AS Literature - Interview with Iweala

AS Comms - what makes a good opening paragraph for the 1000 word essay?

Strong opening paragraphs:

 

• Refer back to the question

• Provide a context (social; historical) for the essay - even if only briefly

• Make it clear why this is an area worth exploring

• Are written clearly and concisely, with a formal register

• Provide sources for any secondary research used

• Set up the boundaries/scope of the answer (we call this the thesis)

 

Example top grade opening paragraph

 

Boomerang Kids

One of the first rites of passage we experience is arguably moving out of our childhood home. This primary step into adulthood provides independence and a start off into your new life. Traditionally, young adults moved out due to starting university or having a new job, but in the 21^st century the cultural norm is changing.  According to The Office for National Statistics, “1.8million men and 1.1million women between the age of 20 and 34 are living with their parents”[1]. Nowadays young adults are moving back home after university or not leaving home at all, and this is due to radical social and economic changes. Young adults that move back in with their parents/guardians have been given a new name, “boomerang kids”. This exploration focuses on why the traditional rites of passage moment of leaving home is being delayed or abandoned, and how this is changing the family unit.

---

[1] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2327674/Staggering-million-parents-50-grown-children-living-home.html

AS Comms - applying the course to a comedy clip / rites of passage

AS Lit - Beasts of no nation - Book review 2

Books of The Times | 'Beasts of No Nation'

A Conscripted Soldier's Tale From the Heart of Darkness

 

By JANET MASLIN

Published: November 17, 2005

"Beasts of No Nation" views the monstrousness of war through the wide, innocent eyes of an African boy who has been conscripted as a soldier. Before this fate befell him, Agu was an eager student. He learned just enough English to give Uzodinma Iweala's debut novel an argot that is distinctively blunt.

Skip to next paragraph

 

BEASTS OF NO NATION
By Uzodinma Iweala
142 pages. HarperCollins Publishers. $16.95.

Forum: Book News and Reviews

Agu has been forced by circumstance - and by armed guerrillas in his unnamed country - to commit unspeakable transgressions and then suffer bewildering, excruciating crises of conscience. The most important parts of his story are distilled by his dialect into simple but horrific acknowledgments. "The sun is just dropping down behind the hill like it is not wanting to be seeing us anymore," he thinks at one point. And: "All we are knowing is that, before the war we are children and now we are not."

All we are knowing about Mr. Iweala is that his book will be readily embraced by readers. Its nuances may not be subtle, but its nobility is impossible to miss. The author, who in his own voice thanks his relatives for listening to him "and tolerating my never washing the dishes," is a young Harvard graduate who divides his time between Washington and Nigeria. He has already won prizes and aligned himself with the angels.

As an indictment of war, "Beasts of No Nation" is relentlessly, pre-emptively clear. It begins as Agu is captured and beaten by rebel soldiers and forced to join their ranks. He is given a machete and ordered to use it; he must comply. "I am not bad boy," he tries to tell himself afterward. "I am not bad boy. I am soldier and soldier is not bad if he is killing. I am telling this to myself because soldier is supposed to be killing, killing, killing. So if I am killing, then I am only doing what is right."

Throughout the novel, the reader is invited to congratulate himself for grasping the paradoxes of such statements. While "Beasts of No Nation" is indeed a wrenching book, its thoughts can be painfully self-evident. None of the book's brutality exaggerates recent African history; none of its scenes would be out of place in a melodramatic war story, either. This outstanding first novel would be even better if it did not deliver so much more shock value than genuine surprise.

In a drastically different context, "The March," E. L. Doctorow's current best seller, offers interwoven war stories in which no one's next move can be predicted. But "Beasts of No Nation" keeps the terrible and the obvious more closely linked. So in the midst of civil war, Agu remembers being read the story of Cain and Abel by his mother. He remembers how his mother and sister disappeared and how his father's fate appeared to be worse. "I am seeing bullet making my father to dance everywhere with his arm raising high to the sky like he is praising God," Agu recalls. He will not see his father's arm raised again. This will prove a gentler death than his mother's.

The young soldiers are kept in line by what Agu calls gun juice. ("Everybody is always wanting gun juice because it is drug and making life easy easy.") They are also under the thumb of their Commandant, sometimes literally. When Agu is forced to be alone with him, he is treated "the way the man goat is sometimes mistaking other man goat for woman goat," just when he feels that no further humiliation is conceivable. The Commandant is enough of a stock villain to be big and strong, towering over these helpless boys. "I am thinking that only big man can be making such big shadow," Agu observes.

Pederasty does not spare the book a bordello scene as well. "I am having plenty plenty womens in the back if you are having plenty plenty money to be giving me," its proprietor explains. And the soldiers are ready for any comfort, anywhere they can find it, after the atrocities they have been forced to commit. Mr. Iweala is at his most eloquently indirect in describing the book's most unthinkable sights, like the grisly massacre of civilians. "We are finding farmer and his goat on the road and we are killing them," Agu says. "Now I am not knowing what is farmer and what is goat."

A book capable of that speaks so powerfully that no dramatic manipulation is necessary. But "Beasts of No Nation" feels obliged to find some light at the end of Agu's tunnel. So he has his dreams - being a doctor or an engineer some day, finding some way to help his countrymen. The book also introduces an eleventh-hour white American to serve as a minor, possibly even ironic deus ex machina. And at the right moment in his storytelling, Mr. Iweala magically gives Agu what has seemed unthinkable during the war's escalation from evil to diabolical: a way out. Like many of the book's twists, this one is manipulative yet genuinely effective.

"Beasts of No Nation" leaves the reader with one resonant, beautiful sentence that captures everything the author has set out to say. That sentence deserves to be read in the full context of this universal soldier's story.

AS Lit - 'Forced to sin'

AS Lit - Beasts of no Nation: book review

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY

Book Review

Beasts of No Nation (2005)

Uzodinma Iweala

·        

By Thom Geier

Thom Geier

Fiction seems to be under attack of late. Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul has argued that the novel is dead and ''of no account'' in capturing the complexities of today's world. Magazines like The Atlantic Monthly have slashed the amount of fiction they publish. And New York Times executive editor Bill Keller last year proposed scaling back the paper's coverage in favor of nonfiction: ''Of course, some fiction needs to be done,'' he said. ''We'll do the new Updike, the new Roth, the new Jonathan Franzen or Zadie Smith. But there are not a lot of them, it seems to me.''

Beasts of No Nation, the remarkable debut novella by 23-year-old Uzodinma Iweala, demonstrates why this line of thinking is wrong — about the quality of contemporary fiction in general, and specifically about its ability to represent the modern human experience. Beasts is the first-person account of Agu, a bright, churchgoing schoolboy in an unnamed African nation beset by a bloody, tribally based civil war. It could be Sudan or Rwanda or any of those African nations that we tend to understand only as abstractions. Agu's mother and sister have been bused away from his village by U.N. peacekeepers to points unknown. When rebels attack the men left behind, he escapes — though not before watching the murder of his schoolteacher father: ''I am seeing bullet making my father to dance everywhere with his arm raising high to the sky like he is praising God.''

Agu is discovered by an itinerant battalion led by a stern, often abusive commandant, who gives the boy the choice between life as a soldier and death. Agu chooses life, and is forced to witness — and commit — horrific acts that journalists would politely dub ''ethnic cleansing.'' For sweet-natured Agu, whose favorite book is the Bible (though he particularly likes David's beheading of Goliath), the brutality around him creates a deep internal conflict. ''I am soldier and soldier is not bad if he is killing,'' he says. ''I am telling this to myself because soldier is supposed to be killing, killing, killing.''

Throughout Beasts, Iweala never wavers from a gripping, pulsing narrative voice that fits Agu's precocious but simple background. He renders roadside massacres in stark, unsparing prose with keenly observed sensuality (''I am bringing the machete up and down and up and down hearing KPWUDA KPWUDA...''). Even occasional moments of poetry (''This darkness is so full like it is my mother's hug'') feel natural, hinting at the possibility of Agu's redemption.

Iweala, an American-born Harvard grad who lives in both Washington, D.C., and Lagos, Nigeria, was reportedly inspired by a Newsweek article about child combatants, but the tools of nonfiction are frankly inadequate to convey the enormity and moral complexity of a life like Agu's. (It's worth recalling that three years ago, a journalist for The New York Times Magazine admitted creating a composite character in a piece about child laborers in Africa.) It is a credit to Iweala, and to the future of fiction, that Agu's story is true, fundamentally true, in every way but the most superficial — he does not literally exist.

Posted Nov 04, 2005

 

AS Comms - Loop Game photo