Alum’s Book Looks at Child Soldiers

Calling those who commit acts of horrific violence “inhuman” does not do justice to their complex situation, Uzodinma Iweala ’04 said yesterday at a reading of his critically acclaimed first novel, “Beasts of No Nation,” in the Barker Center. More than 60 people turned out to hear an excerpt from the new work, which tells the story of a African child soldier.

“The person who is doing the killing is still as human as you would be if you were in that situation,” Iweala said.

In the passage he read, Agu, the young narrator, is forced to kill for the first time. His leader guides his hand as he begins to hack a man to death with a machete.

“I am seeing each drop of blood and each drop of sweat flying here and there. I am hearing the bird flapping their wing as they are leaving all the tree,” Iweala read. “It is sounding like thunder.”

Born in America, Iweala comes from a Nigerian family. The novel is the product of his senior creative-writing thesis, which he completed under the tutelage of Visiting Lecturer on African American Studies and on English Language and Literature Jamaica Kincaid.

“I knew right away that it was something that should be read by as many people as possible,” Kincaid said in her introduction to the reading yesterday.

“Beasts of No Nation” was published this year by HarperCollins, and Iweala has toured the U.S., England, and Canada to promote it. In an interview, he said that he may be visiting other European countries when translations of the novel are published.

Both The New York Times and the Washington Post have profiled Iweala as a rising young writer.

But, when he used the phrase “narrative construct” in the question and answer session after the reading, he paused to chuckle at himself.

In response to his acclaim, Iweala told The Crimson yesterday, “The best thing is that you know people are interested in what you have to say.”

One of Iweala’s most important inspirations for the novel was China Keitetsi, a child soldier from Uganda who addressed the Harvard African Students Association during Iweala’s junior year, he said.

He tried to work on the story in Nigeria the following summer, but he said he found that he needed distance from the country in order to write about it.

“Beasts of No Nation” is set in an unnamed African country, but Iweala said he used details of culture, language, and landscape drawn from Nigeria.

In order to write the story, the harrowing account of the atrocities endured and enacted by a young boy, Iweala said he read reports and interviews with child soldiers from Amnesty International and the Human Rights Watch. He said he also interviewed people who had lived through the Nigerian civil war in the 1960s.

“What people usually don’t get is the resilience of African people, and the hope they have for the future,” he said after the reading. “You have to tell the good with the bad.”

Iweala said he hopes that his novel will make people think more deeply about the plight of child soldiers.

Iweala said he is currently applying to medical school. “Medicine has an immediate tangible impact that writing doesn’t always have,” he said in an interview.

But, he said, he has no doubt he will continue writing. He is working on a second novel.

“I have every confidence he’ll follow through,” Kincaid told The Crimson. “He’s in the realm of literature.”