Beasts of No Nation and Shocking Material

Melissa Brooks
November 20, 2008
Beasts of No Nation p. 1-75

Paul, I am, as you suggested, posting my email to you about Beasts of No Nation I wrote in August for my last post (I did revise it a bit).

The scenes that shocked me most in Beasts were those where Agu killed people with a machete or knife. For instance, when he and Srtika killed the woman and daughter:
"Then Strika is taking his knife high above his head and chopping and everybody is coming apart." (51).
"I am liking the sound of knife chopping KPWUDA KPWUDA on her head and how the blood is just splashing on my hand and my face and my feets. I am chopping and chopping and chopping until I am looking up and it is dark" (51).
The scenes where the Commandant molests Agu also disturbed me extensively. A combination of factors made this book shocking for me: the brutality of the violence (machetes), the pleasure the soldiers often seemed to take in killing and humiliating people, Agu's youthfulness, and especially the humanization of Agu--his anecdotes from his life before the war, in school, with his family; his fluctuation between pleasure and remorse about killing; his cognitive dissonance about his actions while he was killing. Agu makes me think about how people who kill can be regular people and are not necessarily seized by a moment of "insanity" when they kill; it puts people who have killed that much closer to me and every other person in mentality. This in turn reminds me that everyone has the potential to kill, and it just makes me sad. For me, killing, and many cruel or mean things, are entwined with empathy; I'm almost terrified to do things I wouldn't want people to do to me. When Agu or another soldier was killing someone, I often thought of myself in that victim's place, and that makes it much harder for me to cope with this book, and material of this nature.
I think part of the reason we may be drawn to shocking material is because they offer us mental stimulation. We seem to be desensitized to so many things now that stimulation is much harder to come by, so when we experience it we hold on to it. In general, I think people prefer stimulation (even if it's nauseating) to boredom. I also think that shocking material can make us more knowledgeable, aware, and open minded, the latter alone being reason enough for me to pursue the material. But with Beasts for instance, it offers a personal account of war and reawakens us to how awful it really is. It's easier to think about war with grown men in uniforms, attacking only other soldiers, and being very strategic, well planned, and confined to a site solely for war. In Beasts, kids are fighting, civilians are ruthlessly murdered, and the troop Agu's with seem to have no plan whatsoever, rather, that they're wandering aimlessly, hoping to stumble across something (however this could be due to the fact that we hear the story from Agu's point of view--being a kid he does not fully understand what is going on). Anyhow, my point is that I think these kinds of texts force us to face the uglier aspects of reality, and I, at least, want to accept things as they really are and not pretend they're different.