“If peace ever comes, I hope it makes us wiser,” thinks the voiceless teenage soldier at the heart of Chris Abani’s wrenching new novella, “Song for Night” (Akashic, 168 pages, $12.95 paper). What makes this book a luminous addition to the burgeoning literature on boy soldiers is the way the Nigerian author both undercuts and reinforces such hopeful sentiments.
There may be no redemption in war’s devastation, Abani implies, but among the ruins it’s still possible to find transcendent moments of beauty.
Following a land mine explosion, the boy (named “My Luck” by his mother) regains consciousness to find his fellow soldiers gone. The book concerns My Luck’s efforts to rejoin his platoon. But the task turns out to be daunting: The path is dangerous, strewn with human debris, enemies and phantoms, and severed by rivers shared by dead bodies and playful dolphins.
The farther he travels, the more he recalls about his own role in this unnamed war (presumably the Nigerian civil war, which took place in the late 1960s ). He remembers witnessing the murder of his parents; his perilous training as a mine diffuser; the death of his girlfriend, Ijeoma.
If at times My Luck’s narration has a detached quality (Ijeoma was “lacerated by shrapnel, body parts scattered in a way that cannot be explained or described”), it is a reminder of the futility of translating horror into language.
“Song for Night” has the feel of a prose poem, with its primary focus on imagery (the consumption of fish, the dripping of water, the feverish repetition of dreams) and its spare, musical language.
After participating in the atrocities of war, the reunion with his platoon promises to provide crucial order amid senseless chaos.
But how can a person who has killed and raped still find himself overwhelmed by the simple joy of being alive, the pleasure of a good meal, the feeling of warm sun on his face?
“Even with the knowledge that there are some sins too big for even God to forgive,” My Luck thinks, “every night my sky is still full of stars; a wonderful song for night.”
