On October 16, 2015, Netflix debuted Cary Fukunaga’s movie Beasts of No Nation, based on the novel by Nigerian writer Uzodinma Iweala. The story, set in an unnamed West African country, will likely put many in mind of other recent works in the “child soldier” genre across the continent—two of the most prominent to American readers are Ishmeal Beah’s A Long Way Gone, which was prominently displayed on Starbucks counters for several months in 2007, and the Dave Eggers/Valentino Achak Deng collaboration What is the What, a common selection for campus and library reading programs.
The cognitive dissonance of picking up a bloody war memoir with your pumpkin spice latte notwithstanding, the popularity of these stories has led to increased interest in writing from places like Sierra Leone and Sudan. Viewers of Fukunaga’s movie who want to read more, along with discerning readers of African fiction in general, would do well to seek out a recent publication that did not garner quite as much attention as those mentioned above but that broadens the range of stories told about war in Africa beyond the child soldier figure.
There Is A Country: New Fiction from the New Nation of South Sudan, edited by Nyuol Lueth Tong and published by Eggers’ McSweeney’s imprint in 2013, is a collection of eight stories by contemporary South Sudanese writers. In his introduction, Tong writes modestly about his objective for the project, asserting that South Sudan is “too young to be able to claim a literary coterie” in the manner of Nigeria or South Africa. Rather than defining a new field of South Sudanese literature, he continues, the anthology is “an effort to enrich our culture and share the work of our new country.”
While several of the stories directly address the Sudanese civil war, the deeper theme that links many of the pieces centers on the notion of home and homelessness: characters leave home, search for home, and try to construct home spaces out of new configurations of family members and acquaintances. In doing so, these selections comment obliquely on the nation-as-home paradigm, suggesting a tentative hopefulness about their new nation.
The piece that fits least clearly with this theme is the delightfully confounding “Lexicographicide” by Taban Lo Liyong, the most established writer in the group. The very short piece covers the life and death of a self-described intellectual and would-be tyrant who intends to publish a dictionary and put to death anyone caught using words or ideas not found in said dictionary. There are no child soldiers in this witty anecdote, but throughout the collection, there is, as Tong intended, “much more.”
Nicole Cesare 