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

losses that are marked by child soldiers increasingly seem to haunt the social imaginary, reminding us that “[h]aunting belongs to the structure of every hegemony” (Derrida, Specters of Marx 87). Beasts of No Nation and Song for Night draw attention to the colonial and global implications of the conflicts involving child soldiers and the stories, legal and otherwise, that get told about them. The authors' shared Nigerian literary heritage and their shaping of the “world republic of letters” through stories of the subaltern ask us to reflect critically on the interpretative frameworks we bring to such work. Reading these novels within the context of critical analysis of relevant international humanitarian and human rights law (IHL) enables us to rethink human rights as what Slaughter terms “a question of both literacy and legislation, as much matters of literature as of law” (Human Rights, Inc. 3). Indeed, he argues that “what we might call the new literary humanitarianism—the Western desire for bildungsromane of the non-Western other that is enacted through book markets—may be the latest in a series of globalizing forces that encourages the technology-transfers of human rights and the Bildungsroman” (Human Rights, Inc. 314). Iweala and Abani both write to great acclaim, and Beasts of No Nation and Song for Night share many features of the novel of the subject's individual formation and socialization. Significantly, Beasts of No Nation adheres more closely to the expected trajectory of the bildungsroman and has sold much more widely.³ At the same time, the fictional authority of child soldiers, especially given their conflicted legal status, underscores their currency as “phantom subjects of history” (Gordon 196). Their hauntings have both reductive and productive potential, depending on the ways that the narrators, Agu and My Luck, and the trajectories of their stories ultimately secure or undermine the promise of the bildungsroman genre. In productive terms, as Avery Gordon notes, “[p]erceiving the lost subjects of history—the missing and lost ones and the blind fields they inhabit—makes all the difference to any project trying to find the address of the present” (195). Fiction's ability to reveal those “blind fields” brings us into greater proximity with the very real suffering child soldiers incur and inflict even as it insists that we reflect critically on the terms of this relationship. Rather than attempt