Beasts of No Nation dir. by Cary Joji Fukunaga (review)

Interrupted and difficult coming-of-age narratives have often been the focus of postcolonial novels, and more recently this narrative has undergone a renewed exploration in works that focus on children’s involvement in civil wars, particularly on the African continent. While the easy symbolic parallels between child and nation have fallen apart, the reality of child soldiers involved in African wars looms large in contemporary novels and memoirs. It is estimated that up to three hundred thousand child soldiers are currently part of armed forces worldwide, with one hundred and twenty thousand in Africa alone. With the staggering numbers and easily available accounts of the abuse perpetrated by and upon child soldiers, children’s participation in civil wars and genocides has steadily become the subject of novels and memoirs from war-fraught postcolonial regions. Yet another factor that has contributed to the rise of these narratives is the Western publishing space, which has provided abundant opportunity and encouragement for these works to thrive, whether in the form of book contracts with major presses or in terms of prizes, mentions on bestseller lists, and movie option deals.

It is thus no surprise that the last few years have seen the child soldier novel come to life on the big screen, with Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire’s Johnny Mad Dog(2008) based on a novel by the Congolese author Emmanuel Dongala, and most recently Cary Joji Fukunaga’s Beasts of No Nation(2015) based on the novel of the same name by the Nigerian-American writer Uzodinma Iweala. Fukanaga’s adapted film is much more of a commercial and highly publicized event compared to the more modestly released Johnny Mad Dog. Part of the reason is that the novel was widely celebrated in the United States, unlike the translated Johnny Mad Dog, which was disseminated to a largely academic audience. Beasts of No Nationwas voted “A Best Book of the Year” by Time, People, Slate, Entertainment Weekly, and New York Magazineand was reviewed in major media outlets such as the New Yorker, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and Omagazine. With such a strong mainstream force behind it, there was a ready-made audience for the film version, thus overriding the Hollywood concern that it is hard to produce and disseminate cinema from or about Africa. Furthermore, casting the well-known British television and movie star Idris Elba in the role of the cruel Commandant also ensured a Western audience.

Beasts of No Nationstarts with a frame-within-the-frame as a broken television set zooms out to reveal a group of kids playing in a large meadow. The narrator, Agu (played by the Ghanaian actor Abraham Attah), tells the viewer in heavy, halting English that “our country is at war,” while the young boy Agu on screen is seen happily chatting away with his friend in Twi, devising games, and eventually moving from the meadow into a street that seems destroyed by war. The camera continues to pan to shots of tanks, and the narrator tells us that they are safe since they are in a buffer zone, while people are suffering elsewhere. As soon as it is established that Agu is a young boy with a bright future, the story morphs into a ruptured coming-of-age tale in which the young adult Agu is orphaned and descends into a hellish world, his psyche altering slowly until brutality becomes normal and he commits acts of violence with ease. He comes in contact with the Commandant, a soft-spoken yet menacing man who attempts to play surrogate parent to his child soldier militia while forcing them into gruesome acts of violence. Agu starts to be shaped by his experience of trauma, with eyes glazed, hope fading, and the flashbacks of his old, happy life becoming more and more distant until he soon resembles everyone else in the gang. Once his only ally, Striker...