Satire, Children, and Traumatic Violence: The Case of Ahmadou Kourouma and Uwen Akpan

Abstract

My essay explores the child figure as narrator/focalizer/character and victim/perpetrator of traumatic violence and chilling abuse, as represented in Kourouma’s Allah Is Not Obliged (2000) and Akpan’s Say You’re One of Them (2008). These narratives offer themselves for comparison not least because both rely on satire and are about African children exposed to extreme violence in several late-postcolonial African states, but also because of the problematic of representation in contemporary African fiction which they signal. The use of brutalized/brutalizing child narrators/focalizers/characters is an anxious way and limit-point in the representation of excessive degradation characteristic of most contemporary African states. It is emblematic of crises of representation in current African fiction. These narratives inscribe themselves in, but also trouble, the notion of growth whereby child narrators/focalizers were used in the conventional manner of the Bildungsroman genre in late-colonial and early-postcolonial African narratives. They express an ambivalent anxiety, an apprehension that has haunted the African writer since Camara Laye’s African Child (1953) and Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958): the satisfaction of a hegemonic Western readership, on the one hand, and, on the other, the genuine expression of the entanglements of the postcolonial present in the pre-colonial/colonial past as a way of imagining a different future for Africa. The narratives are symptomatic of writers stretched taut by the demands of local problems and the expectations of broader discourses about Africa’s sad current affairs. Together with other narratives of a similar streak, the two novels mark a significant shift or at least daring experimentation by contemporary African writers seeking ways of narrativizing the continent’s fractured past, fraught present, and a decidedly bleak future.