Emerging African Voices: A Study of Contemporary African Literatu ...

what might be called a humanitarian interpretation of these novels, an approach which must on some level replicate the problematic politics of normative IHL itself, I am interested in how Iweala and Abani open up narrative spaces in an attempt to refigure the relationship between reader and text, to resist the pull of identification and/as appropriation while insisting on other forms of engagement with the history that haunts us.

As the legibility of literary subjectivity and legal standing often depends upon national belonging, Iweala and Abani's Nigerian antecedents frame an understanding of what is at stake in their narrative approaches. Writing from the United States and explicitly invoking, among diverse global influences, a Nigerian literary tradition that includes Amos Tutuola, Chinua Achebe, Ken Saro-Wiwa, and Ben Okri, Iweala and Abani navigate competing allegiances and contexts.⁴ Tutuola's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts and Saro-Wiwa's Sozaboy: A Novel in Rotten English, first published in 1954 and 1985, respectively, have particular significance here in their emphasis on the construction of subjectivity made possible by their narrators' journeys through liminal spaces and temporal displacements, between the known and unknowable, and the disenchanted versus enchanted worlds of materiality and imagination.⁵ Tutuola, first celebrated as a “naturalist” author and Saro-Wiwa, whose political activism is often separated from discussions of voice in Sozaboy, also provide a helpful grounding in earlier readings of aesthetics and/of politics in Nigerian literature. Iweala and Abani extend those journeys of their narrators (Abani also shares Saro-Wiwa's explicit focus on the Nigeria-Biafra Civil War) within and beyond national borders, such that we might pursue a “narratological approach [that] opens for analysis the ways in which the globalization of literature and the law are mutually implicated” (Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc. 44). Through Agu and My Luck, Iweala and Abani evoke the fractures in normative narratives of child soldiers as those subjects whom the law can restore to the path of proper development (the characters are either beyond the reach of the law or the law is insufficient in restoring them to the expected trajectory of the Bildungsroman) and it is through the ghostly gestures and “voice” of My Luck that Abani shows us the limits of the law by asking us to imagine beyond it.