Beasts of No Nation
| Author | Uzodinma Iweala |
|---|---|
| Country | Liberia |
| Genre | War drama |
| Publisher | Harper Perennial |
|
Publication date
|
2005 |
Beasts of No Nation is a 2005 novel by the Nigerian-American author Uzodinma Iweala, that takes its title from Fela Kuti's 1989 album with the same name. The book was adapted as a film in 2015.
The novel follows the journey of a young boy, Agu, who is forced to join a group of soldiers in Liberia a West African country. While Agu fears his commander and many of the men around him, his fledgling childhood has been brutally shattered by the war raging through his country, and he is at first conflicted by simultaneous revulsion by and fascination with the mechanics of war. Iweala does not shy away from explicit, visceral detail and paints a complex, difficult picture of Agu as a child soldier. The book does not give any direct clue as to which country it takes place in, and it remains undisclosed. The book is notable for its confrontational, immersive first-person narrative.
The novel is about a West African boy named Agu who is forced to become a child soldier. When war came to his family's small village, Agu’s mother and sister are able to leave with the UN peacekeepers, but Agu is ordered to stay behind and fight with his father and the other men of the village. When soldiers attack the village the men realize that whether they hide or not they will eventually be killed. They mount an attack but Agu runs away at his father's wishes.
Agu hides and is soon found by soldiers, who coerce him to join their rebel force. In a bloody initiation, the commander forces him to kill an unarmed man.
As Agu is forced to leave his childhood behind, he reminisces about the past: his family, his love of reading and school, his dream of becoming an important doctor, and how he used to read the Bible every day. He thinks about how he and his friend used to play at war and how this war is not the same. He fears that God hates him for killing others, but he soon forces himself to believe that this is what God wants, because “he is soldier and this is what soldiers do in war.” He befriends a mute boy named Strika, and together they face the crimes and hardships of war: looting, rape, killing, and starvation.
Agu loses track of time, understanding only that he was a child before that war but has become a man in a seemingly never-ending trial by fire. He wants to stop killing but fears that so doing will get him killed by the Commandant. During this time of war Agu and the army have very little to eat, so they eat what they can: rats, small game, goats, and sometimes other people. The food is not cooked enough for fear that others will see the fire, and the water is known to contain human feces. Agu and other children in the battalion are raped by the Commandant in return for small tokens. While Agu hates the rape he does not resist as he fears he will be killed by the Commandant if he does so.
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