Song For Night by Chris Abani

Nigerian-born novelist Chris Abani’s fifth work, Song For Night, is one of several recent novels dealing with child soldiers in Africa. Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation, Dave Egger’s What is the What? and Ishmael Beah’s memoir A Long Way Gone all tackle the topic with varying degrees of subtlety and success. Clearly an appetite exists for these stories in the west. With press reports of genocide in Sudan, systematic sexual abuse of women in Congo hyperinflation and cholera in Zimbabwe, many in the rich world continue to see Africa, like Conrad, as a place of darkness. Can socially engaged literature, then, help us understand the human dimension of this troubled continent without reinforcing stereotypes, or becoming voyeuristic?

Abani argues emphatically that it can. In an impressive address at the 2008 Brisbane Writer’s festival entitled “Ethics and Narrative: The Human and the Other,” he called on novelists “to conjure all of our darkness and all of our light simultaneously” and to recognise “we all stand on the edge of the same abyss.” Words that might sound trite coming from the mouth of a lesser figure carry real weight from Abani. The writer was repeatedly imprisoned and tortured in his home country both for publishing work that was not to the tastes of the ruling dictatorship and for his political activism. He speaks at human rights functions and was recently awarded the PEN/Beyond Margins award. In this novel, however, some of his creative decisions make it difficult for us to fully connect with his protagonist.

The novel’s central figure is My Luck, a fifteen-year-old minesweeper in the Nigerian civil war whose vocal chords have been cut. The same grisly treatment has been meted out to his entire platoon in order to prevent them crying out and disturbing others from their work. Song For Night explore the problem of voicelessness, a nightmarish prose-fiction exploration of the same topic of “Can the Subaltern speak?” Cultural critic Gayatri Spivak’s 1983 essay famously problematised the position of post colonial intellectuals, arguing that their “priviledge is their loss” and that they quickly shift from speaking of the oppressed to speaking for them. Abani, who now lives in the US and teaches creative writing at the University of California is only too aware of this danger. “What you hear is not my voice,” the novel begins self-consciously and then ties itself in knots trying to justify the narrative voice. “You will say I sound too old for my age,’ My Luck tells us, then tries to persuade us otherwise. “ The interiority of the head, he says, “makes you deep beyond your years.” But we never quite believe him and this mars our ability to connect with him for the entire novel. A close third person narrator may have resolved some of these issues, but would have detracted from the novel’s immediacy and visceral punch.

What then of style? The novella, Abani has said in interviews, was written in just three months of feverish late night toil. It reads like it was written quickly, and, at its best this lends the prose a relentlessness and rhythmic intensity:
“I cannot name it, those things that happened while I watched, and I cannot speak something that was never in the words, speak of things I cannot imagine, could never have seen even as I saw it [sic], and I hide and am grateful for my smell, crouched like an animal in that dark hot space (25).” Here the run on sentences conveys the intensity of the experience and the protagonist’s heightened sensory impressions. It is marred by sloppy editing, unfortunately, as are many passages in the book. At one point we find three similes with “like” on a single page: “like a field of cut corn,” “like a loose cotton shift,” “guts like sausages.” In a book of only a little over 150 pages there are 35 very short chapters and all too often section endings are rushed and perfunctory: “I climb a tree and doze,” or “A mosquito bites me. It is getting dark.” The fragmented effect caused by the brief episodes is deliberate, but does it reflect the character’s exhaustion or that of the author, keen to move on to the next chapter while short of ideas on how to conclude this one?

For a story set in a war zone there is a curious lack of urgency to Song For Night. It sounds like a quest narrative: My Luck wanders the bombed out landscape in search of his lost platoon, but because this is literary fiction, the novel is more interested in showing us its character thinking than showing him acting. Thus sensory perception in the present, the smell of food cooking, the sound of gulls and the taste of fish, invariably lead to remembrance of things past. “Every time I eat fish, I remember grandfather’s story of the lake in the middle of the world and the fish that live there.” Every time? Or just this time because the story requires it? It is the choice of first person present tense narration, perhaps, that makes these frequent slippages in time rather awkward.

It is unfortunate that the transitions into the past jar this way because the story of My Luck’s life before the war is vital and interesting. Indeed, it is when Abani leaves the generic post-apocalyptic landscape of the war behind that he begins to teach us something about Nigeria. My Luck’s family, like the country is divided along religious lines, however it is not with his Muslim father or Catholic mother that the boy feels most deeply connected, but with his grandfather whose mythological tales put him in contact with a spiritual tradition that predates either of the imported religions. This is significant given that the civil war springs from a north/south Muslim/Christian conflict. The grandfather’s traditional African values are privileged over those of My Luck’s parent’s generation, and this is as close as the novel comes to a political solution to the bitter religious and ethnic division behind the war.

At least within the context of his family we begin to see the protagonist as someone recognisably human. Abani, however, is determined not to give us any false redemption; rather he wants to show how the human disintegrates in extreme situations. “My art demands a complete ruthlessness from me,” he said in Ethics and Narrative, “and I have to destroy every character that I make.’ In the final third of the novel, as this disintegration takes place, we move from the concrete world of political conflict to a dreamscape: ghosts on the battlefield, a cloud of flies in the shape of a black-winged angel. The suggestion that My Luck is dead or dying allows a lot of hoary old narrative archetypes to be trotted out. He must cross a river, with the help of a guide named Peter and meet a mysterious mother figure.

Does Song for Night succeed, finally, in giving voice to the subaltern? Only in a deeply ambiguous and evasive way. But if we are not fully persuaded by his ventriloquism here, Abani remains a forthright and persuasive spokesman for human rights. This may be a minor work by a major talent, but its ambition and intensity are to be applauded. It makes most contemporary fiction look limp.