A New Kind Of Jesuit: Is it Just Me Or Is This Just Strange?

Dispatches from the road to hell
A Nigerian priest powerfully portrays the plight of Africa's fleeing children
Jul 13, 2008 04:30 AM
By, John Freeman
Say You're One of Them

By Uwem Akpan Little, Brown, 384 pages, $27
A reader who regularly dips into the World pages will recognize the grim events around which Uwem Akpan's debut story collection revolves. In 1994, with the encouragement of their government, the Hutu majority of Rwanda systematically murdered nearly 1 million Tutsi people. In 2002, the BBC reported that aid workers in Western Africa were exploiting child refugees with demands for sex. Two years ago, violence between Muslims and Christians ratcheted up in Ethiopia. Today, girls as young as 11 are being recruited into the sex trade from shantytowns outside Nairobi, Kenya. In "Say You're One of Them," Akpan teleports readers out of their chairs and into the lives of children trying to survive these dire circumstances. The book is less a story collection than a powerful, frankly activist work of fiction that often succeeds in spite of its intentions. Akpan, a Jesuit priest from Nigeria, exhaustively catalogues the meagre circumstances of his cast.

In "An Ex-Mas Feast," an entire family clusters around one glue bottle, which they share to get high and stave off hunger. They spend the story eagerly anticipating the nightly haul of their 12-year-old, a girl who has become a streetwalker.

Akpan often narrates in the first person, a storytelling strategy that allows him to contrast how much his young narrators understand about their situations, and how little are the chances that they might escape them.

In "Fattening for Gabon," a young boy and girl are sold into semi-slavery when their parents are diagnosed with AIDS. Their uncle ferries the kids to the border, where they are fed stories of happy lives and platters of Western food and sea breezes. Only as they get closer to departing do their uncle's actions in the bedroom reveal they may be on their way to a living hell.

There is little reprieve from the bleakness of these stories. Like Flannery O'Connor's best work, they absorb any light you project upon them. Akpan's characters are wrapped in the hard-edged, inscrutable armour of people in situations so desperate that superhuman instincts take over.

In "My Parents' Bedroom," a young girl named Monique tells how a Hutu mob came for her Tutsi mother during the Rwandan genocide. Monique's mother, a paragon of sacrifice, saved her children, her husband and then her friends – who hid in the family attic while Monique's father proved his loyalty to Hutus by killing his wife.

Akpan is such a clever, instinctual writer that even when his characters are providing testimony, it can feel like art. Each narrator in this book has a different style of speaking and a slightly different nature. But they have a universal method of dealing with the worst disasters: They run. When a young girl's neighbour forbids her to play with their children, the girl's family packs up and leaves. When a one-handed Muslim notices that events are out of control, he disguises himself and boards a bus south. These stories are all dispatches, Akpan makes clear, from a journey that has only begun. It is to their awful credit that, grim as they are, you must hope they have a sequel.
John Freeman is a New York-based reviewer and writer.

Link (here)

GJBJ previous post (here)

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Review by David Gibson entitled Summer reading: A can't miss suggestion on Belief.net (here)

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New York Times book reviewer Janet Maslin has her say in a review entitled, As Africa’s Horrors Rage, Suffer the Little Children, (here) which I think is the best review in "Big Media" because it is viewpoint is not mired in New York Province familiarity.

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An interview with Fr. Akpan in the New Yorker (here)

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NPR interview (here)

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An indepth publisher (Hachette Book Group USA) sponsered website for the book (here)