any legitimate way, the actual experience. But what I did do was read tons of interviews. I read a lot of books about child psychology and about how children process, represent, and speak about violence. I spoke to people who had been through these situations, the majority of whom were in Nigeria. I went to speak with people who had been through the civil war in the 1960s and listened to the way that they talked about the violence that happened, the things that they saw, and how that affected the world that they lived in. That was where a lot of the context came from.
I also did research with a group of psychologists and psychiatrists at Boston University medical school who worked specifically on the reintegration of child soldiers and the impact that violence has on children. So I was able to use a lot of material that they had to put together [to create] whatever world it is that exists in the book. That’s the actual solid background, if that’s what you’re looking for. Is that what you’re looking for?
Audience Member: I guess there are two parts. What you addressed was the way in which this violence is processed by a child. But also, to what extent was the violence played out in the way it’s described? You talked about how they would process these experiences, but how representative is the book about the actual reality of the situation? Obviously, this is not about any specific country, or specific war, but I’m wondering where you got that information.
Iweala: As far as creating scenes, there was imagination, but there was also a fair amount of reading and saying, “Oh, this happens, and how can I write about something like this happening? How does that then affect the rest of the story? How does that affect the character, and how the character lives and behaves within the story?” But if you’re asking how representative the book is of actual situations and actual violence, I would say that a lot of what I write about actually does happen. I did take stuff from people’s interviews and people’s experiences to write and construct the book. The idea, of course, is that it is fiction and is essentially just a story that’s made up to get at these things. It’s not saying that this is how this thing actually happens; it’s how the writer sees and hears what someone has told him has happened, how he imagines the situation to be. So I don’t know if that’s very fulfilling as an answer, but that’s all I have for you. Sorry.
Audience Member: No, that’s great. You mentioned before that feeling someone gets after reading an excellent book, so I wanted to say thank you because I definitely felt that after reading your book.
Audience Member: I read the book a few years ago, but I was thinking while the discussion was going on about the timing of the book. At the time it came out, from what I remember, there was very little popularly accessible information on the children who had these kinds of experiences with violence. And so that’s more significant to me in thinking about the legacy or the impact of this book or why it kind of passed in the shadows when thinking about Africa and African children. From what I remember, there were some articles out on child soldiers. Maybe a small handful featured actual interviews with child soldiers or ex-soldiers and gave a platform to them. Then this novel comes out, which is a narrative voice of this child, and it sort of takes on, perhaps, a disproportionate weight in telling this story.
The other thing I was thinking of was in relation to Mamadou’s comment about generational shifts in African literature. I’m not a literary critic or anything like that, but I do like to read, and I was thinking about the ways in which, in earlier generations, there were a lot of writers who were sort of responding to African history, to historical writing on Africa. From what you were saying, and I’ve heard a lot about younger writers, it seems that people are responding more to almost journalistic writing about Africa and responding to the journalistic stories that circulate globally. So I don’t know if that might be one of the dimensions of the generational shift — what kind of disciplines of narration, historical or journalistic, to which Africa writers are responding.
Iweala: I think you make a really interesting point. I wonder — because the journalistic representations of Africa are so defined by the historical representations — if the two are even at all mutually exclusive. I think that having those representations and responding to them, if that’s what happens, is in essence responding to an existing tradition of writing or of representation. But as for the comment you also made about the timing, I agree with you that it really is very important.
I think that 2005, the year that my book came out, the same year that Tony Blair declared that the Commission of Africa had its study out, was the year of Africa. And for the last two or three years, Africa has been at the center of whatever activism is going on in the world. I think that’s going to change now, given that no one has any money to spend anymore on anything; when disposable income goes, those things that are disposable also go. I think that Africa is one of those things in the larger international popular consciousness. But I think it did have a very big impact on what stories came out, and what is now considered to be representative of a new voice. That’s what I was saying: I think the test of whether or not this is successful is if that boost, the moment where people were focused on it, is able to create a whole stream of voices that now come out and don’t need a moment to be seen or to be legitimate or to be heard.
Audience Member: I’m wondering if you feel that your work has been co-opted, in a way, into these representations of Africa that you’re sort of struggling against. Relating that to the question of terror and language and literature, I’m also wondering if — because you mentioned languages in the novel — there’s a way in which language cannot be just a symptom of violence but also a sort of violence against that image. What I’m wondering is, how do you as a writer speak to that, if you feel that your work has been co-opted?
Iweala: In terms of the co-opting of the work, I think that’s like the point that was made earlier: once you’re done with it, you’re done with it. There’s nothing I can do in terms of how x person or y person wants to use it. But it’s interesting. Mamadou and I had a conversation about that, about representations, and I was saying that sometimes I feel a bit annoyed because the larger point, or what I had in mind, of writing a book is missed, and everybody focuses on the violence. Again, I can complain about that as much as I want, but if I’m true to whatever it is that I said an hour ago, then I kind of have to shut up and say, “It’s out there, and it’s what people say.” And you hope to go back again to the idea of more voices: that as more viewpoints become available, they will be put against a bunch of different viewpoints and will not be considered the only things that represents this place. It’s not, then, an ethnography of a place. It is what it is, which is a book.
To the second point, in terms of whether language itself can be used as violence, I think the short answer to that is yes. There are so many examples of that in literature and in the way that we speak right now. The whole idea of hate speech and whatnot, that’s an extreme example, but it’s just in the way that we construct narratives about certain places or certain kinds of people. I went with my girlfriend two days ago to see the movie Taken, which is an action movie that’s come out now. For those who want to know, it is really entertaining but totally nonsensical and offensive in a lot of ways in which they construct characters. You can imagine — well, I won’t give it away; you just have to see it. But there were representations of people that were just completely absurd. If you think about it, that is language, that is art, that is literature used as violence against a certain set of people, perpetuating stereotypes and whatnot. I think it’s very important to realize that and to be aware of that.