Uzodinma Iweala
Author of Beasts of No Nation
About the Author
Uzodinma Iweala is the author of Beasts of No Nation, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the New York Public Library Young Lions Award, and the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2007 he was selected as one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists. A show more graduate of Harvard University and the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, he lives in New York City and Abuja, Nigeria. show less
Image credit: Photo by user Jummai / Wikimedia Commons
Works by Uzodinma Iweala
Little Enemyz [Hörspiel] 1 copy
Sınırsız Canavarlar 1 copy
Associated Works
The Decameron Project: 29 New Stories from the Pandemic (2020) — Contributor — 157 copies, 5 reviews
Know the Past, Find the Future: The New York Public Library at 100 (2011) — Contributor — 132 copies, 4 reviews
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Iweala, Uzodinma
- Birthdate
- 1982-11-05
- Gender
- male
- Education
- St. Albans, Washington, D.C.
Harvard University (2004)
Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons (2011) - Occupations
- physician
- Organizations
- Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study
- Awards and honors
- Granta's Best Of Young American Novelists (2007)
Hoopes Prize and Dorothy Hicks Lee Prize for Outstanding Undergraduate Thesis - Nationality
- USA (birth)
- Birthplace
- Washington, D.C., USA
- Places of residence
- Washington, D.C., USA
Lagos, Nigeria
New York, New York, USA - Map Location
- USA
Members
Reviews
Agu is a young boy (I’m guessing around 10 or 11 years old) from an unnamed West African country that is experiencing a civil war. After another boy soldier discovers him hiding in a hut, he is forced to join a military unit and become a soldier. The novel is told in first person from Agu’s point of view and the chapters alternate between the present day and flashbacks to Agu’s life before the war, when he was a gifted and popular young boy living a content life with this parents and show more younger sister.
The present day scenes that document Agu’s experiences as a soldier are horrifying and disturbing. While I’ve read quite a bit about the child soldier issue in the news, it’s an entirely different experience to read a fictional account from the perspective of a child forced to participate in unbelievable violence. At times he tries to rationalize it by telling himself that it’s ok, because it’s a soldier’s job to kill. At other times he is plagued by guilt, because he knows that what he is doing is terribly wrong. It’s completely heartbreaking.
Oddly enough, I recently said that I planned to stay away from child narration for a while, but I’m glad I decided to read this. From the book notes, I learned that the author wrote this as his undergraduate thesis at Harvard. It’s very impressive, and I look forward to reading more from him. Recommended. show less
The present day scenes that document Agu’s experiences as a soldier are horrifying and disturbing. While I’ve read quite a bit about the child soldier issue in the news, it’s an entirely different experience to read a fictional account from the perspective of a child forced to participate in unbelievable violence. At times he tries to rationalize it by telling himself that it’s ok, because it’s a soldier’s job to kill. At other times he is plagued by guilt, because he knows that what he is doing is terribly wrong. It’s completely heartbreaking.
Oddly enough, I recently said that I planned to stay away from child narration for a while, but I’m glad I decided to read this. From the book notes, I learned that the author wrote this as his undergraduate thesis at Harvard. It’s very impressive, and I look forward to reading more from him. Recommended. show less
Rating: 4* of five
The Publisher Says: In this stunning debut novel, Agu, a young boy in an unnamed West African nation, is recruited into a unit of guerrilla fighters as civil war engulfs his country. Haunted by his father's own death at the hands of militants, Agu is vulnerable to the dangerous yet paternal nature of his new commander. While the war rages on, Agu becomes increasingly divorced from the life he had known before the conflict started a life of school friends, church services, show more and time with his family still intact.
In a powerful, strikingly original voice that vividly captures Agu's youth and confusion, Uzodinma Iweala has produced a harrowing, inventive, and deeply affecting novel.
My Review: Men writing in the voice of a child are at a disadvantage because childhood is traditionally thought of as a woman's preserve. Iweala writes about a boy who is only nominally a child, though; one of the thousands of boys who are compelled to serve in the civil wars and rebellions of Africa's troubled states.
He does this with force, beauty, and horror.
This moment is the narrator's first moment of joy:
I can't stress enough that this first novel is To Be Read! The passage above, in the context of the story, brought me to tears. It's a lovely piece of writing no matter what...but coming where it does in this wrenchingly infuriating story, it's got a wallop that must be experienced.
Beasts of No Nation was published in 2005. It's written by a Nigerian man of (then) some 23 years of age. Jamaica Kincaid acted as his advisor. Someone explain to me, that all being said, why the Adichie (of similar background and age) cult got rollin' and there was not an Iweala cult...?
This author deserves your attention. Please read his work. It's not flawless, but it's head and shoulders above most things that clutter our shelves!
Strongly recommended.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. show less
The Publisher Says: In this stunning debut novel, Agu, a young boy in an unnamed West African nation, is recruited into a unit of guerrilla fighters as civil war engulfs his country. Haunted by his father's own death at the hands of militants, Agu is vulnerable to the dangerous yet paternal nature of his new commander. While the war rages on, Agu becomes increasingly divorced from the life he had known before the conflict started a life of school friends, church services, show more and time with his family still intact.
In a powerful, strikingly original voice that vividly captures Agu's youth and confusion, Uzodinma Iweala has produced a harrowing, inventive, and deeply affecting novel.
My Review: Men writing in the voice of a child are at a disadvantage because childhood is traditionally thought of as a woman's preserve. Iweala writes about a boy who is only nominally a child, though; one of the thousands of boys who are compelled to serve in the civil wars and rebellions of Africa's troubled states.
He does this with force, beauty, and horror.
This moment is the narrator's first moment of joy:
Nobody is seeing me as I am getting up and walking through the tree right to the road. I am feeling breezes to my back that is pushing me to walk far far away from here and I am moving quickly quickly onto the road where I am just walking walking walking to where the sun is setting. I am looking at it and wanting to catch it in my hand to be squeezing until the color are dripping out from it forever. That way everywhere it is always dark and nobody is ever having to see any of the terrible thing that is happening in this world.
I can't stress enough that this first novel is To Be Read! The passage above, in the context of the story, brought me to tears. It's a lovely piece of writing no matter what...but coming where it does in this wrenchingly infuriating story, it's got a wallop that must be experienced.
Beasts of No Nation was published in 2005. It's written by a Nigerian man of (then) some 23 years of age. Jamaica Kincaid acted as his advisor. Someone explain to me, that all being said, why the Adichie (of similar background and age) cult got rollin' and there was not an Iweala cult...?
This author deserves your attention. Please read his work. It's not flawless, but it's head and shoulders above most things that clutter our shelves!
Strongly recommended.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. show less
When we sit in our comfortable homes, on our cozy couches, warm, dry, and full, it is hard to imagine lives other than our own. Even if we see the horrific ways that some people are forced to live on television, it all feels very removed from us. But when we encounter it in a book, we are right there with the character, facing the terror, the want and deprivation, and the brutality that is life in some corners of the world. It gets under our skin and inhabits our minds with its truths. show more Uzodinma Iweala's visceral and compelling novel, Beasts of No Nation, is one of those books that does not allow the reader to look away from the inhumanity, horror, and loss of innocence that even young children experience daily in a world rent by civil war.
In an unnamed West African nation, Agu is a child soldier. He was conscripted into the guerrilla army when he was found hiding in an abandoned village. Although just a boy, his choice is to become a soldier or to die. So he joins an army without a direction, not understanding its greater purpose, learning to kill simply because the Commandant orders him to do so. He is merely a pawn in a war he doesn't understand and is forced to choose a side he knows nothing about. Although Agu's family is gone, he befriends one of the other boys, Strika, and vies for attention from the brutal Commandant just as if from a benign father. Interspersed with the marching, the physical deprivation, and the atrocities of Agu's new life, are memories of a more peaceful time, life before the war came to his village. Agu was the son of the local school teacher. He was curious, intelligent, and present. These memories of his past are so at odds with his present that it is painful. The Agu of the guerrilla warriors is unquestioning, shut down, and as disconnected from emotion and morality as he can make himself be so as to survive. But what will it mean to survive in such a place and such a state as this? He is indeed one of the beasts of the title.
This is a very slight but powerful novel, heartbreaking in its depiction of this almost unimaginable reality. It is a searing look at the horrors our modern world has created and the stripping of humanity that it allows. Agu tells his own story in first person, present tense, keeping the narrative tension high and immediate throughout the entirety of the story. He narrates in a sing-song pidgin English which takes a little getting used to and is an odd choice of narrative voice given that this is fictional, not a translation, and the author himself is a native English speaker. It does give the reader more of a sense of foreignness than a more traditional grammar would have and perhaps adds to the childishness of Agu's voice as well. The ending is abrupt and almost trance-like but contains wisps of hope amidst ancient-feeling sadness. This is not a book for the faint of heart. It is raw and disturbing. It is unrelenting and graphic. There is no sense of right or good in the conflict and there's brutality on both sides. Agu himself is both victim and perpetrator. Iweala has imagined a terrible, terrible story here, but one that we cannot ignore. I promise that Agu and his fate will haunt you. show less
In an unnamed West African nation, Agu is a child soldier. He was conscripted into the guerrilla army when he was found hiding in an abandoned village. Although just a boy, his choice is to become a soldier or to die. So he joins an army without a direction, not understanding its greater purpose, learning to kill simply because the Commandant orders him to do so. He is merely a pawn in a war he doesn't understand and is forced to choose a side he knows nothing about. Although Agu's family is gone, he befriends one of the other boys, Strika, and vies for attention from the brutal Commandant just as if from a benign father. Interspersed with the marching, the physical deprivation, and the atrocities of Agu's new life, are memories of a more peaceful time, life before the war came to his village. Agu was the son of the local school teacher. He was curious, intelligent, and present. These memories of his past are so at odds with his present that it is painful. The Agu of the guerrilla warriors is unquestioning, shut down, and as disconnected from emotion and morality as he can make himself be so as to survive. But what will it mean to survive in such a place and such a state as this? He is indeed one of the beasts of the title.
This is a very slight but powerful novel, heartbreaking in its depiction of this almost unimaginable reality. It is a searing look at the horrors our modern world has created and the stripping of humanity that it allows. Agu tells his own story in first person, present tense, keeping the narrative tension high and immediate throughout the entirety of the story. He narrates in a sing-song pidgin English which takes a little getting used to and is an odd choice of narrative voice given that this is fictional, not a translation, and the author himself is a native English speaker. It does give the reader more of a sense of foreignness than a more traditional grammar would have and perhaps adds to the childishness of Agu's voice as well. The ending is abrupt and almost trance-like but contains wisps of hope amidst ancient-feeling sadness. This is not a book for the faint of heart. It is raw and disturbing. It is unrelenting and graphic. There is no sense of right or good in the conflict and there's brutality on both sides. Agu himself is both victim and perpetrator. Iweala has imagined a terrible, terrible story here, but one that we cannot ignore. I promise that Agu and his fate will haunt you. show less
Maybe everyone should read a novel written in "rotten English" once in a while. Sure, it's ungrammatical, difficult to get used to, and demands a certain amount of patience, but precisely because it makes mincemeant of the grammar and diction that most of us expect from serious novels it's got a vivacity and immediacy that's wonderful to experience. Like second-language learners whose imprecise use of tired clichés inadvertently breathes new life into them, the language used in this novel show more opens up whole new vistas for English by flat-out disregarding most of its rules. Perhaps readers who've resigned themselves to the fact to the fact that English has more-or-less reached the limits of its expressive capability should pick up "Beasts of No Nation" just so they can be proven wrong.
That said, I'm not sure if "Beasts of No Nation" is really a great novel. I don't think it achieves the emotional resonance of Ken Saro-Wiwa's wonderful - and, frankly, somewhat similar - "Sozaboy," and some readers will likely find its limited and necessarily repetitious vocabulary frustrating. There's also the problem of subject matter. The fact that the book relates the heartbreaking story of Agu, a child soldier caught up in one of the continent's civil wars, makes it difficult to judge on purely aesthetic grounds. One supposes, after all, that there are plenty of children like Agu who cannot tell any other story about themselves. On a realted note, the fact that the novel's author, Uzodinma Iweala, is a highly educated, well-to-do son of a Nigerian emigrant family who came across most of this material by working with former refugees also suggests a host of questions concerning appropriation and authenticity that are also, I imagine, delicate and complicated. Still, I'd be interested to know how "rotten English" might tell stories that were less sad than Agu's, if perahps also less socialy useful. Has somebody written rotten English's "Pride and Prejudice" yet? How about its "Portnoy's Complaint?" Now, that`s something I'd like to read. show less
That said, I'm not sure if "Beasts of No Nation" is really a great novel. I don't think it achieves the emotional resonance of Ken Saro-Wiwa's wonderful - and, frankly, somewhat similar - "Sozaboy," and some readers will likely find its limited and necessarily repetitious vocabulary frustrating. There's also the problem of subject matter. The fact that the book relates the heartbreaking story of Agu, a child soldier caught up in one of the continent's civil wars, makes it difficult to judge on purely aesthetic grounds. One supposes, after all, that there are plenty of children like Agu who cannot tell any other story about themselves. On a realted note, the fact that the novel's author, Uzodinma Iweala, is a highly educated, well-to-do son of a Nigerian emigrant family who came across most of this material by working with former refugees also suggests a host of questions concerning appropriation and authenticity that are also, I imagine, delicate and complicated. Still, I'd be interested to know how "rotten English" might tell stories that were less sad than Agu's, if perahps also less socialy useful. Has somebody written rotten English's "Pride and Prejudice" yet? How about its "Portnoy's Complaint?" Now, that`s something I'd like to read. show less
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