Have a Happy Thanksgiving. I’m off till Sunday. Taking my daughter to the National Zoo. To meet the panda, Tai Shan.

Two books: Johnny Mad Dog by Emmanuel Dongala, and Beasts of No Nation by Uzodinma Iweala.

We discussed both books in class today. Here’s Anderson Tepper in the Washington Post:

Though very different, both these books confront head-on a harsh reality in Africa today: children raised in — and raised by — war. And, ultimately, it’s hard for this subject not to overpower both novels, to flatten the characters, to drain the action of any subtlety. Both are full-immersion books, carried on the back like oversized guns, about the tribulations of their adolescent narrators. And both are riddled with as many questions as bullets: How can a country survive that cannibalizes its youth, that teaches them to kill, to maim, to loot? “Yet again, our [expletive] country had killed one of its children,” Laokol mourns. “What kind of country kills its children in cold blood?”

Tepper’s point about the overwhelming nature of the events and what they do to the narrative and characters is correct, I think, although another way to describe it is that it is a part it seems of the black man’s burden (”the burden of over-representation”) to have to again and again explain and indict. Unlike Anderson, I found Iweala easier to read, his book less marred by narrative flaws and also blessed by a voice that is, at first encounter, quite mesmerizing.

Drawing: Anthony Russo/Washington Post

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My recent Nation review-essay about Eqbal Ahmad has been linked to the Outlook website.

Here’s a link to Ahmad’s celebrated essay “Terrorism: Theirs and Ours.”

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