The Child Soldier Narrative and the Problem of Arrested Historicization

Abstract

This essay proposes a comparative reading of child soldier narratives from Africa, most of them novels, and argues that the recent texts (those published since the mid-1990s) exhibit a lesser engagement with history than the war novels from the colonial and immediate postcolonial periods. One reason for this loss of historicity lies in the way the human rights frame is applied to the child soldier identity and conditions his or her story. The earlier war novels were written in the context of resistance struggles that highlight the agency of the subject whereas the recent emphasis on the victim status of the child soldier seems to compromise his agency. Looking to narrative as a part of the therapeutic process of recovery, these recent texts contrast a past loss of agency that pertains to the time of the war with a future regaining of agency through recovery. This narrative pattern serves to individualize the child soldier and to shift attention away from social and political conditions that brought on his or her circumstances in the first place. The essay also pays attention to recent texts that critique this trend by framing their narratives as failed novels of education and hence tapping into an earlier tradition of African writing as a way of providing historical contextualization. Thus the works of Ahmadou Kourouma and Emmanuel Dongala demonstrate that the complexity of the historical, political, cultural, as well as individual circumstances of the child soldier requires the deployment of a less literal, more ironic, and even allegorical method of narrative representation.

Eleni Coundouriotis is Associate Professor of English and Associate Director of the Human Rights Institute at the University of Connecticut. She is currently completing a book on the war novel in Africa entitled The People's Right to the Novel. Her earlier work includes Claiming History: Colonialism, Ethnography and the Novel and numerous articles on African fiction, European realism, and human rights.

Notes

1. This situation has led critics to puzzle over what constitutes African literature. Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Lila Azam Zanganeh asks how to define a literature “that takes root far from an emigrant's native land, where his work is barely read at all?” She cites Kossi Efoui, a writer from Togo, who says provocatively “For me, African literature is something that does not exist” (June 12, 2005).

2. This is the argument of my book in progress, The People's Right to the Novel: Fiction and War in Africa. There are some exceptions to this generalization; the war novels of canonical authors such as Soyinka, Ngugi, and Ken Saro-Wiwa. But often, even in the case of canonical authors, their war fiction is neglected and goes out of print. For example, Buchi Emecheta's Destination Biafra (1983, first published 1982) and Flora Nwapa's Never Again (1986, first published 1975) do not enjoy anywhere near the critical attention of their other works and are out of print.

3. Taïeb et al. (2008) rely on Ricoeur's theory of narrative identity, but the idea of “constructing a non-addict identity” through the discovery of an autobiographical narrative has been part of the addiction literature for some time. Thus McIntosh and McKeganey (2000) summarize a number of earlier clinicians who argue that the “capacity of the individual to maintain a narrative of his or her biography is an important component of that process” (1503). Taïeb et al. also point to AA where a “newcomer has to reconstitute his identity through the AA story model.” This form of appropriation is a manifestation of a Ricoeurian refiguration of reality (Taïeb et al.: 995). Taïeb et al. also use Ricoeur to point to the risks involved in the process, showing that the task of appropriation does not always go smoothly (995).

4. James Dawes provides the best definition of this genre that arises alongside a multifaceted “global human rights culture.” This literature has formed “a self-contained set of texts sharing key formal properties, an emerging global subgenre that can help structure high-school and college teaching and research, and that can illuminate urgent questions about the relationships among representation, beauty, ethics, and politics” (Dawes 2007: 190).

5. Fredric Jameson (1986) argued famously that all third-world novels are allegories of the nation. He was widely rebuked for his overgeneralization that seemed to erase the value of the individual stories and the real in novels (Ahmad 2008). However, some measure of allegorical interpretation is necessary to tap into the historical imagination of these texts and their critical engagements with imperialist allegories that seek to appropriate the third world. In the ongoing debates about third-world nationalism, Jameson's thesis is still relevant (Szeman 2006).

6. See Arendt (1968: 269–302) for her discussion of the dehumanizing effects of statelessness.

7. See Derrida's discussion of the supplement in Of Grammatology (1974: 155).

8. Parallels between the Holocaust and the pogroms against the Ibo have been made before, and Adichie repeats these here, but it is the recent discussions of genocide in Africa that free her to talk about the Nigerian Civil War in a new way. Analogies between the earlier outbreaks of genocidal violence in Rwanda and the Nigerian Civil War are not found elsewhere in the literature of the Nigerian Civil War. Furthermore, Adichie depicts the characters in the novel also discussing the genocide of the Herero in German South West Africa in 1904 (2006: 50); an event largely ignored until recently when it was given prominence by Mahmood Mamdani in his history of the Rwanda genocide where he calls the massacre of the Herero the first genocide of the twentieth century (2001: 12).

9. Kiernan argues that historically land has been more than an economic motivation for genocidal violence. The idea of one group's racial superiority feeds directly into a sense of entitlement over land, to the extent that genocidal violence fetishizes land: “Genocidal conquerors legitimize their territorial expansion by racial superiority or glorious antiquity at the same time as they claim a unique capacity to put the conquered lands into productive agricultural use” (2007: 29).

10. Isanusi's appearance is often misread. His exotic dress and strange physical features place him in a long line of figures with strange appearance who are misread as somehow particularly African, while in fact they bear all the signs of the globalized culture of capital: the Liberian war lords in their dresses and purses, the child soldiers with teddy bear back packs, etc., carry the accessories of a global market.

11. Although there is general agreement that Mene is young, the question is whether the identity of the child such as we understand it exists. Kourouma has argued that the child is a recent identity in this sense in Africa; he dates it to the 1990s with urbanization and the proliferation of street children who were vulnerable to conscription. In general parlance everyone is a child in the eyes of anyone older than oneself. Orphans are pervasive in the recent literature (Borgomano 2002).

12. More recently, Sozaboy has been recognized as the most significant precursor of the child soldier narrative that emerged in the late 1990s. Uzodinma Iweala in Beasts of No Nation (2005) very self-consciously imitates Saro-Wiwa's literary rotten english. Chris Abani's Song for Night (2007) and earlier francophone texts such as Ahmadou Kourouma's Allah n'est pas obligé (2000) and Emanuel Dongala's Johnny Chien Méchant (2002) are important examples of this genre. Moreover, the popular success of Ishmael Beah's memoir, which is also indebted to Saro-Wiwa's text, has helped disseminate the genre as human rights narrative. Both of the novels by Nigerians (Iweala and Abani) have an unspecific setting like Sozaboy, although Iweala and Abani use Ibo names for their characters. Moreover, Iweala's title is an uncredited allusion to Soyinka's Season of Anomy where the phrase is used in quotation marks as the accusing speech of one character against those he sees behaving as beasts, reneging their humanity and community, or nation (Soyinka 1974: 296).

13. Dongala is very explicit about Laokole's fury; she beats Johnny to death avenging his violence against women in particular: “I began stomping, crushing, kicking with all my might, aiming my blows at those genitals that had humiliated so many women. I thought of the twelve-year-old girl in the camp; I thought of my daughter [a child she adopts], whom he’d nearly flayed alive with lashes from his belt; and I rammed him ceaselessly between the legs. I trampled, pounded, pulverized his groin” (2006: 320).

14. I am alluding here to Godwin Wachira's classic treatment of this theme in the 1968 novel about the Mau Mau, Ordeal in the Forest.