Song for NightBy Chris Abani, Akashic Books, Paperback, 167 pages, $12.95
:
The reader may be forgiven for thinking, however fleetingly, "Yet another haunting novel about a boy soldier?" To review, in the past two years we've seen the publication of Uzodinma Iweala's Beasts of No Nation, Ahmadou Kourouma's Allah is Not Obliged, Emmanuel Dongala's Johnny Mad Dog, Chimamanda Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun, and Helon Habila's Measuring Time, as well as such memoirs as Ishmael Beah's A Long Way Gone and Grace Akallo's Girl Soldier. Yet what is most remarkable is just how variously riveting and beautiful each of these accounts is, and in this regard Nigerian author Chris Abani's spellbinding new novella, Song for Night, fits right in.
The story is told by the mute 15-year-old boy, My Luck (his mother's only son), leader of an imperiled young band of mine-sweepers whose vocal chords have all been cut so as not to panic each other with their dying cries. After three years of fighting, raping, and dying together, he wakes from an explosion to find his platoon has left him for dead, and so sets off to rejoin the only family he has left in this world.
My Luck is an old, old soul, with a head full of his grandfather's tales and a watch that has no hands. His arms are pattered with scars to mark those who have died, those he has killed, and those who he enjoyed killing. Yes, the killing is sometimes sweet, the flesh's clasp of the blade has its own heady, orgasmic charge. Mutilation is a pleasure too, as is rape. Here is the fascinating terror of the child soldier; as flies to wanton boys, they kill us for their sport. Yet there is tenderness and wonder also, in the arms of his dying lover, Ijeoma, in the lost reaches of memory before the fighting came.
The Nigeria he traverses is an otherworldly place trip-mined with nightmare visions of his past deeds, an infernal landscape burned into the reader's mind through a succession of images: a one-legged girl dancing "like a crazy heron;" a river freighted with "macabre regattas" of the dead; a skeleton adrift in a canoe, laced with spider's web; a nun's flying, dying leap; a woman carrying her own coffin. "In this place everything is possible. Here we believe that when a person dies in a sudden and hard way, their spirit wanders confused looking for its body. Confused because they don't realize they're dead. I know this. Traditionally a shaman would ease such a spirit across to the other world. Now, well, the land is crowded with confused spirits and all the shamans are soldiers." There is great cruelty, but seldom wanton deeds; indeed, cruelest of all is want itself, which stalks the land unrelentingly.
Abani is a poet with a gift for stark beauty sparely rendered and, as in his Becoming Abigail, the spacious silences of this novella work very well for his music, as does the form's brevity for his dark theme.
In many ways, including one or two horrifyingly particular scenes, this book is a fitting companion to Cormac McCarthy's The Road, offering another way forward from that no-man's-land beyond the edge of death.
(By the way, Abani is currently working as editor on a forthcoming Nigerian entry into Akashic's deliciously inky series of crime anthologies, to be titled Lagos Noir. American writers take note: I think we're about to get schooled in the true meaning of hardboiled.)