Article 

 

 

 

 

Imbizo https://doi.org/10.25159/2663-6565/7163  
https://upjournals.co.za/index.php/Imbizo  ISSN 2663-6565 (Online) 

Volume 12 | Number 1 | 2021 | #7163 | 15 pages © Unisa Press 2021 

“Body of a Lion, Head of a Soldier”: The Grotesque 
in Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation 

Cecilia Addei  

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1304-9722 

University of Mines and Technology 

Ghana 

ceciliaaddei@yahoo.com 

Abstract 

Beasts of No Nation (2005) is a novel that invites attention to the plight of child 

soldiers. The protagonist of the novel, Agu, enjoyed an ideal life as a child with 

his family and always wished to go through traditional initiation as well as 

formal education before he was forcibly enlisted as a child soldier. At the 

battlefront, Agu engages in different types of violence and suffers various forms 

of abuse, which do not only cause him to lose his childhood but also his 

humanity, depictions of which draw the narrative into the mode of the grotesque. 

This article looks at how Uzodinma Iweala creates the picture of the child 

soldier through animal and bodily images to bring out the ambivalent nature of 

the child soldier as one caught between life and death, human and beast as well 

as between child and adult, through the grotesque, which brings up new 

concepts that are between life and death, fantasy and reality. The paper argues 

that the grotesque is of central importance to Iweala’s treatment of his central 

subject, namely, distorted personal development as a result of war. That is, the 

grotesque is not a chosen mode, but it is the inhuman depiction of the child 

soldier that draws the narrative into the grotesque mode. 

Keywords: grotesque; child soldier; Uzodinma Iweala; Beasts of No Nation 

Introduction 

Beasts of No Nation (2005) is the debut novel of the Nigerian-American writer, 

Uzodinma Iweala. The novel was published by Harper Collins in 2005 and won the John 

Llewellyn Rhys Prize for best work of literature by a young writer. Beasts of No Nation 

tells the story of Agu, a boy who is displaced in a war-torn country and is forced to 

become a child soldier. The story begins in medias res when Agu’s father is killed by 

rebel soldiers who also capture Agu and send him to their camp, but then flashes back 

https://doi.org/10.25159/2663-6565/7163
https://upjournals.co.za/index.php/Imbizo
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1304-9722
mailto:ceciliaaddei@yahoo.com


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to give an account of Agu’s family life before the war. The flashback reveals Agu as a 

boy who lived in a Christian home with his father, a schoolteacher, his mother and sister. 

There is talk of war and the sounds of gunfire, initially only at a distance. As the civil 

war gets closer, a UN van arrives at the village to take the villagers to safety, but the 

men stay back and allow the women and children to board the van. Agu’s mother and 

sister board the van but his father insists Agu stays back with the men in the village. In 

the confusion of a shootout, Agu’s father runs to the bush with him but is killed while 

Agu is captured by the rebel soldiers under a Commandant who asks him to choose 

between death and becoming a child soldier. Without any proper understanding of what 

it means to become a child soldier, Agu chooses to become one for fear of being killed. 

At the battlefront, Agu is initiated into the violence of war and he takes part in the killing 

of captured soldiers and civilians, rape and looting. As a model child, beloved by his 

parents and his schoolteacher, Mistress Gloria, Agu is presented in continuous tension 

between the demands of his child-soldier experience and his life before the war. His 

desire to leave the army finally comes true when Rambo, one of the child soldiers, leads 

a successful revolt against the Commandant and is able to kill him. On their way to 

escape, Agu’s best friend, Strika, dies. Agu is found and taken to a rehabilitation camp 

under the care of an American therapist, Amy, who invites him to share his thoughts 

and feelings, and as Agu tells her about his experience of war, Amy cannot help crying.  

Beasts of No Nation has received much critical attention in the form of articles and book 

reviews that mostly miss the novel’s representation of distorted personal development 

that pushes the narrative into the mode of the grotesque. Some of these scholars are of 

the view that the novel is a representation of trauma. Others are interested in its 

representation of human rights abuses while still others argue that it is a representation 

of the deformation of the African bildungsroman that indexes a loss of humanity. The 

style of the novel is very striking, and most critics have analysed stylistic elements in 

the novel as will be outlined below.  

Critics have argued that the novel represents the loss not only of childhood, but also 

humanity. According to Gehrmann (2011, 34), Beasts of No Nation presents children 

“caught between childhood and adulthood and at the same time points to the difficulties 

of human communication.” She believes that the concerns with language and the theme 

of the loss of humanity through war are major questions in Beasts of No Nation. For 

Allison Mackey (2013), Beasts of No Nation is a meditation on the loss of humanity on 

a local as well as global scale. She argues that Agu’s growth has been stunted. He is 

denied the opportunity to become a man in the cultural ways of his village and has gone 

from boy to beast instead of from boy to man: “A particularly stark coming-of-age story, 

Beasts of No Nation highlights the oxymoronic nature of the figure of a ‘child’ who is 

also a ‘soldier’” (Mackey 2013, 109). According to Moynagh (2011), the trope of human 

personality development is held out largely to be negated by the corrupt world in which 

child-soldier characters live. To her, in Beasts of No Nation, this problem is thematised 

through Agu’s meditations on the fate of his childhood which has been destroyed 

without making him an adult. Moynagh believes that, in emphasising the interrupted 



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development of the child soldier, the novel foregrounds the crisis for human personhood 

that necropolitics (the sovereign power over life and death) represents. For Schultheis 

(2008), Beasts of No Nation shares many features of the novel of individual subject 

formation and socialisation as it adheres to the expected trajectory of the 

bildungsroman. 

Critics who analyse the novel’s representation of human rights include Hron (2008), 

Schultheis (2008) and Gehrmann (2011). Hron (2008) argues that the novel poignantly 

presents the violation of children’s rights and the dehumanisation of children from 

human beings to “animals” and finally to “this thing.” According to Schultheis, the 

novel draws the reader’s attention to the “problem” of speaking, of constructing and 

bridging cultural difference and of speaking on or from the edges of representability. 

Schultheis further argues that the figure of the child soldier embodies a contradiction—

at once vulnerable and violent, victim and perpetrator, innocent and knowing—it 

appears to call forth the failure of the promise of law and politics. For Gehrmann (2011, 

33), the novel represents child soldiers as “victims who become culprits; they are 

ambivalent, caught in an ambiguous state between innocence and guilt.” 

There are yet other scholars who argue that the novel is a representation of trauma. 

These scholars include Nabutanyi (2013), Gehrmann (2011) and West-Pavlov (2012). 

Nabutanyi (2012) looks at how the novel employs language to represent trauma without 

exploiting or cheapening the pain of the victim. To him, the continuous present tense 

and ungrammatical English, the diction and simple structure of Agu’s sentences, all 

contribute to bringing out the protagonist’s fear and trauma. Thus, the style of the novel 

presents Agu as a traumatised child who needs ready sympathy. For Gehrmann (2011), 

the novel is a successful literary attempt to give voice and a language to trauma, though 

this is not to say that any fictional account can speak for actual child soldiers or represent 

their experiences completely. Gehrmann argues that Beasts of No Nation is a story about 

the loss of human language and “the concern with language […] reflects an overall 

difficulty of finding an adequate form of enunciation for the expression of traumatic war 

experiences through literature as a space of negotiation” (Gehrmann 2011, 43). For 

West-Pavlov (2012), in Beasts of No Nation, the impossibility of encoding traumatic 

experiences within memory is dramatised by the use of the continuous present tense in 

the narrative that preserves an eternal ongoing present for trauma. For West-Pavlov, 

many of the novel’s stylistic devices, alongside the use of the continuous present tense, 

can be accounted for by the mechanism of traumatic “acting out” that accompanies the 

experience of something that remains unrepresentable.  

On the question of narrative mode, there are a few critics who have commented on the 

non-realist style of Beasts of No Nation and its effect on its theme. Rosen and Rosen 

(2012, 308) argue that the fact that the story unfolds both everywhere and nowhere, with 

no history and no reference to any current event, makes it a comic nightmare allegory 

that does not construct a familiar realist world. According to West-Pavlov (2012), the 

disrupted narrative style of the novel is a mimetic replication of a child whose abruptly 



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terminated education gives him a limited purchase upon English. This also acts as a 

form of postmodern attention to the materiality of language that further points to the 

fact that the novel is not realist. According to Kearney (2010), Iweala’s use of memory 

and fantasy to convey the effects on Agu of his child-soldier experiences helps to portray 

Agu in continuous tension between the demands of his sensitive conscience and the 

corrupting influences of his child-soldier existence. According to Tunca (2014), both 

Song for Night and Beasts of No Nation challenge “the conventions of literary realism 

as their narrative strategy, emphatically spurn[ing] the rules of mimesis.” To her, 

Iweala’s most overt challenge to realism “lies in his creation of an invented idiom for 

his first person narrator.” This shows that some critics have identified the novel as non-

realist. However, none of these scholars identifies the grotesque mode, which for me is 

the dominant mode of novel.  

Even though Beasts of No Nation has received a lot of critical attention in the form of 

articles and book reviews, these mostly miss the novel’s representation of distorted 

personal development that pushes the narrative into the mode of the grotesque. Also, 

even though some scholars have discussed the novel’s representation of disrupted 

growth, none of this scholarship has discussed the grotesque as a consequence of the 

perversion of normal development or bildung. The grotesque, I argue, is of central 

importance to Iweala’s treatment of his central subject, namely, distorted personal 

development as a result of war. In the section that follows, I discuss the grotesque, after 

which I discuss how Iweala’s narration of the child-soldier experience shifts the novel 

into the mode of the grotesque.  

The Grotesque: Origins and Debates 

The word “grotesque” is derived from the Italian la grottesca and grottesco and refers 

to a grotto or a cave. The word was coined to designate a certain ornamental style that 

came to light during the late fifteenth-century excavations of the Domus Aurea of Nero, 

first in Rome and then in other parts of Italy as well, and which turned out to constitute 

a hitherto unknown ancient form of ornamental painting (Clayborough 1965; Kayser 

1981). The term was first used to describe art and architecture, but later came to be used 

in literary circles. In literature, its characters are either physically or spiritually 

deformed, and perform abnormal actions. It exaggerates the inappropriate, degrades 

objects and the body and focuses on characters, oftentimes physically or spiritually 

deformed, performing abnormal actions. The Renaissance used the grotesque as 

something worrying and evil, the face of a world totally different from the familiar, a 

world in which the realm of inanimate things is not separated from those of plants, 

animals and human beings. Grotesque ornamentation often features plant-animal-

human hybrids. 

One extensive meditation on the grotesque is offered by Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin 

in his observations on the combination of the comic and tragic spirit in François 

Rabelais’ sixteenth-century French Renaissance novels on medieval folk culture, 

Gargantua and Pantagruel. In his analysis of these books, Bakhtin came up with the 



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characteristics of what he calls the carnivalesque-grotesque in his work Rabelais and 

His World (1984). Bakhtin traces the origin of the grotesque in popular festivities of the 

carnival from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance period that worked temporarily to 

abandon “the existing hierarchy, the existing religious, political, and moral values, 

norms, and prohibitions” (Bakhtin 1984, 9–10). Thompson (as quoted in Dombrowski 

2011), posits that the first literary as opposed to ornamental or sculptural reference to 

the term “grotesque” was in the sixteenth century when Rabelais used it in connection 

with the body. 

Key thinkers of this mode, apart from Bakhtin, include Arthur Clayborough, Philip 

Thompson and Wolfgang Kayser, all of whom offer similar as well as different ideas 

on the grotesque to that of Bakhtin. Even though Kayser is arguably the first person to 

write extensively on the grotesque, he did not give any clear definition for the term but 

instead offered several qualities of the mode which overlap with the ideas of Bakhtin 

(1984), Clayborough (1965) and Thomson (1972).  

Like Bakhtin, Kayser sees the grotesque as the fusion of human and non-human 

elements in the playful destruction of symmetry and in the greater destruction of size. 

He understands the grotesque as something not only playfully gay and carelessly 

fantastic but also ominous and sinister in the face of a world totally different from the 

familiar one—a world in which the realm of inanimate things is not separated from those 

of plants, animals and human beings and “where the laws of statistics, symmetry, and 

proportion are no longer valid” (Kayser 1981, 21). For Kayser, the grotesque contradicts 

the very laws that rule our familiar world. As such, several contradictory feelings are 

aroused by the grotesque. We smile at the deformations but are disgusted by the horrible 

and monstrous elements. The basic feeling is one of surprise and horror, an agonising 

fear in the presence of a world that breaks apart and remains inaccessible. Kayser’s 

analyses of the grotesque, though similar to that of Bakhtin, do not dwell so much on 

body parts as Bakhtin does.  

Although the grotesque has undergone several transitions, most of these characteristics 

in literature have remained unchanged. The key characteristics of the grotesque that 

almost all these scholars emphasise are that, as a mode, the grotesque combines the 

comic and the horrific and abounds in sexual overtones as well as vulgarity and bawdy 

language. Its characters and themes are determined by the ugly, the supernatural and the 

monstrous. There is great emphasis on body parts and sensual images of the body, 

references to spirits and ghosts, animal metaphors and images of degradation. The 

distortion of persons and objects, the fusion of the fearsome and the ludicrous and the 

amalgamation of incompatibles in the grotesque infuses in the reader a sense of 

dislocation and insecurity. 

Even though the term “grotesque” did not originate in Africa, the concept is not foreign 

to African cultures. Its elements manifest in folktales where there are references to 

hybrid monsters as well as the blending of horror and humour. For instance, among the 



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Akans of Ghana, the monster Sasabonsam is a popular character in folktales and is 

mostly portrayed as punishing disobedient children. Besides the feature of hybrid 

monsters, the human body also has a great significance in African culture, since it is a 

prototype of society. Social order is represented symbolically by the body and thus a 

malfunctioning of the body or parts of the body points to disorder in society (Veit-Wild 

2006). Scholars such as Achille Mbembe have written about the grotesque in relation to 

the power and performance of the elite. According to Mbembe (1992, 6), the grotesque 

is used as a means of “erecting, ratifying, or deconstructing particular regimes of 

violence and domination.” This means that to Mbembe, the grotesque is an ambiguous 

concept that can create power as well as deconstruct power, while for Bakhtin, the 

grotesque is always anti-authority. According to Bakhtin, obscenity and the grotesque 

are parodies that undermine officialdom by exposing its arbitrary and perishable 

character. For Rita Barnard, “to write about the grotesque in the context of postcolonial 

Africa is to enter into a lively debate about power, aesthetics, and the circulation of 

signs” (Barnard 2004, 284). African writers such as Zakes Mda have made use of the 

mode to compel readers “to contemplate one of the most striking thresholds of recent 

history—the demise of the apartheid regime” (Barnard 2004, 279). However, in Beasts 

of No Nation the grotesque is not used to question power and performance in the 

postcolony as found in the African writers discussed in this section. Instead, it is a 

consequence of the horrible perversion and distortion of personal development through 

war. This will be discussed in the section below. 

Distorted Personal Development and the Grotesque Mode  

In this section, I discuss Beasts of No Nation as a grotesque novel and how the novel 

shifts into the mode of the grotesque. I argue that the grotesque mode is the consequence 

of a macabre reality for which the precepts of formal realism are inappropriate. A major 

impetus for the shift into the grotesque is the aberrant personal development of the child 

soldier. The protagonist is taken through an initiation that defies the moral precepts of 

all cultures in the context of war where he is taught the horrors of perpetrating murder, 

rape and brutality while he also suffers the abuse of hunger, deprivation and sodomy. 

The perversity of the initiation of the child produces the stimulus that forces the 

narrative into the grotesque mode. 

The protagonist of the novel, Agu, is portrayed as a child who has an ideal life before 

he is recruited as a child soldier. Agu is a child who is loved and cared for by his father, 

a schoolteacher and his mother, a staunch Christian. Agu’s life before the war is 

portrayed to provide a sharp contrast with his life as a child soldier. He is a boy who 

loves education and is anxious to go to school. At school, Agu was the smartest person 

in his class. He is so brilliant that he skips one class. He takes all his lessons seriously, 

to the admiration of his class teacher, Mistress Gloria, who was always telling him, 

“Agu make sure you study book enh? If you are studying hard you can be going to the 

university to be Doctor or Engineer” (Iweala 2005, 28). Agu is also admired by his 

friends because all the other “children were thinking that I am nice boy and also I am 



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the best at all the games and all the lessons we are learning. So they were liking me and 

wanting to be my friend” (29). Apart from formal education, Agu also wished to go 

through the traditional initiation of his village. The ceremony is so colourful that he 

cannot wait to be of age to go through it. During this traditional initiation, the chief 

teaches the initiates good moral values that will make them responsible adults in their 

society. 

However, Agu misses both the opportunity to be initiated the traditional way and the 

opportunity for formal education, as he is enlisted as a child soldier. His experience of 

war thus becomes his form of initiation and education, though aberrant.  Contrary to the 

traditional initiation in Agu’s village, the Commandant, who is the “chief” in the context 

of war initiation, teaches the “initiates” how to kill. Unlike the chief of Agu’s village 

who teaches the initiates to control violence, the Commandant teaches Agu how to kill 

a human being. He teaches him how to hold the machete and he “is squeezing my hand 

around the handle of the machete and I am feeling the wood in my finger and my palm. 

It is just like killing goat. Just bring this hand up and knock him well well. He is taking 

my hand and bringing it down so hard on top of enemy’s head and I am feeling like 

electricity is running through my whole body” (2005, 21). While the Commandant, the 

chief in the context of initiation into war, teaches Agu how to kill, his other “initiates” 

engage in their maniac laughter, “KEHI KEHI,” foregrounding the macabre humour of 

the grotesque. The village initiation ceremony is aimed at instilling good social and 

moral values in the initiates in order for them to be responsible in their new status as 

adults, while formal education is designed to equip the individual with knowledge and 

skills that will enable him to function well in society. Agu misses both ways of 

becoming an adult. Instead, he is initiated into the violence of war which is meaningless. 

Thus, Agu goes through a perverted form of initiation that fails to make him an adult 

the traditional way or knowledgeable in Western formal education. Instead of going 

through traditional initiation to be transformed into a man and human, he receives 

initiation through war that turns him into a “beast.” Thus, the war does not only cause 

Agu to lose his childhood but also his humanity. His experience of war is so appalling 

that its portrayal causes the narrative to slide into the mode of the grotesque, as will be 

discussed below. 

Beasts of No Nation is an example of what Flora Veit-Wild has called “writing madness 

in the post-colony” (Veit-Wild 2006, 88). This madness, according to Veit-Wild, 

“expresses itself frequently through images of the grotesque body; carnivalesque parody 

and travesty serve to mock, contort and subvert figurations of colonial or postcolonial 

violence. Mad writing cannot be anything but violent writing” (Veit-Wild 2006, 4). 

Iweala does this through the obscene speech of the grotesque body and the comic 

distortion of reality. The novel is replete with acts of violence against children and 

violence perpetrated by children to an extent that defies any objective realism. To the 

protagonist, the grotesque manifests in the appearance of the characters who contribute 

to the destruction of his dreams and in his own acts of violence. According to Quayson 

(2001, 192), “the African postcolony, especially under the violent condition of its birth, 



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often produced multiple narratives, some of which were not amenable to any simple 

explanation.” Tunca (2014, 146) is therefore right when she argues that Beasts of No 

Nation deploys “stylistic strategies that overtly challenge the conventions of realism” 

as it wrestles “with the conundrum of how to put into words experiences that can hardly 

be described or grasped in any human language” (2014, 150). For Harrow (2013, 4), the 

novel questions the possibility of “conveying to the reader an event whose 

excessiveness defies the language of representation.” The grotesque is a concept that 

allows the representation of the culturally unimaginable, in the case of Beasts of No 

Nation, the aberrant development of the child, not into adulthood, but into a monster. 

Beasts of No Nation depicts the social reality of the child soldier using satire, the 

amalgamation of the horrific and the comic, sexual overtones, vulgarity and bawdy 

language, all of which are stylistic elements suggestive of the grotesque. Its characters 

and themes are determined by the ugly, the supernatural and the monstrous. There is 

great emphasis on body parts and sensual images of the body, references to spirits and 

ghosts, animal metaphors and images of degradation. There is also the merging of the 

fearsome and the comic that produces a sense of disorder and anxiety in the reader. The 

reader is fascinated by the bizarre and changing images but is at the same time disgusted 

by them.  

Foregrounding the body is a significant dimension of the grotesque that highlights the 

materiality of existence and undoes the Enlightenment binary that places the mind above 

the body. In the opening paragraphs of Beasts of No Nation, the central character senses 

his own experiences and knows himself through his body, albeit a body that is made to 

suffer. If, as according to Agu’s Christian upbringing, “in the beginning was the word,” 

in the war-time experience, in the beginning is the body in discomfort and the body in 

pain: “It is starting like this” (Iweala 2005, 1). Agu goes on to describe his sensations 

through a detailed indexing of the parts of his body. He feels a crawling on his “skin” 

and on his “head,” a tingling between his “eye[s]” and an itching in his “nose” (1). His 

existence is made up of a collection of body parts that are troubled. However, it is not 

only his own experience that is presented through the body. He represents his fellow 

child soldiers and his oppressive commanders through body images also. Strika, the 

child soldier who finds Agu and brings him to the camp, has a “yellow eye,” a “short 

dark body with one big belly and leg thin like spider’s own” and “his neck is just 

struggling too much to hold up his big head that is always moving one way or another” 

(2). This description shows a child who has suffered hunger and degradation for a long 

time. Thus, right from the beginning of the novel, the reader is introduced to the 

grotesque body that is in pain. 

The body in pain is juxtaposed with the body that causes pain, portrayed in the 

description of the Commandant to show how warlords abuse children in times of war 

for their own selfish gains. The Commandant, Agu’s oppressor, “is just very big even 

though this war is coming to make most men small children and children small like 

baby. He is so tall that looking at him is like climbing tree, so big that if he is standing 



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next to you, then his shadow is blocking the sun” (33). Other bodily descriptions of the 

Commandant, however, show him as a monster. His yellow teeth are not well arranged 

in his mouth “with gap[s] here and there. His gum is black and his eye is red. His nose 

is coming out into a very round bulb at the tip which is sticking over his fat brown lip” 

(7).  His forehead is described as shiny; his big nose covers his whole face and even his 

top lip is covered with a mustache and he has a big black beard. This description of the 

Commandant is reminiscent of descriptions of monsters in folktales, as are his actions 

in the novel. If the body in grotesque literature generally reverses or undoes the 

Enlightenment mind/body dichotomy, in Beasts of No Nation we see that the war 

context reduces people to mere bodies, bodies in pain and bodies that cause pain.  

These bodily depictions of violence and deprivation are juxtaposed with bodily 

descriptions of love and care when the novel flashes back to Agu’s life before the war. 

Agu describes the love between himself and his mother using bodily images. “In the 

evening, I am always sitting on the floor just watching her with her buttom sticking high 

into the air and her breast touching her knee while she is working to make the kitchen 

so clean and not even fruit fly is wanting to put its egg inside” (24). The references to 

buttocks and breasts signify fertility and productivity in times of peace as opposed to 

the violence of war. As a child who likes reading, Agu is always sitting on his mother’s 

lap on their favourite chair as she opens the pages of books. When she reads, Agu senses 

her physical presence: “over my shoulder and I am feeling her lip moving in my ear as 

she was saying each word” (25). Here, the lap symbolises protection, while reading over 

Agu’s shoulder and her lip moving in his ear signify companionship. This pre-war body 

language is starkly different from the grotesque body language of the war situation. For 

instance, Agu’s mother’s body language sharply contrasts with the Commandant’s 

closeness to Agu during the Commandant’s acts of sodomy that signify Agu’s slavery 

and the abuse of power on the part of the Commandant. Agu does not “want his finger 

creeping all over my body. I don’t want his tongue to be touching me and feeling like 

slug should be feeling if it is on your body” (84). Thus, the novel employs images of the 

body to depict Agu’s experience of adults in parental or pseudo-parental roles: the 

caring mother he had before the war, and the abusive surrogate father in the person of 

the Commandant. Highlighting the physicality of existence is associated with the 

grotesque and is exemplified in Iweala’s method of presenting disorder and distortion 

in times of war, which takes away children’s childhood and humanity. 

Apart from the grotesque body in pain discussed above, the novel abounds in grotesque 

descriptions of the deformed body that signify how human beings are reduced to the 

monstrous in the context of war. Human beings are killed and their bodies deformed 

beyond description. Agu’s first victim is, for instance, described as “having deep red 

cut everywhere and his forehead is looking just crushed so his whole face is not even 

looking like face because his head is broken everywhere and there is just blood, blood, 

blood” (21). The body of one soldier whom the Commandant kills for annoying him is 

also left “on the roadside with one big hole in his head and his eye wide open” (33). 

There is no respect for dead human beings as they are left to lie uncared for like dead 



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animals. The body of Luftenant, the soldier who is killed by a prostitute, is dumped into 

the gutter and the soldiers “are leaving his body for the cat and dog and maggot and 

worm to eat” (116). When the Commandant who has disturbed the child soldiers for a 

long time is killed, his body is “looking down to his chest with his whole mouth open 

like he is screaming” (123). One child soldier also remembers his mother’s body blown 

apart like “meats” hanging from a tree while Strika, Agu’s friend, remembers his 

parents’ headless bodies. These and many other references to the mutilated body evoke 

suffering and deprivation that further heighten the degrading experience of the child 

soldier as one who has seen, experienced and perpetrated violence. The physical 

distortion is that of a caricature that confounds the reader’s sense of reality and the 

deformed bodies appear devoid of their humanity. The grotesque style thus heightens 

the degradation Iweala portrays in the novel. 

The degraded body is further portrayed in the novel through scatological images. 

Davidson (2008) argues that in the grotesque, bodily processes are connected with the 

intake and output of food, especially urination and defecation. The numerous references 

to defecation, urinating and vomiting suggest a breakdown of the social order. People 

ease themselves and vomit both out of pleasure and out of fear. Luftenant is portrayed 

as “going to toilet” anywhere for pleasure while Agu is so afraid that, “I am wanting to 

cry and I am feeling I am having to go to toilet” (2005, 9). Again, when he is made to 

kill his first victim to prove that he is not a spy, his fear makes him feel that he needs to 

“be going to toilet” (15). The Commandant’s acts of violence against his victims are 

also depicted as making them vomit. He kicks an “enemy man in the stomach very hard 

and the man is just dropping unto his knee and vomiting all over the ground” (18). When 

Agu is asked to kill his first victim, he is so afraid that he says, “I am shaking and 

holding my thing. I am wanting to vomit” (19). While the other victims are lying on the 

ground in fear and “going to toilet and making the whole air to stink,” Agu spits 

“because there is too much saliva in my mouth” (20). When he is finally able to kill his 

first victim, he begins “vomiting everywhere. I cannot be stopping myself” (21). In 

European culture, the manifestation of the body through images and themes related to 

eating, defecation, death, sex, and drinking were key to the culture’s emphasis on 

equivocal laughter as a means of organising social criticism of institutional doctrines. 

However, in Beasts of No Nation, these images are a result of the violence against 

children that reduces their bodies to bodies of disgrace and dishonour. The picture of 

the child soldier that Iweala creates through bodily images brings out the ambivalent 

nature of the child soldier as one caught between life and death, human and beast as 

well as between child and adult through the grotesque, which brings up new concepts 

that are between life and death, fantasy and reality.  

The degraded body is further dehumanised by its resemblance to animals, especially 

nocturnal and creeping animals, as Kayser (1981) has argued. In Beasts of No Nation, 

this is used to depict the extent to which children have been reduced to ontological 

ambivalence in the context of war since war makes a child develop into a beast instead 

of developing into an adult. There are references to insects, especially mosquitoes, 



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11 

disturbing the narrator and his fellow child soldiers. Agu’s fears when he is first 

captured by the rebels make his “body crunch up like one small mouse in the corner 

when the light is coming on” (Iweala 2005, 1). The Commandant’s disrespect for human 

life is portrayed in the way he looks at him like he is an “ant or some insect like that” 

(5) and how the Commandant refers to him as one “dead rat” (10). Some of the children 

are so deformed by the violence and abuse that they do not only look like madmen “but 

mad horse[s]” (13). The numerous references to mosquitoes in the novel indicate the 

disturbed nature of the child soldier as well as heighten the degradation the novel 

portrays. Mosquitoes are nocturnal insects that breed in filth and disturb people’s sleep. 

Iweala’s continuous references to them portray the extent of degradation of the society 

that produces child soldiers and portray the child soldier as one who is constantly 

disturbed. Throughout the novel, Agu talks about mosquitoes disturbing him. He sees 

mosquitoes everywhere moving around in circles “like they are also waiting for 

something. If they are coming near to me, then I am beating them with my hand, but it 

is not doing anything. There are so many” (14–15). The frequency of the references to 

nocturnal and creeping animals is therefore symbolic of the disturbed nature of the child 

soldier while the protagonist’s inability to beat away endless mosquitoes is symbolic of 

the helplessness of the child soldier.  

Animal metaphors are also employed by Iweala to depict how violence dehumanises 

both the victims and the perpetrators. The blending of human and non-human forms has 

long been a recognised characteristic of grotesque art. In Beasts of No Nation, human 

beings are portrayed as dying like animals and killing a human being is compared to 

killing an animal. The Commandant for instance does not see any difference between 

killing a human being and killing a dog. He asks Agu, “[d]o you see this dog! he is 

shouting. You want to be a soldier enh? Well—kill him” (18). According to him, killing 

a human being “is just like killing a goat” (21); he also refers to his enemies as dogs. 

These animal metaphors are employed to depict how the child soldiers’ grotesque acts 

of violence make them lose their humanity. Under the influence of drugs and in the heat 

of their violent activities, they see each other as animals, since their physical 

abnormality makes them appear devoid of humanity. For example, on one of their raids, 

Agu nearly shoots his friend Strika because he “is looking like dog to me” (47). He also 

admits that his acts of violence make him look like an animal, but he thinks that if he 

decides to run away from the war, the type of animal that will chase him will be “having 

the body of lion and the head of soldier” (128), as noted in the title of this paper. He 

continues to narrate that the animal will be “with helmet and eye that are looking like 

bullet and teeths that are looking like knife to be chewing me up. Its tail is like gun and 

its breath like fire that is cooking me well well before it is sitting down to be eating all 

of the burning part of my body” (128). This wild animal is symbolic of the war, which 

seems to have become impossible to run away from. The regular references to human 

beings as animals indicate the extent to which Agu has lost not only his childhood but 

also his humanity. Thus, the grotesque element of blending human and animal qualities 

is employed in the novel to show how war can reduce the human being to a monster. 

This blending of the human and the animal contributes to degradation since human 



Addei 

12 

beings are brought down to the level of animals by mingling with them or presenting 

behaviours that make them look like animals. In Beasts of No Nation, these animal 

images drawing on the grotesque are symbolic of the primal and violent behaviours of 

the characters. 

Like most grotesque novels, Beasts of No Nation combines tragedy and comedy, but 

with an emphasis on tragedy. The reader observes these characters with a complex 

feeling of disgust and sympathy. The child soldiers are portrayed as suffering hunger 

and deprivation, with no adequate clothing and shelter. They suffer from the constant 

rape by the Commandant and live in perpetual fear of being killed by him. The novel 

presents the horror of the child soldier’s experience vividly to bring out their plight. 

Agu’s friend Strika is so hungry that “he is writing HUNGRY” and Agu wants to say 

he is hungry too, but he is too weak to speak. Strika is so hungry that he licks his 

cracking lips till they become red as if he has swallowed “red paint” (37), while Agu’s 

own hunger is an attack: “Hunger is attacking me because I am not eating anything since 

so long. … sleep is attacking me and I am beginning to think of my village” (40). These 

ugly experiences together with the violence in which the child soldiers engage and the 

abuse they suffer make the novel tragic.   

However, in the midst of the tragic events, the mode of narration nevertheless makes 

the novel appear comic, which is the distinction of the grotesque. There are a few 

incidents and descriptions in the novel that evoke laughter in the midst of the horror. 

Some of the descriptions are very humorous: Agu says “[i]t is funny to be watching 

[Commandant] moving also because he is walking like his leg is a wooden pole that is 

not bending for anything” (33). Even the gravest acts of violence are accompanied by 

onomatopoeia and similes that bring humour into the tragic events being narrated. 

Machetes slashing into human flesh come with the “KWUDA KWUDA” sound, 

followed by the child soldiers’ maniacal laughter, “kehi kehi.” Agu’s killing of his 

victim is also accompanied by “KPWUD KPWUD” and “KPWUDA KPWUDA.” A 

serious act like sodomy is also narrated as “entering inside of me the way the man goat 

is sometimes mistaking other man goat for woman and going inside of them” (85). 

Strika also demonstrates the Commandant’s act of sodomy by drawing a “picture in the 

mud of man bending down with his hand on the ground and gun and bullet shooting up 

his buttom” (85). Beasts of No Nation can thus be said to be a comic nightmare allegory, 

as has been established by Rosen and Rosen (2012) discussed above. The portrayal of 

the Commandant, with all the qualities of a comic book villain who is not interested in 

power, money, or land but kills for the sake of killing and for his own lust and 

amusement, heightens the comic aspect of the novel. But his acts also appear tragic, 

highlighting the ambiguity of the grotesque. Thus, Iweala’s creation of scenes that seem 

tragic but laughable in effect is to give a comic relief to the reader in the midst of the 

horror. The grotesque style thus reduces the tension of the reader as he/she reads the 

horrific, often unimaginable, child-soldier story. 



Addei 

13 

References to spirits or ghosts in grotesque novels are signs of spiritual deformity or 

even madness. According to Bakhtin, the grotesque presents a degrading from the 

abstract or spiritual to the earthly, material human life. It “involves taking that which is 

sublime, spiritual, noble, honourable, etc, and undermining it in such a way as to make 

it appear revolting, degraded, and disgusting” (1984, 19–20). And the motion of the 

action is always downwards, going from good to bad, to worse, to worst (Davidson 

2008). In the novel, human beings are degraded to animals, beasts and finally “things.” 

In Beasts of Nation, these images of spirits and madness are employed to show the 

degradation of the notion of childhood, which is characterised by innocence, to that of 

abuse, violence and deprivation. Agu’s friend Strika is so engulfed in the violence that 

he is “looking like spirit or demon. His skin is looking somehow like burned-up wood 

or charcoal and it is sticking tight to his face so his whole cheek is sticking out sharp 

sharp” (2005, 80). For Agu, his experiences make him spiritually deformed in a way 

that is only comparable to madness, as he sees dead bodies everywhere. The image of 

childhood is degraded from one of happiness and innocence to one of violence and 

rejection while the image of the soldier is degraded from pride to shame. Agu’s memory 

of soldiers in his village marching in their beautiful uniforms is degraded to that of 

soldiers without any proper uniforms engaging in forms of unthinkable violence. The 

grotesque is thus a way of portraying the degradation of human values in times of war.  

Conclusion 

In Beasts of No Nation, Iweala represents the experience of the African child soldier 

whose childhood has been destroyed through war. Through excessive use of bodily 

images, Iweala presents the violence perpetrated against and by the African child 

soldier, who is caught between innocence and guilt. The novel is thus a story of 

perverted initiation and education since both concepts are frustrated in the novel. 

Traditional initiation is designed to move the child into adulthood and to distinguish the 

man from the “beast,” while formal education is designed to equip the individual with 

knowledge and skills that will enable him to function well in society. However, the 

debauched initiation and education through war that Agu receives cause him to develop 

into a “beast.” This is captured through the metaphors of animals such as dogs, horses 

and insects, discussed above. These grotesque elements in the narrative capture the 

perversion of norms. I have argued that in Beasts of No Nation the grotesque is not a 

chosen mode, but rather a mode into which the narrative is forced. It is the depictions 

of the unspeakable, unimaginable and unthinkable war-time violence, which causes the 

child soldiers to lose not only their childhood but their humanity, that shifts the narrative 

into the non-realist narrative mode of the grotesque.  

Acknowledgement 

I am grateful to the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa 

(CODESRIA) and the South African National Institute for the Humanities and Social 



Addei 

14 

Sciences (NIHSS) for the funding they provided for my PhD thesis from which this 

article originates. 

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