And this is how it is starting God. When I’m closing my eyes, I am seeing the rainy season in my village. You can be finding the ground is washing away beneath your feet. Nothing is ever for sure. And everything is always changing.In response to the #OscarSoWhite debate, Dame Helen Mirren said, “One of the reasons it went that way – Idris Elba absolutely would have been nominated for an Oscar. He wasn’t because not enough people saw, or wanted to see, a film about child soldiers.” That intrigued me, and when I saw that she was talking about the film based on the book Beasts of No Nation, and when I then remembered that that particular slim volume was unread on my bookshelf, I eagerly cracked it open in order to better understand the conversation. Now, with a 142 page book in hand and the film streaming on Netflix, it was easily possible to both read the book and watch the movie on the same afternoon, which I did, and I'm writing equally about book and film in this opening paragraph to make this urgent point: While the film is really very good, if you only watch the film, you haven't experienced the book: read this book!
Told from the point-of-view of a little boy of unknown age from an unnamed West African country, Beasts of No Nation begins as Agu is discovered in hiding and brought before the Commandant of a rebel squad. His backstory will eventually be filled in by flashbacks – Agu is the bright son of a schoolteacher father and a loving mother, his childhood enriched by both Christianity and traditional animism, his family scattered as his village was invaded by militia – but in the beginning, he is just a sick and scared little boy, given the choice to fight or die. What makes this book so fascinating is Agu's distinctive voice:
The boy who is hitting me is running to the first truck. When he is reaching the door, he is bending down with his back so straight and his leg so straight. Only his head is moving back and forward, left and right, on his neck. Then he is standing up and suddenly, quick just like that, the door of the truck is swinging open and hitting the boy right in his big belly and he is just taking off like bird, flying in the air, and landing on his buttom in hole of water in the road. There is sound coming from all the other soldier. It is laughing sound.Not only does Agu employ idiosyncratic phrasing that marks his voice as vaguely foreign to the Western reader, but his observations remain naive and non-introspective throughout: no matter the horrors that Agu witnesses or participates in, his voice is always that of a little boy; one who eventually becomes numb; his tone unchanged whether marching in the rain or hacking at someone with a machete. And this is where the book differs from the film: On the screen, the remarkable Idris Elba as the Commandant is given military objectives in order to provide a plot, but on the page, none of that matters – Agu doesn't understand the politics that led to the civil war, so we don't learn about it; he's a pawn who does what he's told, at first from fear and then from habit, and the reader watches in horror as a little boy's humanity is all but erased.
I was crying as I closed this book, and when the film opened with a carefree Agu getting into mischief with his village friends, the tears continued streaming down my face: the character had become a part of me and I wept for the future I knew was coming for him. Perhaps it's true that no one wants to see a film – or read a book – about child soldiers, but this felt like a powerful act of witnessing and valuable (in different ways) on both the page and the screen.
When the #OscarSoWhite debate started, Dave was immediately on board with the boycott, agreeing that only racism could explain no black actors among the nominations. I pointed out that maybe there were no outstanding performances by black actors this year. "Oh yeah", said Dave, "what about Will Smith?" I pointed out that neither of us saw Concussion, so we're only taking Will and Jada Pinkett Smith's word for it that he deserved the statuette. I then mused that perhaps the racism isn't necessarily in the Academy but occurs earlier in the Hollywood process -- there isn't diversity in the nominations because there isn't diversity in movie roles -- but Dave is stubbornly attached to the idea that Will Smith was snubbed for racist reasons. Could be, but like I said, we haven't even seen his performance.
On the other hand, I can attest that Idris Elba was really very, very good in Beasts of No Nation (as was the young Abraham Atta who played Agu; he absolutely broke my heart), but was this also a racist snub? Dame Mirren thinks the problem lies with the Academy not wanting to watch a movie about child soldiers, but isn't it their purpose to watch all the eligible movies? Is the problem actually that this was released on Netflix, so it is technically a made-for-TV movie, and Hollywood isn't ready to embrace new platforms? I'm thinking that might have been the more important point to clear up.
And to get to the act of "witnessing": therein lies the real racism. The fact of and the experience of child soldiers ought to be on everyone's radar -- there are child soldiers being used right now; the Taliban "assassinated" a 10-year-old militia member just this week -- but it's so easy to dismiss as a problem from the other side of the world; a phenomenon of people different from us. The least that the Academy could do is watch a film about it.
And then on the other hand, I recently saw this short video and I wonder what those young men would make of Beasts of No Nation.
