Uzodinma Iweala is a medical student at Columbia and the author of Beasts of No Nation (2005), 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. It has now been translated into 11 languages and won several literary prizes. Below is an edited excerpt 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.
Here, Iweala addresses the idea of a “clean war,” a politically sanctioned conflict, as opposed to an aimless, barbaric “dirty war,” and how this dichotomy relates to the portrayal of conflicts in Africa. Responses to this topic are by V. Y. Mudimbe, Newman Ivey White Professor of Literature at Duke University and author of The Idea of Africa and Table of Faith; Elsadig Elsheikh, a human-rights leader in residence at Columbia’s Human Rights Advocates Program; and Allan Thompson, a journalism professor at Carleton University.
Additional comments are posted by readers. To read the full edited transcript or listen to podcasts of the public event, click here. To view other blog discussions, click here. [Perhaps put this in the side bar]
Mamadou Diouf: The title of your book, Beasts of No Nation, announces that the violence that defines this text is not linked to a particular political project. When compared to 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.
So what is the imagination behind this, and how does it relate to the general presentation of what Africa is? It’s interesting that you use an expression that is the same as the title of V. Y. Mudimbe’s book, The Idea of Africa, and say, like Mudimbe, that the idea of Africa is “revealed in the Western text.” There is this idea that this continent is the locus of disaster, that people there are not even able to fight a clean war. So how do you even negotiate these different tensions?
Uzodinma Iweala: You bring up a really interesting term, the idea that you can have a clean war and that you can have clean destruction. War essentially destroys and makes nonsense of what is organized. 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. You see some of the things that we’ve justified as the country of the United States because we have the voice to explain the kind of violence that we use, it’s insanity. All of the violence and the destruction that we use, that’s insane anywhere. It’s just that in one place we can develop rules governing how we kill and how we decide to kill, who gets to die, and who gets a voice afterward, and who gets a voice while killing or after being killed. Meanwhile, in another place it’s put forward that there is no organization or structure.
From 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 as chaotic, savage. You suggested that there is a point when violence gets disassociated from structure. In my mind, there isn’t. In my mind, there’s definitely always an association with a political context, with its aims and goals. It’s just that I decided not to have my story set in a particular country. I didn’t want to write about a specific place. I wanted to write about the larger idea of violence and the structures that it creates in and of itself.
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