Vulnerability and Security in Human Rights Literature and Visual Culture

A primary feature of vulnerability theory is its attempt to characterize simultaneously a universal human condition and particular circumstances. On the one hand, vulnerability invokes the risks and rewards of relationality that everyone shares by virtue of embodied, affective existence: one’s susceptibility to loss, injury, violence, and death, as well as to desire, recognition, and community. On the other hand, when used in juridical contexts or in reference to imposed precarity, it defines and describes populations or persons in exceptional danger. Within international human rights legal instruments, “vulnerable populations” can refer to many kinds and categories of peoples, including women, children, refugees, prisoners, survivors of mass violence, persons defined according to mental capacity or debility, and so forth.¹ Any list of vulnerable populations is notable for the lack of commonality among its terms: the definition may depend upon a wide range of natural and human-made factors such as physical or mental capacities, citizenship status, professional activities, or the experience of harm. What links these categories and triggers both the special procedural status of the claimants within international human rights law and the protective duties of the state to which they are entitled is their victimhood. Indeed, Sally Engle Merry writes that “[v]ictims must, therefore, be vulnerable and suffering bodies rather than political persons” to warrant human rights action.² That vulnerability defined as victimhood in a way that seems to preclude political subjectivity activates liberal human rights law presents a central challenge: How can vulnerability theory frame an empowering, alternative approach to human rights as one path toward justice?

As discussed in the introduction, embodied vulnerability, theorized by Anna Grear, strives to resolve this contradiction between vulnerability as victimhood and what I would call strategic vulnerability: vulnerability that does not wholly define subjectivity but describes a dimension of the subject’s social positionality that, while often linked to suffering, can also be mobilized for particular ends. Embodied vulnerability is “more than the capacity for suffering” in Grear’s theorization; it also defines the specific conditions of human intercorporeality, which Maurice Merleau-Ponty explains in terms of the interrelationship of the human being and the world that takes place primarily through the subject’s sensory perception.³ Because a politics based in embodied human vulnerability requires an accounting for the specific circumstances of one’s differentiated existence, Grear writes that it enables “a political consciousness of standing in shared space.”⁴ But whose political consciousness is addressed here? Those who are vulnerable, or those who witness them? And what is the relationship between perception and the social imaginary in which it gains meaning? And to what extent can the experience or understanding of embodied vulnerability create or make visible space for the political agency of those very persons defined as vulnerable? Under what circumstances can personal vulnerability become transformed into the right to security of person as opposed to one’s biopolitical securitization within the global military-industrial complex (and its offshoots and legacies); or are the two inevitably one and the same? Answers to these questions depend not solely on a notion of shared space, but also of a shared time in which political consciousness can take shape and be exercised. Moreover, they depend upon the extent to which ideas and practices of strategic vulnerability can navigate between the (relatively privileged, safe) liberal subject and the (relatively marginalized, unsafe) victim to find modes of subjectivity beyond such entrenched binaries. The concept of embodied vulnerability shifts the politics of scale in the human rights arena from the universal and timeless to the particular; however, embodied vulnerable subjects’ bids for political agency, their use of strategic vulnerability, still run the risk of reactivating the very narratives of un-locatable victimhood they sought to avoid.

Child soldiers illuminate this paradox within vulnerability theory and its application in human rights work. As subjects of varying ages and maturity who challenge easy distinctions between victims and perpetrators (and, correspondingly, easy distinctions between passivity and agency, or between innocence and culpability or complicity), their political claims to personal security and restitution for their suffering is often at odds with the harms they have committed and their own maturation. As shown below, child soldiers problematize the building blocks of normative human rights—the liberal subject, the nation-state, and the international order of states—along with the concepts of historical and civilizational progress to which they are tied. Although vulnerability approaches offer an alternative grounding for human rights claims to those framed by the liberal subject in relation to the nation-state, vulnerability can also be coopted by rhetorics of victimhood in ways that can rhetorically and materially reinforce precisely the suffering that rights claims seek to remedy. That potential for cooptation increases with respect to children, who are already ambiguously situated before the law as at once a protected group and, at the same time, potential yet often still unqualified legal persons. As legal minors, they cannot fully represent themselves; however, the law simultaneously protects them from full culpability for their actions. How can one be protected by a law that fails to recognize her? Child soldiers further problematize the notion of legal qualification, because it is difficult to pinpoint where responsibility should rest for the crimes child soldiers commit. Considering the application of international human rights law on child soldiers, Wendy Hesford argues, that “the particularities of ‘embodied vulnerability’ are erased, and problematically so, in the process of stripping the child soldier of political identity and reclaiming the simultaneously generic and exceptional identity of the vulnerable child.”⁵ As Hesford notes, the identity category based upon the prototypical (Western) notion of the innocent, vulnerable child wrings political agency from children both in terms of the law’s protection and of its prosecution. This chapter builds upon and extends that argument through the lens of strategic vulnerability and a focus on representations of child soldiers in human rights law—the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) and its Optional Protocol ([2000] 2002)—primarily in relation to two recent literary fictions, Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation (2005) and Chris Abani’s Song for Night (2007). Together these texts point to the importance of temporality and the narrative scales used to represent it in defining the embodied and vulnerable human rights subject and the context of political subjectivization, in Rancière’s sense, even as the works exemplify the difficulty of writing outside of dominant narratives of the subject’s development such as the Bildungsroman. The concept of political subjectivization helps to undo the knot of child soldiers in the context of agency and passivity, not through the argument that children are any more mature, rational, agentic than they are (terms which would reconfirm the values of liberal subjectivity) or that the state should fulfill that role for them, but by insisting that child soldiers are always already situated in a specific political context.

In contradistinction to the liberal subject for whom rights guarantee the path of civilizational progress and full humanity, or the immature liberal subject who will attain full legal personhood in the future, child soldiers (and survivors of the conflicts which include child soldiers) in the literature under consideration here register as “the spectrally human”: those subjects that Judith Butler reads in a different context as the products of a “spurious notion of civilization [that] provides the measure by which the human is defined at the same time that a field of would-be humans, the spectrally human, the deconstituted, are maintained and detained, made to live and die within that extra-human and extra-juridical sphere of life.”⁶ Iweala and Abani give voice to the spectrally human who often function as little more than disposable matériel in the conflicts they serve; in addition, Abani calls into question the civilizational and legal narratives that would redeem child soldiers as lost children who can be redirected along the path of first citizenship and then full humanity.

The contexts of the novels are also defined by apparent failures of normative forms of political sovereignty, whatever their limitations, and their replacement by what Mbembe calls necropolitics—the “generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies and populations”¹³ in the violent competition for resources and power. Hovering between the necropolitics of predatory intra-state actors and the rescue and rehabilitation narrative implicit in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), the novels demonstrate that “it is the interrelation between the sovereign right to kill and the [humanitarian] right to rescue that constitutes modes of modern power, whether by the state or by other institutions of power.”¹⁴ This interrelation, in turn, raises a question of the different subject positions that are generated by these two narratives and that might be imagined in the intervals between them.

Drawing on George Bataille’s formulation of sovereignty as that which risks rather than avoids death, Mbembe theorizes the political away from the progressive narrative of inviolability secured through reason: “Politics, in this case, is not the forward dialectical movement of reason. Politics can only be traced as a spiral transgression, as that difference that disorients the very idea of the limit.”¹⁵ Child soldiers as paradoxical figures of death and the future are poised at that limit, and novels disclose moments of political subjectivization that arise at the limit as well as the ways in which ideologies of liberalism reassert their hold to foreclose the imagination of alternative political subjects. For instance, Iweala grounds his protagonist Agu’s experience in social chaos that is, as befitting the child narrator, divorced from political concerns. In moments of extreme violence, Agu imagines himself in temporal entanglements coded by cultural distinction: acting out folktales, experiencing initiation rituals of manhood or animal sacrifice, or 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. Both worlds are mourned in the story, and the resulting void offers a space and time for the reassertion of the normative values conveyed through structures of the law and the Bildungsroman, although any resolution those structures offer Agu seems insufficient to compensate for the breakdown in social meaning he has experienced. Song for Night takes place more overtly on the faultline between life and death, at the limit Mbembe defines as constitutive of the political. It is there that the spectrally human—conveyed through the voice of the character My Luck—haunts worlds beyond that of the postcolony and the present-tense of the story, troubling the ideal of the vulnerable subject who can be made secure through the force of the law.

Building Blocks of the Human Rights Regime

To examine how vulnerability might function in relation to the key components of the human rights regime, I begin with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), a powerful, global human rights discourse, in relation to novelistic representations of “the most famous character of the end of the 20^th century,”¹⁶ the child soldier. In both forms of representation, a conventional narrative about childhood innocence and vulnerability typically produces one of three affective outcomes: mourning for the ideal childhood that has been damaged and, perhaps, cannot be reclaimed; consolation through the legal processes of redress or formal rituals of elegy; or redemption promised by the law, guaranteed by UN member states, and legible in the continued narration of the subject’s life story—what Barbara Harlow aptly describes as “the humanitarian generic instructions of DDR (disarmament-demobilization-rehabilitation) for the literary transcription of a former child soldier’s re-bildungsroman.”¹⁷ The extent to which child soldiers are at once fetishized and mourned thus depends upon the law’s power to define and, if possible, to restore an idealized image of the child through the paternalistic intervention of the international community.

Figuring child soldiers as spectrally human, rather than as damaged potential subjects of liberalism, elicits responses that are not bound by the protocols of mourning and legal restitution. Whereas Butler uses “spectrally human” to describe those consigned to social abandonment and the state of exception, such as the Guantánamo detainees, and invokes mourning as a form of political recognition, here I examine the disruptive (in addition to elegiac) effects of hauntology for this paradigmatic human rights subject—paradigmatic in this reading because of the paradoxes of subjectivity and rights layered in representations of child soldiers, rather than because of their potentially dual status as victims and perpetrators. The characters and populations who figure as spectrally human in the literature under consideration in this chapter challenge the very terms through which they might be mourned. The ideological losses that are marked by child soldiers (the failures of the normative progress narrative of human rights, the ideal/vulnerable child, and the bildungsroman) increasingly haunt the social imaginary, reminding readers, in Jacques Derrida’s words, that “[h]aunting belongs to the structure of every hegemony.”¹⁸

Indeed, ideological discussions of child soldiers pivot on a particular concept of childhood itself. In her contribution to the 2006 PMLA special issue on “The Humanities in Human Rights: Critique, Language, Politics,” Jacqueline Bhabha begins her discussion of the ambiguous status of the child in human rights law and policy with the question, “What sort of human is a child?”¹⁹ Her analysis of the cultural and legal definitions of a child, particularly as formulated in the CRC, focuses on the ramifications of “[c]hildhood in this conception [as] romanticized and utopianized and at the same time peculiarly disenfranchised and disempowered.”²⁰ She concludes that childhood “as a clearly demarcated space of limited autonomy is an idealization of what it is to be human and a gloss on the relation between agency and rights.”²¹ Along with other populations designated as vulnerable, children are granted special protection in exchange for a limited degree of political agency. If childhood is a “distinctive way of being human” and one that deserves protection,²² the distinction ostensibly rests on the child’s incorporation of social investment and the still undetermined promise of its future returns: childhood should, in its idealized form, form the foundation for the proleptic, fully qualified subject of rights. In this sense, the figure of the child attracts all manner of laudatory—if empty—significations that essentially point to one temporal/sociopolitical space: the future; our future. According to the law, then, vulnerability figures as a temporary condition of limited capacity, including agency, in the human being’s development into a liberal subject within the family of nation-states. If vulnerability is a temporary anomaly, then it is produced by metaphorically faulty parenting, and invites intervention from normative human rights actors to serve in loco parentis.

Not only are the protections for children as vulnerable subjects unequally available, but child soldiers, both proscribed and interpellated by the CRC, complicate its moral economy by signifying in its calculations what Mbembe calls a “logic of expenditure” in which “the giving of death has become a prime means of creating the world”²³ (original emphasis), of governmentality through persistent, oftentimes domestic war that destroys existing social structures. Conflicts driven by the “logic of expenditure,” whose objectives may be local even though they may result from a global struggle for resources, produce “not only […] the coercion to which people are subjected, and the sufferings inflicted on the human body by war, scarcity, and destitution, but also embrace a whole cluster of re-orderings of society, culture, and identity, and a series of recent changes in the way power is exercised and rationalized.”²⁴ Mbembe theorizes these re-orderings and their effects on law, political power, social structures, and culture that characterize the relationship between the “privatization of public violence […] and the imagination of the self” in the postcolony and that are magnified in conditions of violent, intra-national social upheaval.²⁵

In the specific context of conflicts that include child soldiers, entanglement could seem to indicate the need for the forceful application—through international intervention—of the values promulgated by the CRC and thus the restoration of the civilizational, developmental narrative (Harlow’s DDR) it conveys. What I am suggesting instead is that reading the law and fiction in tandem makes visible the limitations of the conceptual building blocks of the CRC, and that this reading praxis illuminates the imagination of other narratives of human rights that might complement, address imbalances, or respond to lacunae within normative human rights discourse. Reading the law and literature in conversation with one another demonstrates the importance, first, of considering the extent to which a vulnerability approach that focuses on the spectrally human challenges a singular definition of the human rights subject; and, second, of understanding haunting and hetero-temporal entanglement beyond the putative confines of the postcolony to describe human rights as a biopolitical and geopolitical regime in broader terms. Finally, reading between law and literature underscores their discursive intersections. Marianne Constable insists that “legal speech acts of representatives of official law as well as the claims of their critics are performative and passionate, designed to evoke in their respective hearers a shared sense of obligation that is not only conventionally performed but also a matter of desire.”²⁶ I turn to fiction that engages with legal norms and constraints to connect the performative and passionate claims of the law to the performative and passionate claims of its imagined subjects and to trace how together these discourses work to shape the broader social imaginary.

Although the participation of children in armed conflict is not new historically,²⁷ recent legal mechanisms, legal criticism, humanitarian efforts, social sciences reports, and literary and filmic productions have increased its public profile. Estimates of child soldiers worldwide originally published in the 1996 UN study by Graça Machel on the Impact of Armed Conflict upon Children and in subsequent Child Soldiers Global Reports by the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers, among other organizations, consistently approximate 300,000 child soldiers engaging in armed conflict at any given time. Although found in an estimated two-thirds of recent or ongoing conflicts, they are often associated with unstable and lesser-developed areas of the world and signify political failure, as though the soldiers’ maturity is indicative of the nation’s.²⁸ Despite widespread recognition that child soldiering is not a contemporary phenomenon, scholars define trends in how warfare is conducted that arguably facilitate its use. Michael Wessells and Alcinda Honwana cite developments in the technology and distribution of light weaponry, a shift from conventional war between states to war within or across them, increasingly blurred lines between civilian and military combatants, the targeting of civilians in war, difficulty in distinguishing war from criminality, and links between “new” wars and broader breakdown in social structures as the key components of this crisis.²⁹ Mbembe emphasizes the economic and political realities at the core of many such conflicts: “[T]heir central stake is the control of resources, whose modes of extraction and forms of commercialization feed, in turn, the murderous conflicts and practices of predation.”³⁰ In place of anti-colonial rhetoric that galvanized earlier liberation movements, the conflicts he considers are often fueled by the “preponderance of tropes and dichotomies that draw on ontology, degeneracy, and theologies of health”³¹—fears that have circulated around witchcraft or Ebola, for instance, and that circulate through rhetorics of embodied vulnerability and illustrate how those rhetorics can be mobilized or exploited for either humanitarian or violent ends. Militarized children function ambiguously within such discourses, signifying moral corruption and degeneracy on the one hand and an image of futurity on the other.

Critiques of the paternalism and latent or overt racism in many portrayals of child soldiers in postcolonial contexts come from many different disciplines. In his broad study of child soldiers, David M. Rosen pays particular attention to postcolonial conditions and the roots of social disintegration. Disputing the rationale of light arms development as a catalyst of child soldiering (he argues the weapon of choice is the AK-47, available since 1949) and the rhetoric surrounding child soldiers as inevitable by-products of (failed) postcolonial nation-states, he rightly cautions against the automatic coupling of postcolonialism with chaos, violence, exploitation and irrationality.³² Otherwise, the figure of the child soldier as a metonymic substitution for a wayward, irrational state appears suspiciously in need of assistance from a sensible, firm adult (with international humanitarian institutions and former colonizers performing functions of parent, lawyer, and therapist). Rosen draws attention to the role of non-governmental organizations in lobbying efforts to develop international humanitarian law regarding child soldiers, and cites the Machel Report, a landmark study of child soldiering “authorized,” he suggests, by Graça Machel’s participation in national liberation movements (and marriage to Nelson Mandela), for providing “a template for virtually all human rights reporting on child soldiers:”³³ “Machel’s revolutionary ‘credentials’ are important because the idea that warfare in the postcolonial world is qualitatively different from earlier forms of war is central to the humanitarian narrative.”³⁴ Although the idea that postcolonial conflicts involving child soldiers are new lends urgency to humanitarian efforts, those efforts rarely consider the colonial underpinnings to the structural inequalities and political imbalances that produce violence.

This critique of dominant humanitarian approaches to child soldiers raises the question of how to write about the use and experiences of child soldiers, and African child soldiers in particular, as a serious problem in and of itself and a challenge to future social stability without replicating the ethnocentric bias of much of the commentary. Rosen’s insight into how a globalized “politics of age” in legal and humanitarian narratives of child soldiers substitutes for a more material politics about social inequity in the postcolony and around the globe provides an important check on the enthusiastic consumption, at least in the global North, of fiction that features African child soldiers.³⁵ Andrew Mawson asks, “Can a convenient fiction about what is a child carry the weight of so much violence?”³⁶ In response, Rosen argues for scholars to attend more carefully to the differentiated ways in which children participate in armed conflict and to the roots of those conflicts under consideration.

The continuing conversation among human rights workers, legal scholars, reporters, and cultural workers over the definition, status, and legal protections accorded child soldiers has, notwithstanding trenchant critiques, coalesced around notions of the child (as a person below age eighteen) in armed conflict as an innocent victim of adult and state or intra-state depravity, who is in need of protection by the very forces that have already seemingly failed him or her. Embedded in these narratives is a politics of age that reflects the ideological positions and political objectives of the participants in these discussions.³⁷ The negotiated consensus in international humanitarian law (IHL) on child soldiers, while designed to ensure the greatest possible scope of protection, elides the intertwined problems of their re-presentation, in the sense of depiction of and speaking for, implicit in consensus itself; at the same time, some literary narratives, anthropological readings, and legal critiques draw attention to those elisions through close analysis of cultural constructions of childhood and the distribution of juridico-political agency that attends it.

The predicament of child soldiers in international humanitarian and human rights law falls primarily under the jurisdiction of the CRC (1989) and the Optional Protocol to the CRC on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict (Optional Protocol, adopted 2000, entered into force 2002).³⁸ Echoing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the CRC seeks to protect the child’s “full development of his or her personality” (Preamble). Other key provisions include: the child’s right to a name, nationality, and family (Article 7); the duty of public and private institutions to consider “the best interests of the child” (Article 1); the recognition of the child’s right to freedom of expression, thought, conscience, and religion (Articles 13 and 14); and, complicating the issue of who may define and articulate the “best interests” stipulated in Article 1, protection for “the child who is capable of forming his or her own views [of] the right to express those views freely in all matters affecting the child” (Article 12). Re-iterated chronologically as a narrative of the child’s life, the CRC calls for name, family, and citizenship at birth; parental and then social instruction in early childhood (including the development of religious beliefs, exposure to media, shaping of autonomous reason, public education, and gradually increased exposure to risk); growing responsibilities as well as the ongoing need for leisure toward the end of childhood; and then full maturation and reasoned autonomy. Speaking directly about child soldiers, the CRC stipulates fifteen as the minimum age for armed service (Article 15) and requires States to “promote physical and psychological recovery and social reintegration of a child victim of […] armed conflicts” (Article 39). That a child soldier, who may have perpetrated egregious crimes, reads as a victim reflects the protective aims of the Convention.

The Optional Protocol extends the law’s protective reach by invoking the Straight 18 definition of a child, which raises the minimum age for recruitment from 15 to 18 and asserts that those under 18 should not “take a direct part in hostilities” (Articles 1, 2, and 3), although it does permit “voluntary recruitment into [States’] national armed forces under the age of 18.”³⁹ Many analysts and legal advocates adopt the more inclusive principles articulated in UNICEF’s Cape Town Annotated Principles and Best Practices of 1977 of a child soldier as “any person under 18 years of age who is part of any kind of regular or irregular armed force in any capacity, including but not limited to cooks, porters, messengers, and those accompanying such groups, other than purely as family members.” The definition also includes “[g]irls recruited for sexual purposes and forced marriage […]. It does not, therefore, only refer to a child who is carrying or has carried arms.”⁴⁰ These legal standards seek to provide an even wider scope of protections for children who take part by choice or conscription in violent conflict, and thus do not differentiate between the various roles children serve.

The legal excerpts above do not capture the full scope of these documents; however, they intimate the ways in which, as Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff write, “the effort to make human rights into an ever more universal discourse, and to ascribe ever more authority to it, gives impetus to the remapping of the cartography of jurisdictions.”⁴¹ Notwithstanding the ostensible universality of the legal principles, geopolitical forces determine their availability to children in war. Moreover, whereas responsibility for a child’s well-being rests primarily with the immediate family, in conflict situations considered by IHL that responsibility moves quickly to the international community according to a prescribed set of values. As many scholars have noted, the CRC and its attendant instruments purport to set universal standards; however, they normalize a particular construction of the human being-as-legal subject that is most legible within western traditions. The definition of childhood as a time of innocence, play (rather than work), and the cultivation of “full development of personality” reflects an investment in liberal, capitalist values dependent upon the individual’s successful negotiation of separate public and private spheres.⁴² In her excellent reading of the ideological presuppositions of the CRC, Sharon Stephens notes that the Convention recognizes “a universal, free-standing individual child [… who is] on a particular developmental trajectory.”⁴³ The acknowledgment of “the importance of the traditions and cultural values of each people” follows well after the reiteration of the UDHR’s recognition of inherent rights, broadly liberal values, individual development, and the family “as the fundamental group of society and the natural environment for the growth and well-being of all its members” (CRC, Preamble). “The Convention argues,” Stephens summarizes, “that the child has first and foremost a right to international modernist culture […,] then to identity (conceived in individual, familial, and national terms), and finally, in special cases, to minority and indigenous cultures.”⁴⁴

The psychosocial approach to “recovery and social reintegration of a child victim” (CRC, Article 39), often defined and administered by international humanitarian organizations with the backing of international law, reasserts that hierarchy of desirable cultural values and those who maintain them. Therapeutic language regarding the abstract individual or legal person further masks structural inequities and political crises, which are frequently articulated in terms of cultural difference at the root of conflict.⁴⁵ In addition, the language of psychosocial rehabilitation fails to consider both its own cultural roots as well as the problem that the subject will only be legible in a social context that, given the subject’s current status, has already been severely compromised. The CRC pays little attention to the forms of healing, and whether they pertain primarily to the community or the individual, whose meanings and effectiveness are local.

Significantly, the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child (1990, entered into force 1999) gets little attention in the critiques explored above, although it does re-connect the rights holder and moral agent (as one with duties) within the context of pan-African identifications. The African Charter emphasizes the “preservation and strengthening of positive African morals, traditional values and cultures” among its core objectives (Preamble and Article 11), offers a broader definition of family (Article 20) than the CRC and Optional Protocol, and details specific responsibilities of the child toward the family, society, state, legal community, and international community (Article 31). More precisely, Article 31 enumerates every child’s duty to “respect his parents, superiors and elders at all times,” to serve the nation, to “preserve and strengthen African cultural values,” and to work on behalf of African Unity. Although the Charter maintains the Straight 18 definition of a child adopted in the Optional Protocol, it creates a space for multiple readings of what (not when) childhood should be. At the same time, the Charter’s emphasis on state power, obedience to elders, and the political goals of pan-Africanism limits the possibility of claims against abusive states.

In her reading of the relationship between IHL and the contexts in which it is invoked on behalf of children, Vanessa Pupavac finds an inherent pathologizing of adults, especially those in the global South.⁴⁶ If children do not have access to the protected sphere of childhood enshrined in IHL, “the plight of children” (when abstracted and divorced from political context) “implicitly or explicitly blames the adults for their fate.”⁴⁷ Pupavac rests her argument on the “separation of the rights-holder and the moral agent” in IHL principles that concern children.⁴⁸ Despite the provision in the CRC for protection of the child’s articulation of his or her own views, freedom of expression does not equal a guarantee to exercise control over one’s own “best interest.” That responsibility rests first with parents or guardians and then with the state. If, however, as Comaroff and Comaroff argue, the “court has become a utopic institutional site to which human agency may turn for a medium in which to achieve its ends,”⁴⁹ a corollary of the growing jurisdiction is its transnational governmentality over non-conventional and often intra-national armed conflict and the subjects within them. The mobilization of campaigns on behalf of child soldiers, potentially enhanced through the protection of their right to be heard, can thus effectively create opportunities for “lawfare” by international organizations in local contexts.⁵⁰ As employing child soldiers becomes increasingly narrated as criminal rather than political, the call for legal intervention gets louder and “the discourse of crime displaces attention away from the material and social effects of neoliberalism, blaming its darker undersides on the evils of the underworld.”⁵¹ This trend simultaneously shifts the weight of concern about security from vulnerable populations to the institutions of legal enforcement—border agents, security personnel, police, etc. Narratives of criminality only reinforce the view that the use of child soldiers is a form of social deviance that violates an ideal. In this ideological loop, child soldiers as human rights subjects become ahistorical and de-contextualized. The historical and political roots of their conflicts, as well as their social-familial contexts, are erased, such that they belong primarily to the category “child soldier” and the objects of humanitarianism mobilized on their behalf.

Child Soldiers and Literary Traditions

The many paradoxes of child soldiers in the law similarly problematize their literary representation, and Iweala and Abani address the question posed by Joseph Slaughter, “What happens to the story form of human personality development when the modern institutional guarantors of social order and meaning—the democratic state and the public sphere that replaced Nature and Nature’s God—have been perverted?”⁵² In Beasts of No Nation and Song for Night, child soldiers as narrators of their own stories restore the necessary link Pupavac identifies between rights holder and moral agent, but to what end? Although as children they have only immature standing in legal and moral realms, as narrators they have an authority that is difficult to marginalize in favor of another source. Structurally, it is the task of the Bildungsroman as a novel of formation to resolve this tension. The CRC’s universalizing, legal narrative of a child who should be nurtured in certain ways in order to achieve full subjectivity in autonomous, bounded individualism finds a literary equivalent in the genre of the Bildungsroman that Franco Moretti describes as “the symbolic form that more than any other has portrayed and promoted modern socialization.”⁵³ In his landmark book on the formal intersections of human rights and literature, Slaughter looks at the roots of this alliance in narrative parallels between the UDHR (which the CRC echoes) and the Bildungsroman, both of which are quintessentially and paradigmatically modern forms whose didactic function is the production of discursive norms.⁵⁴ The “novelization of citizenship” in these forms depends upon an idealized public sphere with the ability to “manufacture consent for the state’s legitimacy.”⁵⁵ For if, as Moretti states, the Bildungsroman is “the most contradictory of modern symbolic forms,” then it demonstrates that “in our world socialization itself consists first of all in the interiorization of a contradiction” (original emphasis) between the private individual and the public sphere.⁵⁶ Narratives of child soldiers, whose interiority is ostensibly immature as is their agency in the public sphere, reveal fissures within the legal and literary Bildungsroman’s ideological assumptions. In terms of context, whereas the public sphere corresponds to the nation in the conventional Bildungsroman, Iweala and Abani’s fiction at once draws upon a Nigerian literary tradition, as well as aspects of the Nigeria-Biafra Civil War, and extends beyond them.⁵⁷ As the titles of both novels indicate, they seek to address the problematics of representing child soldiers within Anglophone literature more generally as opposed to Nigerian literature alone.

Because child soldiers are tethered to the developmental narrative of the law, yet embody contradiction (at once vulnerable and violent, victims and perpetrators, innocent and knowing), they call forth the promise and failure of law and politics as well as act as agents of “the destruction of all social bonds—other than the bond of hostility.”⁵⁸ These contradictions produce much of the narrative tension for child soldiers in literary fiction: the “destruction of all social bonds” seems to call for either their restoration or reformulation by the story’s end. Addressing these readerly expectations and the pedagogical function of the Bildungsroman, Moretti argues that the representation of modernity depends upon the satisfactory progression from youthful individualism in the sense of uniqueness to adulthood and full citizenship: “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.’”⁵⁹ If assuaging modernity’s “hostile force”⁶⁰ depends upon this narrative teleology, child soldiers would seem to mark the failure of that effort. However, I am suggesting that Iweala’s and Abani’s novels, in making visible the expected terms of modernity through their play with the Bildungsroman form, also call those terms into question. These two texts do not offer the materialism of embodied vulnerability and historical specificity to countermand the effects of innocence and victimhood; rather, they challenge conventional representational categories and temporalities of child soldiers. Beasts of No Nation and Song for Night are driven by the question of narrative completion, of how the narrators will fare in relation to normative models of development and justice.

Iweala’s and Abani’s child soldier protagonists, Agu and My Luck, embody the contradictions found in the legal definitions of child soldiers, although the novels resolve those contradictions in different ways. In Beasts of No Nation, Agu rapes (and is raped), pillages, and murders, though Iweala gives him the foundations of a 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.”⁶¹ Agu’s relentlessly present continuous and immature voice, victimization, and desire for moral grounding create conditions of sympathy for him as a potential subject of the law who, notwithstanding the violence he has committed, is still in need of protection. Abani’s My Luck refuses to take refuge in this contradictory though powerful ideology of the child in need of rehabilitation. My Luck’s initiation into conflict at age thirteen left him “armed and lost in a war with taste for rape.” In a voice that is anything but childlike, he remembers another crucial transformation, when Ijeoma said:

“I will save you.”

And she did. [… T]hat night and every night after that, whenever we raided a town or a village, while the others were raping the women and sometimes the men, Ijeoma and I made desperate love, crying as we came, but we did it to make sure that amongst all that horror, there was still love.⁶²

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 in their platoon), and a narrator whose gestures function as “lyrical similes”⁶³ and whose textual voice speaks 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), retribution, or moral development (he is beyond the reaches of both). Instead he insists on his desires, longings, and rationales. His language supersedes the law’s ability to foster the “full development of personality” called for in the UDHR and the CRC, while the narrative places him beyond the law’s claims and effects.

Of course, the full development of personality is one of the major areas of overlap between the language of IHL and the Bildungsroman, and Slaughter reads their ideological implications through 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 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.”⁶⁴ Beasts of No Nation and Song for Night complicate these options, because the stories emerge out of the disintegration of the public sphere itself (with direct mention of the colonial and neocolonial powers that provide support for that disintegration and are implicated in its causes) and, thus, the concept of modernity to which it is tied. In other words, the social disintegration that takes place in the novels is a product of modernity as opposed to an aberration from it. Song for Night in particular does not so much invert the relationship between rights rhetoric and social inequalities as deconstruct it. Abani offers a first-person narration that cannot be fused to a liberal subject and that draws attention to its own construction. In this way, the novella as a failed Bildungsroman asks readers to think critically about the terms through which child soldiers as the spectrally human—those whose vulnerability and violence not just demand the protective force of the law but simultaneously undermine its foundational narratives—might nonetheless become legible.

The Politics of Space and Time

How, then, do the spatial and temporal entanglements of the novels differ from the spatialization of time that takes place through application of the developmental narrative of the CRC and its attendant instruments upon the postcolony? Entanglement potentially, though not necessarily, complicates or diversifies the narrative possibilities of human rights. If entanglement makes it possible to “envisage subjectivity itself as temporality,” as Mbembe argues,⁶⁵ then the “interlocking of presents, pasts, and futures that retain their depths of other presents, pasts, and futures, each age bearing, altering, and maintaining the previous ones”⁶⁶ also makes it possible to imagine alternative discourses of rights and their claimants. The project of imagining alternatives stems from different facets of vulnerability: relationality constituted through local, communal (as opposed to ostensibly universal and secular) beliefs, languages, and practices; the work of mourning those formerly considered expendable; or the necessity of acknowledging the haunting presence of the spectrally human. I consider both the potential and limitations of each of these possibilities in turn.

In his forceful critique of (capitalized) Human Rights as a “global structure of laws, courts, norms, and organizations that raise money, write reports, run international campaigns, open local offices, lobby governments, and claim to speak with a singular authority in the name of humanity as a whole,”⁶⁷ Stephen Hopgood argues for the continued necessity of lower-case human rights: a “nonhegemonic language or resistance” and reciprocity that is grounded in local contexts.⁶⁸ This turn to the local and the hetero-temporalities it might include corresponds to arguments for a concept of modernity not tied to western models of individual, national, and capitalist development. Dipesh Chakrabarty, for instance, emphasizes the need to bridge the divide between “the analytic and the affective” in rereading modernity as something other than a product of Enlightenment reason.⁶⁹ Fiction’s capacity for ambiguity and incommensurability can assist with the “move away from the monomania of the imagination that operates within the gesture that the knowing, judging, willing subject always already knows what is good for everybody, ahead of any investigation.”⁷⁰ For Chakrabarty, the discourses, practices, and temporalities of cultural difference disrupt that monomania and, with it, a singular narrative of History. In order to re-imagine history from subaltern subject positions that do not yearn for but “[disrupt] the languages of the state, of citizenship, of wholes and totalities, [and] the legacy of Enlightenment rationalism,” he argues for the development of “analytical categories in academic discourse that do justice to the real, everyday and multiple ‘connections’ we have to what we, in becoming modern, have come to see as ‘non-rational.’”⁷¹ Chakrabarty’s argument has also been critiqued for reinforcing the division between rationality and “non-rationality” in ways that ultimately re-ascribe what is non-rational to what is culturally distinct from a western secular norm. The concept of entanglement avoids that risk, while countering the notion of a singular, totalizing narrative of History and modernity. Agu and My Luck similarly resist the romanticization of cultural difference; instead, they evince the promise of theories of hetero-temporality to generate histories of those consumed by the march of progress. Agu and My Luck signify that child soldiers represent something other than familial-national deviations from History, that their contradictions are not deviations from but rather imbrications of modernity. My Luck’s haunting presence, for example, by refusing to represent some form of lost or damaged cultural authenticity, instead “test[s] the limits of death or of its meaning in a world of terror,” as Colin Dayan evocatively describes the contemporary work of ghosts.⁷²

Although Abani explicitly warns against reading My Luck ethnographically as a voice of cultural difference, the intent of Beasts of No Nation is more ambiguous because of the multiple significations of the title. It speaks to the inhumanity that Agu experiences, but also to moments where he imagines himself as an animal in West African fables. In these moments, as one of Chakrabarty’s most trenchant critics, Vasant Kaiwar, writes, “[s]ubversive history, it turns out, is nothing more than a proxy for what Chakrabarty elsewhere calls the time of the gods.”⁷³ As Kaiwar writes in another emphatic critique, “Postcolonial theory seems utterly fascinated by goblins, fairies, gods and spirits of all kinds, possibly suggesting the richly enchanted world of third-world subalterns in opposition to the disenchanted, Enlightenment-inspired secular universe we live in.”⁷⁴ The overlap of “postcolonial” with “non-rational” or “supernatural” contributes to exoticizing narratives of postcolonial difference and elides questions of capital and labor that constitute the logic of expenditure which fuels the use of child soldiers.

The logic of expenditure also elicits the work of mourning, although the political force of mourning is subject for debate. Judith Butler emphasizes the need “to establish modes of public seeing and hearing that might well respond to the cry of the human,”⁷⁵ which suggests the need to make visible the suffering of child soldiers in terms that would allow them to be mourned. For Butler, grief (and grievability) “furnishes a sense of political community of a complex order, and it does this first of all by bringing to the fore the relational ties that have implications for theorizing fundamental dependency and ethical responsibility.”⁷⁶ However, one could also argue that child soldiers have become hyper-visible in contemporary cultural representations and that these representations, as Hesford argues, tend to vacate political complexity and agency in favor of an undifferentiated narrative of victimhood. The elegiac titles of Beasts of No Nation and Song for Night, in addition to other popular texts such as Invisible Children (Invisible Children: Rough Cut, 2003) and A Long Way Gone (2007), reflect the failure of certain idealizations of subject and nation. Mourning those failures depends upon and reinforces ostensibly timeless images of both the innocent child and childhood innocence. The calls to mourning in the titles, however, also imply a relationship between those failures or losses and global cultural production, as that which is mourned returns through the production and consumption of the stories themselves.⁷⁷ The roots of social inequities and political failures that produce child soldiers in the postcolonial contexts of these stories often remain unmarked, although the geopolitical distribution of inequity and failure they represent contributes to their circulation in the global marketplace. Thus, mourning and marketability are enhanced by a clear distance between the worlds of reader and text as opposed to the collapse of that distance.

Beasts of No Nation and Song for Night can illuminate the (neo)imperial and global implications of the conflicts involving child soldiers and the stories, legal and otherwise, that get told about them. Indeed, Slaughter argues that “what we might call the new literary humanitarianism—the Western desire for Bildungsromane of the non-Western other that is enacted through book markets—may be the latest in a series of globalizing forces that encourages the technology-transfers of human rights and the Bildungsroman.”⁷⁸ Iweala and Abani write to considerable acclaim, and Beasts of No Nation and Song for Night share many features of the disarmament-demobilization-rehabilitation “novel of formation” that Harlow identifies. Significantly, Beasts of No Nation adheres more closely to that trajectory and has sold much more widely.⁷⁹ Whereas the popularity of the genre and these particular novels perhaps indicates public interest in the conditions that produce child soldiers and their futures, the fictional authority of child soldiers underscores their greater currency as “phantom subjects of history”⁸⁰ who bear the weight of idealization and of atrocity despite their limited autonomy and legal standing.

The layered meanings of the spectrally human—those who are consigned to social abandonment or the logic of expenditure, yet whose presence haunts “the structure of every hegemony”⁸¹—recoup the potential of a critical mourning that disturbs the calculation of human rights and victimhood and clears a space for political subjectivization, in the sense of one’s emergence as a political subject and to broaden the forms of political engagement that are visible. The analysis of these novels that follows resists the temptation to read the spectrally human of the novels and their haunting as evidence of supernatural alterity to a narrowly scripted modernity. The characters do, however, demonstrate the work of mourning as conjuration whose spatio-temporal dislocations make possible a “politics of memory, of inheritance, and of generations”⁸² (original emphasis) that Derrida defines as crucial for constituting an ethical regard for an other. This politics does not always feature the agentic subject, as such, but always demands attention to political context and the narratives that are legible within it. The interruption of established narratives of the Bildungsroman, national history, and the rehabilitation of child soldiers is not, in other words, necessarily subaltern or subversive; however, it does require reading across existing temporal and spatial frames and therefore making possible the imagination of alternative discourses of human rights.

As Derrida notes, the haunting effects of heterotemporality—its ability to disrupt the present—is essential for justice in the future: “Without this non-contemporaneity with itself of the living present, without that which secretly unhinges it, without this responsibility and this respect for justice concerning those who are not there, of those who are no longer or who are not yet present and living, what sense would there be to ask the question ‘where?’ ‘where tomorrow?’ ‘whither?’” (original emphasis).⁸³ Conjuration reverses the force of mourning such that the lost object or person becomes a witness to the present. As witnesses to atrocity who can speak from the past and into the present and perhaps the future, Agu and My Luck shift the focus of mourning from grief to, if not responsibility, interpellation, and they do so by defining themselves as subjects of human rights untethered to the pragmatics of legal personhood. Their hauntings have both reductive and productive potential, depending upon the ways that the narrators and the trajectories of their stories ultimately secure or undermine the promise of the Bildungsroman. In productive terms, as Avery Gordon notes, “[p]erceiving the lost subjects of history—the missing and lost ones and the blind fields they inhabit—makes all the difference to any project trying to find the address of the present.”⁸⁴ Fiction’s ability to reveal those “blind fields” brings to the forefront the role of child soldiers in the logic of expenditure, and, thus, that logic itself. In doing so, “[h]aunting occurs,” Gordon notes, “on the terrain situated between our ability to conclusively describe the logic of Capitalism or State Terror, for example, and the various experiences of this logic, experiences that are more often than not partial, coded, symptomatic, contradictory, ambiguous.”⁸⁵ At the same time, the texts disclose the limits of haunting: it succeeds more to expose the logics of violent exclusion than to imagine an alternative to them.

Expendability and Revaluation in Beasts of No Nation

As noted above, Derrida theorizes that “this being-with specters” also constitutes a “politics of memory” necessary for an ethics that looks to the future:

No justice—let us not say no law and once again we are not speaking here of laws—seems possible or thinkable without the principle of some responsibility, beyond all living present, within that which disjoins the present, before the ghosts of those who are not yet born or who are already dead, be they victims of wars, political or other kinds of violence.⁸⁶

The “politics of memory” in this case also reads as a politics of form, and the character of the child soldier continually challenges the Bildungsroman’s ability to synthesize individual and nation through successive generations of Nigerian literature. As I have discussed elsewhere, by invoking the child in war (as refugee or soldier) as a spectral presence, Amos Tutuola in My Life in the Bush of Ghosts and Ken Saro-Wiwa in Sozaboy present a kind of temporal and perspectival doubling that enables readings within and against the nation as a coming-of-age story. For Tutuola, life in the Bush of Ghosts provides a critical distance from which to examine the terms of the Bildungsroman, even if it reiterates those terms. Given the narrator’s desire to continue to trespass across the worlds of life and death, the novel leaves no clear formulation of the future of a Yoruban or Nigerian public sphere, although it sketches parameters for such a sphere by combining folktale and the modern novel in the late-colonial moment.⁸⁷ Saro-Wiwa aligns the crisis of the postcolonial state with that of the subject, wherein the success of the former comes seemingly at the expense of the latter, the materiality of Sozaboy’s “rotten English” insufficient to ward off social death. Iweala and Abani take up this doubling in different ways. Iweala’s Agu reads as a post-national descendent of the earlier authors in the way his voice, now abstracted from specific ethnic or regional context, is, according to the author, “inspired by voices of ordinary Nigerians, and of course by such writers as Ken Saro-Wiwa, Chinua Achebe, and Amos Tutuola” and “is as much a character as his person.”⁸⁸ Voice locates him literarily and substitutes for the historical particularities of embodied vulnerability. Working parallel to the voice are the novel’s geographic non-specificity—the story takes place in an unnamed West African nation—coupled with its reassertion of what Slaughter describes as “the idealist developmental compulsion of human rights and Bildung in [global] literature.”⁸⁹ Abani, on the other hand, contests that narrative through the spectral presence of My Luck, for whom no dissensual or consensual accommodation to the public sphere will occur. Intertwining local, national, and global affiliations, Abani nonetheless refutes the implication that the Bildungsroman can secure a viable future for a (former) child soldier in either national or global literary terms. This clears a space for other narratives and negotiations of modern subjectivity that might acknowledge if not embrace the ethical injunctions of that subject’s own ghosts.

Midway through Beasts of No Nation, Agu begins the story of his family’s dissolution in wartime through a fractured perspective indicative of war’s assault on coherent subjectivity: “Behind my eye I am seeing.”⁹⁰ The politics of memory here recalls the breakdown of civil society as violence rapidly approaches. His father loses the teaching job that secures their middle-class life and soon the United Nations evacuates women and children. Agu, left behind with his father and “the men of this village” to honor ancestors and guard private property, recognizes this protective measure as another form of social collapse: “Nothing in the village is the same without the women cooking food and selling groundnut and talk talking so all of the men are just staying quietly quietly like somebody is dying.”⁹¹ The simile proves apt as war arrives via guns and machetes, and Agu flees, laden only with “seeing bullet making my father to dance everywhere with his arm raising high to the sky like he is praising God.”⁹² That vision haunts Agu throughout the novel, continually reminding him of the impossibility of adequately understanding his egregious circumstances in familial terms. Situated at the heart of the narrative, the loss of family becomes a catalyst for a proliferation of fractured perspectives that extend from Agu’s initiation into violence in the first two chapters up until he finds himself in an NGO rehabilitation center in the penultimate chapter. Wandering through war with a weapon but without any discernible political agenda, he constantly sees double: “If I am closing my eye, I am seeing”; “Everything is inside out like my shirt I am wearing”; “I am standing outside myself”; “I am looking at Commandant and Strika and I am also thinking to myself that both of them are looking so peaceful and beautiful like how we are looking before the war, like how we are being after the war, but not like now”; “Suddenly, I am standing here in this room, but I am also standing in my classroom in the shadow.”⁹³ Soldiers dancing in the camp remind him of the annual male initiation ceremonies in the village through the Dance of the Leopard and the Ox:

Everybody is knowing that to be killing masquerade you are removing its mask.

All of the dancer is removing their mask.

All of the spirit are dying and now all the boy is becoming men.

I am opening my eye and seeing that I am still in the war, and I am thinking, if war is not coming, then I would be man by now.⁹⁴

This scene effectively divorces violence from manhood and critiques the loss of communal codes of conduct that contain rather than condone violence. Without those codes, murder and rape substitute for traditional initiation ceremonies, but do not fulfill their social function: Agu sees himself as a soldier, but not a man. Memory here has an ethical function in establishing a perspective from which Agu can recognize wartime violence, ostensibly in the name of group solidarity, as the destruction rather than reinforcement of social bonds.

Memory and the entanglements of time and culture do not necessarily produce ethical action. The scene above follows a horrific rape and murder in the novel in which the folkloric narrative fails to provide that critical distance on the violence at hand, and instead seems to displace its material effects onto an imaginative realm for which Agu feels no responsibility. As Agu’s team finds a mother and daughter hiding in a house and begins to assault them, the mother’s scream triggers a complementary parable: “AYIIIEEE, like it is the creation of my village when long ago great warrior and his army are just fighting fighting enemy in the bush near my village.” The creation story links the placement of the village to mythic parents of the village mourning over the “abomination” of their sons killing each other when they fail to recognize their fraternity under the masquerade of difference. Yet Agu positions himself against the lesson of the story, insisting, “I am grabbing the woman and her daughter. They are not my mother and my sister.”⁹⁵ Although the immediate and folkloric mother’s screams intersect in his telling, Agu can only recognize mother and daughter as the enemy, and he and his friend Strika dismember them.

The story of the ox and the leopard—retold twice in this short section—exemplifies “the relationship of active dissociation” from the past in which “bonds of hostility,” such as those shared by Strika and Agu, replace earlier affiliative narratives.⁹⁶ Mbembe provides the foundation for reading these scenes as components of a “political culture founded on the use of force and the emergence of an ethic of masculinity that rests on the public and violent expression of acts of virility,”⁹⁷ rather than solely as expressions of chaotic, senseless violence. Particularly in the case of child soldiers, for whom the “possession of a gun acts as an equivalent to the acquisition of a phallus […,] the mediations between the gun and the phallus are not just imaginary.” In these equations, moreover, “woman is constituted as the surplus—that which can be spent without worry of replenishment.”⁹⁸ Significantly, the disposability of women substitutes temporarily for that of child soldiers: rape as a weapon of war provides added value to the child soldiers who wield it, and who are otherwise themselves readily expendable. Agu seems to recognize that this gendered equation must also apply to his mother and sister, and he replaces those familial bonds with protective and nurturing solidarity with Strika. Agu recognizes Strika as “my brother and my family and the only person I can be talking to even if he is never talking back;”⁹⁹ however, their bond does not produce an alternative ending to, or a new community out of, the fable of the ox and the leopard. Strika’s death on the road “home” once the soldiers abandon any military mission they might have had completes the breakdown of social bonds and leaves Agu completely unmoored from family, village, mission, and even the fraternity of war.

One of the strengths of the novel comes from Iweala’s work to reverse the gendered terms of sex and violence. The catalyst for Agu’s rejection of militarism comes from his group’s visit to a brothel where the women, far from being reduced to their most expendable form in equations of sex and death during war, insist on other forms of value. As the men disperse to private rooms, leaving Agu at the television and bar, he makes several attempts to assert his own masculinity, which the women refuse to ratify. A young woman responds to his commands, “Is this war just making you to have no respect for your elder? This small thing borned yesterday trying to order me around. Enh! You this small thing. I can be your mother!”¹⁰⁰ She brings the bread he demands, but when he tries to touch her, “she is looking at me like she will be beating me to death and sucking in her teeths so I am putting my hand down.”¹⁰¹ What initially reads as a check on the corruption of childhood and Agu’s attempt to violate the norms of respect is rewritten as a more powerful check on violent masculinity when another woman in the brothel fatally stabs the Luftenant when he beats her during sex, and the group retreats carrying him with the knife still plunged into his belly.

The prostitutes provide an example of other courses of action for Agu that his memories and multiple perspectives cannot. After leaving the village with the brothel, the soldiers’ fortunes decline further as bombing, dying, deserting, and starving all increase. When Rambo, who has become the new Luftenant, tells the Commandant that he and the others are finished, the Commandant looks to Agu, his bodyguard, for protection. These desperate circumstances effect a shift in Agu from a soldier who is at once commanded and deadly to a boy making other choices: “I am lowering my gun,” he says, as Rambo shoots the Commandant and tells the soldiers, “WE ARE GOING HOME!”¹⁰² Once Strika dies on that journey back to a home that obviously does not exist, Agu abandons his military ties in a similar re-scripting of agency: “I am looking at my gun and I am saying to it, I am not needing you anymore. […] My shoulder that it is always sitting on is hurting so much, but I am feeling it jubilating because it is not having to be obeying gun anymore.”¹⁰³

Iweala does not expand upon the productive potential of this fragmented subject who so clearly in these moments relinquishes the desire for sovereignty guaranteed by his gun. Left wandering in the dark, where at least “nobody is ever having to see any of the terrible thing that is happening in this world,”¹⁰⁴ he emerges figuratively and literally in the morning light of a Catholic rehabilitation center. As the dictates of the literary and legal Bildungsroman reassert themselves with insistence, the last chapter “promote[s] physical and psychological recovery and social reintegration of a child victim of […] armed conflicts” (CRC, Article 39).¹⁰⁵ Physically restored with food, sanitation, medical care, and new clothes, Agu also receives psychosocial therapy with the help of a priest and an American aid worker, Amy, who encourages him to tell her his stories, very much to put his ghosts to rest. Amy’s humanitarianism models that of the posited reader, who should listen sympathetically to the narrative’s restoration of the whole, mature subject, even if the story cannot completely bridge the geopolitical and experiential spaces between them. “I am all of this thing,” Agu tells Amy (and the reader), with the reminder that “I am thinking I am like old man and she is like small girl because I am fighting in war and she is not even knowing what war is.”¹⁰⁶ This conclusion secures at once Agu’s former innocence as a child (in the legal and religious sense either of not accountable for his wartime atrocities or of eligible for the “Confession and Forgiveness and Resurrection” the priest offers) and narrative authority as an adult by re-inscribing the middle-class, Christian values of his nuclear family in the only remaining available sphere, that of global humanitarian literature. Although the novel concludes in the rehabilitation center rather than beyond it, Beasts of No Nation conforms to Slaughter’s argument that “in a heavily marketized and commoditized social economy, a society of readers’ humanitarian pressure for social conformity (what it regards as liberation by enfranchisement) translates into a commercial pressure for generic conformity (liberation by literacy and publication).”¹⁰⁷ That conformity in the novel ultimately seems to confirm Martha Minow’s argument that “[t]herapeutic purposes contrast starkly with political ones” in outcomes of atrocity.¹⁰⁸ By way of textual conclusion, Agu’s possible rehabilitation is enough.

Song for Night: A Handbook of Mourning as Conjuration

Abani actively resists the terms of this engagement. In place of literary humanitarianism, he encourages what Slaughter describes as “unlearning the self-congratulatory sense of benevolence (or noblesse oblige) that seems naturally to attend such reading acts of recognition” of the full dignity of a marginalized other.¹⁰⁹ Rather than a narrator whose restoration to the path of full human development seems to depend on the response of a sympathetic reader/aid worker, My Luck is introduced at the point of death, or what Salgado has described in terms of life “passing through death” (original emphasis),¹¹⁰ beyond the scope of the Bildungsroman in literature, humanitarianism, or law. For these reasons and because the novella is as much about the work of a literary aesthetic in representing child soldiers as it is about child soldiers themselves, My Luck’s story invites considerations of vulnerability that is divorced from phenomenology as well as identification.¹¹¹ The limbo between life and death, between the various cultural norms that shape My Luck’s understanding of his place in or out of the world, and between established narratives of childhood innocence and My Luck’s knowing voice—these intervals, in Rancière’s sense, between competing narrative temporalities that fail to cohere—provide the foundations for a profound meditation on where human rights end and other narratives of justice might begin.

The story proceeds through a complicated reworking of the terms and temporalities of death and silence. As is typical in Abani’s work, themes in the novella may be traced to his work in other literary forms. In Daphne’s Lot, Abani’s poetic re-imagination of his family’s experience of the Nigeria-Biafra Civil War, he writes of a seven-year old girl in a refugee camp:

[…] The other kids teased her

constantly. But she never spoke, or fought back.

When asked why, she said:

Dead people have nothing to say.¹¹²

Song for Night reverses the ironic relationship between silence and death in the poem to explore how haunting exceeds the language to describe it, yet insists on acknowledgment of the presence (present-ness) of the past and its importance for the ethical consideration of the future. As the title suggests, the novella invites readers into a circle of mourning, but one that wards against easy sentimentality or “self-congratulatory benevolence.” In place of identification with the protagonist, the novella stages the problem of witnessing My Luck’s paradoxes as a child soldier as a problem of self-representation (as discussed earlier with respect to the relevant legislation) as well as of reading the voices that haunt a shared present.

If “[d]eath is the thing you cannot fold into words,”¹¹³ as Abani writes in another poem, how can the conjuring and then haunting of ghosts become legible? What kinds of negotiations do they foster? Abani begins to address these questions through the interplay and undoing of silence and death made present at the limits of language. He grounds My Luck’s story loosely in history, region, and politics; however, as opposed to Tutuola, Saro-Wiwa, and Iweala, he separates that foundation from voice as a representation of authenticity. Indeed, Eleni Coundouriotis includes both Beasts of No Nation and Song for Night among the recent child soldier novels in African literature that, she argues, privilege victimhood and recovery of the protagonists over both historical agency and the stories of those who suffer at the hands of child soldiers. As opposed to the reading I offer here, which emphasizes the different approaches of the two works, Coundouriotis understands both Iweala and Abani’s work as tied to a Western paternalist project of restoring an innocent victim who stands metonymically for an immature continent.¹¹⁴

At once richly imagistic, spare, and elegant, Song for Night intertwines allusions from Igbo, Catholic, and Greek myths and stories to situate My Luck as child soldier (with Igbo, Catholic, and Muslim identifications) in the civil war and, through his slow death from a mine explosion, on his journey across the river of hate. The novella reaches beyond that quasi-national context, however, to present a manual of sorts to transnational mourning as conjuration. One of the persistent tropes in the novella is the imaginary manual “John Wayne” uses to train his child soldiers as he whips them into formation: “This is from the manual, the same manual that they use in West Point, the same one they use in Sandhurst; the military manual for the rules of engagement [… it is] like the rules of etiquette for war.” For John Wayne, the manual that he keeps in his head, so that “it can never be lost,” also promises that “we can never be lost as long as we follow [it].”¹¹⁵ John Wayne’s comments imply that the rules of engagement and the etiquette for war that are ostensibly the same in West Point, Sandhurst, and loosely Biafran context of the text, and that implication would seem to indicate support the universal principles of IHL; however, the rules of engagement and protection become perverted and absurd in this necropolitical conflict. Playing on that trope of the manual for the impossible (the jus in bello or law of war that can prevent loss), Abani opens the novella with a complementary set of directives, procedures, and conditions for reading a voice of the dead.

My Luck begins with a direct address to the reader: “What you hear is not my voice.” This declaration of authorial privilege warns immediately against any appropriative desire the reader might have to identify with the narrator. In addition, it places the problem of narration of the human rights subject at the center of the story. Abani quickly compounds the meanings of what “not my voice” might signify, of the many ways in which war renders vulnerability speechless and, thus, the many ways in which the literary will intervene where testimony cannot. My Luck explains first that he has not spoken in the three years since boot camp (intimating that perhaps, like Iweala’s Strika, he has been traumatized into silence by war); that he and other child soldiers “have developed a crude way of talking, a sort of sign language that we have become fluent in” (a disingenuous suggestion, given that both his signing and commentary are overtly literary); that he and the other mine diffusers, chosen for their slightness, had their vocal cords slit to prevent them from frightening each other during explosions; and, finally, that “not my voice” is about interiority as much as silence, because “there is something about the mind’s interiority no less that opens up your view of the world.”¹¹⁶ The inward turn has ethical implications. The word “your” functions doubly in the sentence to address the reader and to signify the speaker’s self-reflection. It also conjures the mind’s interiority (the loss that has been taken in) in the image of an other who serves as witness to the present, a process Derrida describes as crucial to the work of mourning: “The image looks at us. This dyssymetry also inscribes […] an essential anachrony in our being exposed to the other; it dislocated all contemporaneity at the very heart of what we have our sights on at the same time.”¹¹⁷ The inward turn that mourning takes initiates spatial, temporal, and subjective dislocations. These dislocations destabilize fixed positions of reader and text to make possible ethical calculations that explicitly extend to those whose voices are no longer present or who were never heard. In effect, Abani poses the question of how the logic of expenditure that fuels these conflicts as well as the legal principles of justice and protection would be calculated differently if those who are spectrally human—either because they are/were expendable or because they have perished in the conflict—were part of the equation. Song for Night does not answer that question; however, it demonstrates Abani’s literary attempt to summon one of those voices. The destabilized entanglements of time that make haunting possible extend to the failure of language to capture traumatic experience, such that the interiority does not offer the promise of complete disclosure or a counter, yet still totalizing narrative to the logic of war. Instead, Abani invites readers to risk the dangers of incomprehensibility and the impossibility of reading voices that can never be represented fully, yet still demand to be heard. This is the irruptive potential of political subjectivization.

Abani never mourns the limitations of language in representing atrocity; instead, he highlights, through My Luck’s address, those limitations as foundational to the work of imaginative literature:

Of course if you are hearing any of this at all it’s because you have gained access to my head. You would also know then that my inner-speech is not in English, because there is something atavistic about war that rejects all but the primal language of the genes to comprehend it, so you are in fact hearing my thoughts in Igbo. But we shan’t waste time on trying to figure all that out because as I said before, time here is precious and not to be wasted on peculiarities, only on what is essential.¹¹⁸

What is essential here is fiction’s ability to conjure a voice the reader is willing to attend, to bring forth the paradoxical violence and suffering of the child soldier without masking one behind the other. The urgency of My Luck’s appeal within the story becomes clear on the next page when we learn he has just come to, so to speak, after a mine blast. Not only is My Luck’s voice impossible, his embodiment is, too. With chapter titles that are both moving and ironic, such as “Silence Is a Steady Hand, Palm Flat,” “Death Is Two Fingers Sliding across the Throat,” and “Imagination Is a Forefinger between the Eyes,” what follows is an exploration of how literature “gestures the unspeakable.”¹¹⁹ For Abani, as for Avery Gordon in her theory of haunting, gestures function as “structures of feeling” (borrowed from Raymond Williams) that figure “the necessarily social nature of what we call the subjective; [gesture] gives notice to the texture and skin of the this, here, now, alive, active contemporaneity of our lives.”¹²⁰ Significantly in Abani’s work, the task is not to script the texture of the present to be phenomenologically available to readers (what it “feels like” to be a child soldier), but rather to represent how the entanglements of temporality and subjectivity call forth an imagination of shared, embodied vulnerability.

Song for Night’s contribution to that imaginative effort is precisely to avoid naturalizing its terms and instead to render them as explicitly as possible. The yearning for an authentic, embodied voice of an other is acknowledged and then denied, with an overtly lyrical and literary representation offered in its place. The language of gesture to describe the spectrally human links reason, presence, and corporeality to affect, anachrony, and imagination within what Derrida terms the “spectrapoetic.”¹²¹ For Derrida, following Marx, spectrapoetic describes the “metamorphosis of commodities [that] was already a process of transfiguring idealization”; but it is also related to conjuration as “a matter of neutralizing a hegemony or overturning some power.”¹²² Thus, at every juncture, Abani provides a narrative of the loss that counters the designation of expendability with a haunting return, while continually undermining assumptions of what that loss might mean and for whom.

The story emerges gradually from the palimpsestic layering of journeys whose meanings proliferate through the text. For My Luck, his desire to catch up with his unit, which abandoned him for dead on the battlefield in violation of protocol, propels him forward. The Cross River marks his central passage. Abani stresses the river’s plethora of meanings, as its name and his journey invoke Greek mythology (and its rewritings in western literary epics), Igbo legend, and colonial history. Those alternative renderings of the past are reflected corporeally in the crosses he carves in his arm in what he calls “my personal cemetery,” itself imaging the Islamic and Catholic faiths of his parents (and employing the knife of “[m]y father the imam and circumciser” for one of the cuts).¹²³ “‘Life and death are like this river,’” My Luck’s grandfather told him, and he holds onto floating corpses and rides in empty canoes, carried initially by his “undercurrent, full of a hate dark as any undertow.”¹²⁴

The journey gains shape and dimension, even as its temporalities further proliferate and lose their distinction. He finds himself in key sites of violence and conscience from his past, yet the days bleed together. As he comes closer to accepting death, embodiment and sensory experience increasingly give way to ethical consideration. Meeting Ijeoma at a house where he had inadvertently shot a minister’s pregnant wife, Ijeoma tells him, “These are memories. Before we can move from here, we have to relive and release the darkness.”¹²⁵ Despite all signs to the contrary—e.g., people who curse, “Tufia!” to ward off evil spirits when they see him; the appearance of Ijeoma, whose death he witnessed—My Luck refuses to countenance his own death, although he recognizes the haunting that surrounds him. At first, haunting appears figurative and literary, referencing both social death and a state of being reminiscent of the ending of Sozaboy when Mene is unrecognizable to others upon his return home. My Luck comments, “I am sure that when the war is over, many of the reported dead will stream back to their families only to be rejected as ghosts or zombies.”¹²⁶ There is no social space available for child soldiers who both exemplify and instrumentalize necropolitical authority once war has ended. As his journey continues through the ghosts of his own past, however, he also must contend with other specters like himself that are haunting the land. Doing so, he intimates, will require re-activating the cultural traditions that war has destroyed not as static reminders of tradition, but as necessary, adaptable practices for the future. Despite his comment that just when we need shamans to put the dead to rest, the shamans have all become soldiers, a “native priest” named Peter appears, reminding him that “we all have to cross [this river] someday,” and conjures a canoe for the end of My Luck’s journey.¹²⁷ Here the passage that began with gestures for silence and death and progressed through memory and imagination moves finally to familial love. Floating in a coffin provided by Grace—that undeserved gift that may at times provide an alternative to rights or to humanitarianism tied to stereotypes of deserving victims—he reaches the opposite shore to find Home: “a Palm Fisted to the Heart.”

Abani emphasizes, through gesture and the voice that is not “my voice,” the construction of My Luck and the narrative, which conclude at the opposite shore when his young mother, name, and voice are recuperated. My Luck’s return to his mother may appear to reassert a romanticized view of the family as at once private and naturalized; however, the imbrication of family dynamics and national disintegration that led to My Luck’s enlistment undermines such a reading. Instead, Abani seems to recognize the yearning for such a secure space, even as he places it beyond the scope of this lifeworld. Agu’s insistence at the end of his tale of atrocities that “I am also having mother once, and she is loving me”¹²⁸ and My Luck’s reiteration of maternal love both confirm the protagonists’ humanity, a humanity that includes the capacity for violence and degradation as well as for love, care, and forgiveness. By emphasizing the human-ness of the characters and their capacity for ethical regard—notwithstanding their experiences of social abandonment, disposability, instrumentality in conflict, or even willful participation in it—both novels focus readers’ attention on the dynamic interplay of assumptions that surround child soldiers as well as their metaphoric representation of precarious life at this moment of late modernity.

Ghosts, argue Derrida and Gordon, always “[figure a] utopian dimension” that gestures toward the future.¹²⁹ In Derrida’s terms, specters address the implied reader’s inevitable statement, “I would like to learn to live finally,” with the reminder that “[i]f it—learning to live—remains to be done, it can happen only between life and death.”¹³⁰ Whereas Iweala ultimately locates the future in the promise, however fraught and ambiguous, of the law, Abani takes up Derrida’s challenge. Song for Night remains focused on the song itself—the potential literary aesthetics have to disrupt any imposed uni-linear form of history, narrative, or human development. The anachrony of the novella and its transpatiality, in other words, provide the moment between life and death that is otherwise unavailable for the reader who wants to learn to live. Death restores My Luck to the childhood he lost, a romanticized conclusion to be sure, but one that also underscores the impossibility of such restoration among the living. Mourning as conjuration then focuses not solely on the child soldier as victim, but on the broader circumstances that have produced him as well as on the atrocities he has committed. Mourning attends what Derrida has theorized in terms of “time out of joint,” and responsibility for both shifts from My Luck to the reader in the novella’s conclusion.¹³¹

Abani’s “spectrapoetics,” his haunting portrayal of My Luck through irony that continually defers what should be present, provide an alternative imagining of how to negotiate the terms of global literature and the terms of modernity, including the consumption of fiction about child soldiers as a something other than a particularly affective example of subaltern or postcolonial difference. Whereas Derrida locates spectrapoetics in relation to the State’s complicity with capitalism, wherein “[t]hese ghosts that are commodities transform human producers into ghosts,”¹³² Abani makes the process of transformation visible in a human rights context through the narrative and ethical journey of one of those ghosts.

My Luck’s journey takes place in the absence of human rights law, an absence that is signified in multiple ways. In the logic of the story, My Luck is beyond the reach of the law; however, this circumstance of plot also illuminates conflicted temporalities within normative human rights and alternatives founded upon embodied vulnerability as opposed to liberal subjectivity. Inhering in normative human rights is a temporal progression from a time of barbarity, as referenced in the Preamble of the UDHR, to an impossible ideal future. Mourning attached to this narrative looks backward, but does not question the ideal of the future, which determines who is or is not grievable and depends upon the association of vulnerability with victimhood. On the other hand, as Butler effectively argues, when mourning is for the spectrally human, it forcefully calls upon a non-teleological image of the future. What I would call a critical and productive mourning necessitates the future anterior. In Butler’s terms, the future anterior states, “‘this will be a life that will have been lived’ [and] is the presupposition of a grievable life, which means that this will be a life that can be regarded as a life, and be sustained by that regard.”¹³³ My Luck is not a ghost of the future anterior; however, his haunting and the spectrapoetics that attend it disturb the neatness of the novella’s conclusion and conventional mourning for his death. My Luck, who exists and survives only in the imagination, whose Bildungsroman cannot be written, who never claims the rights and responsibilities of citizenship and, indeed, who “is no longer the citizen in the making,”¹³⁴ disrupts the desire for the totalizing forms of compensation offered through the “full development of the human personality” in literature and law.

Mourning as conjuration then refocalizes through My Luck as witness to the reader’s predilections as well as to My Luck’s own atrocities. In keeping with a Levinasian ethics shaped by the image of the face that is at once concrete and abstract and stands in for the “infinite ethical relation”¹³⁵ to others (before identity and before will), My Luck interprets his own actions through the regard of others. These looks, moreover, constitute the most ethically challenging moments of the text. They direct attention away from a material political and historical reading of the book, as Abani’s critics have argued, and toward the problem of imagining an ethos of human rights that incorporates all the paradoxes of the child soldier rather than measures his distance from the legal ideal. To give one example, the first face My Luck recounts is one that haunts him throughout his journey. Wandering with his unit into a village wasted by war, and “armed to the teeth with AK-47s and bags of ammo and grenades mostly stolen from the better US-armed enemy soldiers,” he asks for food from a group of old women cooking over an open fire, only to discover in horror that the meal is a tiny human baby. Depravity pervades the scene: “I emptied a clip into them, as my platoon cheered at the snapping of old bones and the sigh of tired flesh even though they didn’t know why I was killing the women.”¹³⁶ The novella does not hierarchize a gradation of evils as the women roast the baby, My Luck fires upon them, and his platoon cheers at the sight of more violence and death. In place of the rules of war, which seems to have no meaning in the necropolitics at hand, My Luck recognizes that “[i]t is that little face, maybe a few months old, that keeps me from rest.”¹³⁷ The geopolitical significance of the enemy soldiers, of ostensible reasons for fighting, fade from view, while that infinite ethical obligation to the future signified by the infant’s face persists to catalyze his story. The child’s face—the face that should be a life that will have been lived—opens up the future to imagination and negotiation; however, it does so in the a priori sense that Levinas intended, rather than in terms tethered to a particular context.

Notes

1. For a more extensive discussion of definitions of vulnerability in human rights legal contexts, see Morawa, “Vulnerability as a Concept in International Human Rights Law” and Timmer, “A Quiet Revolution: Vulnerability in the European Court of Human Rights.”

2. Merry, “Introduction: Conditions of Vulnerability,” 198.

3. Grear, Redirecting Human Rights: Facing the Challenge of Corporate Legal Humanity, 133, 119.

4. Grear, Redirecting Human Rights, 133.

5. Hesford, “Contingent Vulnerabilities: Child Soldiers as Human Rights Subjects,” 71.

6. Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, 91.

7. Hawley, “Biafra as Heritage and Symbol: Adichie, Mbachu, and Iweala,” 23.

8. Maslin, “A Conscripted Soldier’s Tale from the Heart of Darkness,” E9.

9. Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 14–15.

10. Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 14.

11. Ewing, Arguing Sainthood: Modernity, Psychoanalysis, and Islam, 8.

12. Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law.

13. Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 14 (original emphasis).

14. Grewal, Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms, 198.

15. Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 16.

16. Ahmadou Kourouma, quoted in Singer, Children at War, 37.

17. Harlow, “Child and/or Soldier?: From Resistance Movements to Human Rights Regiments,” 209.

18. Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, 87.

19. Bhabha, “The Child––What Sort of Human?” 1526.

20. Bhabha. “The Child––What Sort of Human?” 1528.

21. Bhabha. “The Child––What Sort of Human?” 1534.

22. Bhabha. “The Child––What Sort of Human?” 1527.

23. Mbembe, “On Politics as a Form of Expenditure,” 299.

24. Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 66.

25. Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 66.

26. Constable, Our Word Is Our Bond: How Legal Speech Acts, 104.

27. Much recent criticism about contemporary child soldiers begins with a gesture toward the long history of child participation in armed conflict. P.W. Singer’s Children at War is an exception to this scholarship, as he argues that “[t]he exclusion of children from warfare has held true in almost every traditional culture” (9) and distinguishes violent from nonviolent participation in past conflicts. Barbara Harlow, meanwhile, critiques the contemporary literary fascination with the child soldiers that ignores its long political history as well as is unaccompanied by the political will to address the treatment of child soldiers such as Omar Khadr, committed to Guantánamo when he was fifteen years old (“Child and/or Soldier?: From Resistance Movements to Human Rights Regiments”).

28. For overviews of the global scope of child soldiering, see Wessells (2006), Singer (2006), and Rosen (2005). Honwana (2005) provides a more targeted analysis of African child soldiers, based on fieldwork in Mozambique and Angola. Wessells notes that assumptions about child soldiers as stigmas of underdevelopment and political failing ignore the “normalization and legitimation by child soldiering by countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom which claim to protect children and to have children’s best interests at heart” while legally recruiting soldiers below age 18 into their own armed forces (17).

29. See Honwana, Child Soldiers in Africa, Introduction and Chapters 1 and 2, and Wessells, “The New Face of War” (18–23).

30. Mbembe, “On Politics as a Form of Expenditure,” 322.

31. Mbembe, “On Politics as a Form of Expenditure,” 322.

32. Rosen, Armies of the Young, 14, 12.

33. Rosen, “Child Soldiers, International Humanitarian Law, and the Globalization of Childhood,” 298.

34. Rosen, Armies of the Young, 12.

35. Rosen addresses the politicization of childhood and its legal implications in his final chapter, “The Politics of Age,” in Armies of the Young as well as in “Child Soldiers, International Humanitarian Law, and the Globalization of Childhood.”

36. Mawson, “Children, Impunity and Justice: Some Dilemmas from Northern Uganda,” 141.

37. Rosen, “Child Soldiers,” 296.

38. Relevant international humanitarian law (such as the Geneva Conventions) and human rights law (such as the CRC) provides various definitions of a child and levels of protection to children in armed conflict, depending on their age, whether they serve in national or anti-national armed groups, and whether they are conscripted voluntarily or forcibly. In addition to the CRC and the Optional Protocol, the Third and Fourth Geneva Conventions (1949) and the Additional Protocol Relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts (1977) have provisions that address children in war more broadly, and all three mandate the highest level of protection to children under the age of 15, with age 18 marking the end of childhood. The Additional Protocol, like the Convention on the Rights of the Child, allows for recruitment of soldiers between ages 15 and 18. The International Labour Organization’s Convention 182 on the Worst Forms of Child Labor (1999) follows the Straight–18 definition of a child, and cites “forced or compulsory recruitment of children into armed conflict” (Article 3) as one of the worst forms of child labor (a provision that does not address voluntary child service). In the United States, Senators Durbin (D-Illinois) and Brownback (R-Kansas) have introduced bill S. 1175, the Child Soldier Prevention Act of 2008. It places limits on US military assistance to countries whose government forces or government-sponsored armed groups “recruit or use” child soldiers (Section 5) and it encourages US “services to rehabilitate recovered child soldiers and reintegrate them back into their communities” (Section 4).

39. For a close look at the statutory differences between these legal instruments, see Breen, “When Is a Child Not a Child? Child Soldiers in International Law.” Breen notes the “cultural differences” that influence the definition of a child (72), though she argues ultimately for the strengthening of “age-related rights” protection for children under 18 (97–98).

40. UNICEF, Cape Town Annotated Principles and Best Practices (1997).

41. Comaroff and Comaroff, “Introduction,” Law and Disorder in the Postcolony, 33.

42. For further development of this argument, see Boyden, “Childhood and the Policy Makers: A Comparative Perspective on the Globalization of Childhood” as well as Burman, “Innocents Abroad: Western Fantasies of Childhood and the Iconography of Emergencies.”

43. Stephens, “Introduction: Children and the Politics of Culture in ‘Late Capitalism’,” 36.

44. Stephens, “Introduction: Children and the Politics of Culture in ‘Late Capitalism’,” 39.

45. See also Boyden and de Berry’s “Introduction” to Children and Youth on the Front Line: Ethnography, Armed Conflict and Displacement. The focus on trauma and psychopathology, they note, “have the effect of both pathologising the survivors of the conflict and individualizing a phenomenon that is in fact profoundly political” (xiv).

46. Pupavac, “Misanthropy Without Borders: The International Children’s Rights Regime,” 100–101.

47. Pupavac, “Misanthropy Without Borders,” 102.

48. Pupavac, “Misanthropy Without Borders,” 99.

49. Comaroff and Comaroff, “Introduction,” 33.

50. Comaroff and Comaroff, “Introduction,” 30.

51. Comaroff and Comaroff, “Introduction,” 44.

52. Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc. 150.

53. Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Cultures, 10.

54. For his focused analysis of this narrative intersection, see Slaughter, “Enabling Fictions and Novel Subjects: The Bildungsroman and International Human Rights Law.” This argument is expanded and extended throughout Human Rights, Inc.

55. Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc., Chapter 2, “Becoming Plots: Human Rights, the Bildungsroman, and the Novelization of Citizenship,” and 151.

56. Moretti, The Way of the World, 10.

57. In “Of Ancestors and Progeny,” Black Issues Book Review (November/December 2006): 24–25, Abani cites Tutuola and Saro-Wiwa as precursors for Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation (25), and I extend that influence to Song for Night perhaps more than Abani himself would. For a larger discussion of that influence, see Schultheis, “Global Specters: Child Soldiers in the Post-National Fiction of Uzodinma Iweala and Chris Abani.” In “The Child Soldier Narrative and the Problem of Arrested Historicization,” Coundouriotis gives an excellent reading of the influence of Soyinka’s Season of Anomy (1974) on Iweala and Abani.

58. Mbembe, “On Politics as a Form of Expenditure,” 322.

59. Moretti, The Way of the World, 6.

60. Moretti, The Way of the World, 6.

61. Iweala, Beasts of No Nation, 23.

62. Abani, Song for Night, 86.

63. Salgado, “Vanishing Points/Visible Fictions: The Textual Politics of Terror,” 217.

64. Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc., 180, 181, 182.

65. Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 15.

66. Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 16.

67. Hopgood, The Endtimes of Human Rights, ix.

68. Hopgood, The Endtimes of Human Rights, 178, 168.

69. Chakrabarty, “Radical Histories and Question of Enlightenment Rationalism: Some Recent Critiques of Subaltern Studies,” 262.

70. Chakrabarty, “Radical Histories and Question of Enlightenment Rationalism,” 275.

71. Chakrabarty, “Radical Histories and Question of Enlightenment Rationalism,” 276, 262.

72. Dayan, The Law Is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons, 9.

73. Kaiwar, “Toward Orientalism and Nativism: The Impasse of Sublatern Studies,” 218.

74. Kaiwar, “Colonialism, Difference and Exoticism in the Formation of a Postcolonial Metanarrative,” 66.

75. Butler, Precarious Life, 147.

76. Butler, Precarious Life, 22.

77. That who triumphs in the “tougher arena of high-stakes, blockbuster publishing” is central to understanding the stakes of our reading of African child soldiers is clear in the recent controversy over Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone (Shelley Gare, “Africa’s War Child,” The Australian, 15 March 2008, http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23074110–5016101,00.html). See, for instance, the ironically titled, “Boy Soldier of Fortune,” by Graham Rayman, The Village Voice (18 March 2008), “Disturbing Memoir Outsells Literary Comfort Food at Starbucks” (10 March 2007) B7 by Julie Bosman of The New York Times, as well as the newsbreaking reporting on the Beah story by Shelley Gare and Peter Wilson in The Australian in March 2008.

78. Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc., 314.

79. As just one indicator, a recent WorldCat search yielded 505 libraries that have purchased Song for Night as opposed to 1348 holding Beasts of No Nation. Beasts of No Nation also received early support from Jamaica Kincaid, Iweala’s advisor at Harvard University where he first drafted the novel as his undergraduate honors thesis, and the novel was published by HarperCollins. Song for Night, by contrast, was published by Akashic Books, which has a reputation for courting alternative and African-American markets (Linda Chavers and Calvin Reid. “Five Figures: Black Book Publishing Today,” Publishers Weekly 12 December 2005, http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6290197.html).

80. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, 196.

81. Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, 87.

82. Derrida, Specters of Marx, xix.

83. Derrida, Specters of Marx, xix.

84. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 195.

85. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 24.

86. Derrida, Specters of Marx, xix.

87. Quayson, Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing, 62.

88. Iweala, “P.S.: Writing Beasts of No Nation,” Beasts of No Nation, 1.

89. Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc., 307.

90. Iweala, Beasts of No Nation, 60.

91. Iweala, Beasts of No Nation, 67, 69.

92. Iweala, Beasts of No Nation, 72.

93. Iweala, Beasts of No Nation, 56, 52, 48, 92, 104–5.

94. Iweala, Beasts of No Nation, 56.

95. Iweala, Beasts of No Nation, 49, 48.

96. Mbembe, “On Politics as a Form of Expenditure,” 322. These earlier narratives also include Christian parables with which Agu was raised. In the scene with the mother and daughter, for instance, Agu responds to the mother’s prayers by “laughing laughing because God is forgetting everybody in this country” (Iweala, 48), phrasing that at once recognizes their common citizenship and discounts it in favor of what Mbembe calls a “relationship of reciprocal negation” (“On Politics as a Form of Expenditure,” 326).

97. Mbembe, “On Politics as a Form of Expenditure,” 326.

98. Mbembe, “On Politics as a Form of Expenditure,” 328.

99. Iweala, Beasts of No Nation, 131.

100. Iweala, Beasts of No Nation, 111.

101. Iweala, Beasts of No Nation, 112.

102. Iweala, Beasts of No Nation, 123.

103. Iweala, Beasts of No Nation, 135–6.

104. Iweala, Beasts of No Nation, 136.

105. Iweala has contributed in more nuanced ways to efforts of the United Nations, including in an essay in Our Common Humanity in the Information Age: Principles and Values for Development (UN: Global Alliance for ICT and Development, 2007). There he argues against the promotion Western civil and political freedoms above social and economic development, noting that “[f]reedom and development go hand in hand” (32) and that “to maintain their luxuries, societies have been known to sacrifice freedom, theirs and others’” (31).

106. Iweala, Beasts of No Nation, 142, 140.

107. Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc., 307. In “Troubling Humanitarian Consumption: Reframing Relationality in African Child Soldier Narratives,” Allison Mackey finds more ambiguity in the novel’s conclusion, particularly in Agu’s reluctance to share his story with Amy and his sense that telling alone cannot bridge the space between Amy and his experiences; however, to me the reluctance reflects the tensions within the therapeutic process as opposed to resistance to it.

108. Minow, Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History after Genocide and Mass Violence, 22.

109. Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc., 326.

110. Salgado, “Vanishing Points,” 218.

111. For a fuller discussion of how Abani’s two novellas construct an ethos of human rights out of the temporal play between lyrical and narrative modes, see Moore and Swanson Goldberg, “‘Let Us Begin with a Smaller Gesture’: An Ethos of Human Rights and the Possibilities of Form in Abani’s Song for Night and Becoming Abigail.”

112. Abani, Daphne’s Lot, 40.

113. Abani, Dog Woman, 15.

114. Coundouriotis, “The Child Soldier Narrative and the Problem of Arrested Historicization,” 192.

115. Abani, Song for Night, 33, 34.

116. Abani, Song for Night, 19, 20, 21.

117. Derrida, “By Force of Mourning,” The Work of Mourning, 160.

118. Abani, Song for Night, 21.

119. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 150.

120. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 199. Gordon turns to Williams here to emphasize fiction’s ability to render the past, present, and future active social processes, rather than static temporal moments.

121. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 45.

122. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 45, 47.

123. Abani, Song for Night, 70, 38.

124. Abani, Song for Night, 45–46.

125. Abani, Song for Night, 104.

126. Abani, Song for Night, 50.

127. Abani, Song for Night, 113–14.

128. Iweala, Beasts of No Nation, 142.

129. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 183.

130. Derrida, Specters of Marx, xvii, xviii.

131. In his reading of Hamlet’s lamentation of “The time is out of joint. O cursed spite, / That ever I was born to set it right!”, Derrida finds tragedy in Hamlet’s refusal to accept the responsibility, stemming from his birth, for the law as well as in the law itself as a tool of vengeance (Derrida, Specters of Marx, 20–21).

132. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 156.

133. Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? 15.

134. Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity, 36.

135. Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, x.

136. Abani, Song for Night, 28.

137. Abani, Song for Night, 29.

138. ReliefWeb Glossary of Humanitarian Terms (August 2008), 46.