On Reading Say You're One of Them

I feel like a wrung out dish cloth. Just finished reading Uwem Akpan’s Say You’re One of Them, short stories about children caught in the middle of religious and ethnic violence. Reading it is harrowing, but I couldn’t put it down. Each story recounts a horror some child tries to escape: there is the on-the-edge of starvation Jigana, who lives on glue in a box with his family of 7. He rejects a chance to go to school because his sister leaves home to become a prostitute. Jigana is wounded more by her departure than by her choice of work. Then there are the two siblings Kotchikpa and Yewa, who are going to be sold into slavery by their uncle. Their innocence and trust prevents them from understanding what is happening to them until their uncle has a change of heart and tries to save them, only to be beaten to death himself. Kotchikpa recognizes the desperateness of their situation before Yewa, who is deceived by her need for affection and food. In her gluttony she doesn’t recognize the deceptiveness of the adults who feed her and give her attention.

The little girl in “What Language Is That?” does not suffer so much that we see, but she must give up her beloved Best Friend because one is Christian and one is Muslim. Her parents offer her a new remote as they pack up to leave, the little girl still somewhat unaware of her pending loss. One wonders if her last communication with her friend will sustain an attitude of conciliation with people of different faith, but that surmise is lessened throughout “Luxurious Hearses” in which a young Muslim teenager, Jubril, attempts to flee his Muslim friends and relations in the northern part of Khamfi to get to the southern part because he has become a target of violence. Sharia has been enacted, and he is being hunted down because his father was a Christian who had him baptized as an infant. Trapped on the bus with Christian and pagan people trying to get to their southern families, Jubril attempts to pass as a Christian and begins to question his Islamic practice because of his contact with these people of different faith. Small arguments break out as the bus riders wait for petrol and the bus driver, but each ends relatively peacefully. But as the bus riders watch the violence on the TVs, both in the north and the south, they start to forget their undeclared truces with each other. And when they finally discover that Jubril is really a Muslim, because he lost his hand for stealing, they forget that they had supported him in an earlier tiff on the bus, and act out with the same violence they saw on TV.

The final story, “My Parents’ Bedroom” is about Monique and her brother Jean, who have the advantage of parents who have been to college and who love each other and their families, even though one is Hutu and the other is Tsutsi. But when their community goes insane with ethnic violence, Monique’s mother sacrifices herself to save some of her doomed people who are hiding in her ceiling. It is hard to imagine that Monique can recover from what she sees, but her life is spared for the time being.

Having read Left to Tell a few years ago about Immaculee Ilibagiza’s escape from Rwanda and her subsequent forgiveness of her enemies, I could believe in the eventual rebuilding of these children's lives, even though the inhumanity of the violence is almost unbelievable. There is something redemptive in the telling of these stories: These children, even in their innocence, learn to recognize injustice, but they also see the humanity of their enemies. In Monique’s case she must watch her beloved father betray his family, under great duress. Although the violence is unfathomable, it is committed by human beings who have been given a face through these stories.  And while at first I wondered how a priest (Akpan wrote some of these stories while in the seminary) could write stories with such gut-wrenching violence, soon I was won over by the empathy with which he presents these weak human beings, both the adults and the children.  He writes with no sentimentality, no pretty resolutions, no sensationalism, but a clear-eyed, unsanitized view of the mysteries of violence and survival. 

A song by Angelique Kidjo inspired by the book is available here.