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

and promoted modern socialization” (Moretti 10). In his landmark book on human rights and literature, Slaughter looks at the roots of this alliance in narrative parallels between the UDHR and the bildungsroman, both of which are quintessentially and paradigmatically modern forms whose tutelary function is the production of discursive norms in and for the public sphere.¹³ The “novelization of citizenship” in these forms depends upon the idealized public sphere's ability to “manufacture consent for the state's legitimacy.”¹⁴ For if, as Franco Moretti states, the bildungsroman is “the most contradictory of modern symbolic forms,” then it reminds us that “in our world socialization itself consists first of all in the interiorization of a contradiction” between the private individual and the public sphere (10, original emphasis). Narratives of child soldiers, whose interiority is ostensibly immature and who have only marginal access to the public sphere, reveal fissures within the legal and literary bildungsroman's ideological assumptions as well as the weakness of its generic and topological forms. We see two extremes of interiority in Agu and My Luck's voices. While Agu's is persistently childlike, My Luck knowingly tells the reader, “If you are anything like Ijeoma [read: capable of caring for me] you will say that I sound too old for my age” (Abani, Song for Night 19). Moretti argues that the representation of modernity depends upon the satisfactory progression from youth to adulthood, “by curbing [youth's] intrinsically boundless dynamism, only by agreeing to betray to a certain extent its very essence…Only thus, we may add, can it be ‘made human’ ” (6). If assuaging modernity's “hostile force” depends upon this narrative teleology (Moretti 6), child soldiers would seem to mark its failures. Iweala and Abani's novels of child soldiers are driven by the question of narrative completion. Implicit in the novels' premises is the expectation of a resolution of the question of how the narrators will fare in relation to normative models of development and justice. Slaughter reads the ideological implications of three major trajectories of bildungsromane. Between the idealist bildungsroman, in which the individual and society “achieve a mutual accord,” and the realist form, which “tend[s] to depict the social order as intractable” such that “personality development appears as a process of assimilation,” he locates the “dissensual,” often postcolonial bildungsroman