| Chapter 1: | Global Specters |
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Agu and My Luck stand at two ends of this definition. In Beasts of No Nation, Agu rapes and is raped, pillages, and murders, though Iweala gives him a proto-conscience: “I am not bad boy. I am soldier and soldier is not bad if he is killing. I am telling this to myself because soldier is supposed to be killing, killing, killing. So if I am killing, then I am only doing what is right. I am singing song to myself because I am hearing too many voice in my head telling me I am bad boy” (23). The immature voice, victimization, and conscience create a condition of sympathy for the would-be subject of the law who is at once violent and in need of protection. Abani's My Luck refuses to take refuge in this ideology of the child. His initiation into conflict left him at age thirteen “armed and lost in a war with the taste for rape.” In a voice that is anything but childlike, he remembers his transformation when Ijeoma (whose Igbo name he translates as Good Life) said:
My Luck's complicated construction as the narrator subverts the terms and rationale of the legal conventions. At the outset, he is a landmine diffuser, a fifteen-year-old who can still pass for twelve, yet who is capable of deep love with a fellow “soldier” (who was not “recruited for sexual purposes and forced marriage,” but who joined willingly as did the other children), and a narrator whose gestures and voice speak primarily in the mature language of poetics. Although under age eighteen and a participant in war, he invites neither saving (Ijeoma has already accomplished that), nor punishment or moral development (he is beyond the reaches of both). His language supersedes the law's ability to foster the “full development of personality” while the narrative places him beyond its material claims and effects.
The IHL excerpts above do not capture the full scope of these documents; however, they intimate the ways in which “the effort to make