| Chapter 1: | Global Specters |
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of the global South: “The dissensual Bildungsroman inverts the affirmative rights claim of the idealist genre by publicizing the discrepancy between the rhetoric of liberty, equality, and fraternity and the inegalitarian social formations and relations in which that rhetoric is put into historical practice” (Human Rights, Inc. 180–82). Beasts of No Nation and Song for Night contest even this third category, however, because the stories emerge out of the disintegration of the public sphere itself. While Iweala does not relinquish a longing for a viable (international) public sphere in Beasts of No Nation, he grounds Agu's experience in social chaos that is seemingly divorced from bona fide political concerns. At moments of extreme violence, Agu imagines himself acting out folktales, experiencing initiation rituals of manhood or animal sacrifice, or being transformed into the animal world. In moments of nostalgia, he lingers over memories of his nuclear family, Bible study and church, and his role as prize student to his teacher, Gloria. Abani, on the other hand, writes out of the failure of the public sphere. The setting of Song for Night is both the Nigeria-Biafra Civil War—the story commences when My Luck's name, given by his mother, literally fails him on the minefield—and the twilight world between life and death (the loss of luck is thus his own and his mother's). My Luck also brings to mind Ken Saro-Wiwa's protagonist in Sozaboy (soldier boy), who introduced himself as “free-born of Dukana,” “the only son of my mama,” who has “passed my elementary six distinction,” but now cannot afford the school fees: “The thing pained me bad because I wanted to be a big man like lawyer or doctor riding car and talking big big English. In fact I used to know English in the school and every time I will try to read any book that I see. So when I see that I cannot go secondary, I was not happy. However, that is my luck” (11, emphasis added). Abani insists on literary and historical specificity as a condition for meaning, even when he places historical materiality out of his character's reach. This poses the more difficult challenge of managing our expectations as readers, of reading a novella narrated by a child soldier in an adult voice without attempting to recuperate the character, the exclusionary values of a normative public sphere, the bildungsroman form, or a literary history in solely national terms.