Two Acholi children in Gulu, northern Uganda (Samantha Casolari)

Yet even as it seems drowsy patches of the international community may finally be waking up to the atrocities being committed there, they have thus far ignored altogether the overwhelming humanitarian crisis going on in nearby Uganda, where a decades-long civil war has seen such widespread killing and rape that many children are now being brought into the conflict as child soldiers. Last year's 'Gulu Walk,' an international event that saw thousands march in cities from Amsterdam to Beijing to Toronto, and even Edmonton, highlighted the high cost of this war on Uganda's children by using an 11-kilometre walk of solidarity to demonstrate how far children in neighbouring villages must walk to the city of Gulu every night to avoid abduction or molestation by soldiers during the night, even in their homes. It is in this context that Uzodinma Iweala's Beasts of No Nation emerges, the debut novel from this Nigerian author and graduate of Harvard University.

I have begun to wonder if it is a hallmark on Nigerian literature that many of its great novels are so short and brutal. As Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart mashes the bursting, spinning carcass of a people that have lost their identity between your teeth, Iweala's Beasts of No Nation pistolwhips you with the hands of a child, and asks us to look up at him and decide if he is a man, a beast, or a boy. The novel begins with a claustrophobic, dizzying displacement that quickly shoves you to the ground face-first with its protagonist, a young boy caught alone and brought under the command of the... off-putting (to say the absolute least) Commandant and his somewhat impromptu militia, already comprised of several young children. The boy himself, in an unnamed West African country, has been separated from his mother, father, sister and their village. As such, the road they march on is often marked by intense moments of regret and loneliness for him, as he explains the terror and confusion of a war he does not understand and cannot feel the weight or reasons for.

Iweala leaves the boy unnamed when we meet him, a disorienting detail similarly left out in Clarice Lispector's Hour of the Star to at once pull us away from a child we cannot connect with comfortably, and strip bare the assumptions and baggage a name brings along, forcing us to shake hands with a humanity we are unaccustomed to on an extremely intimate level. The few characters we are shown with any closeness are either left unnamed or given titles, like the Commandant, Rambo, or Preacher, a boy in their brigade who sings church songs to himself every night before he goes to sleep, songs our speaker finds he cannot help himself singing along to. It is in his sense of confusion and frustration with what is happening that we take the hot gun in our hands and see what it means for this boy, who is forced to become something else, to shoot holes over and over and over again in women and sons and daughters that seem vaguely familiar (a feeling that conjures up the story Are You My Mother? in the worst ways).

We see through his eyes the knife he must chop a mother's head away with until there is hot blood in everything and under his skin. Iweala forces us to question if these nameless soldiers are even human, or if they have become something so monstrous there is no trace of men left in them, as they kill without even feeling their hand bring the machete down, as if they are so far lost that the limbs and the blood that fall are just rain on a window they can't or will not look through. But the boy, and he must at heart still be a boy, shows us he is still human when he remembers his teachers at school, of his dreams to be Doctor or an Engineer (capital D, capital E) and when he speaks to his only friend in their uniformless army, a boy named Strika, who cannot speak back.

There are so many things Iweala leaves us to wonder at but will not show us for more than an instant; does the boy see his long-lost friend, who disappeared so violently, in Strika's eyes? At whose hands does his father 'dance' when the boy last sees him, and does it even matter who he is fighting for?

Beasts of No Nation is a visceral kick in the teeth, a bloody meditation on many things, not least of all what remains when a childhood becomes a brutal, eviscerating shove into something else entirely. But could these beasts lurk anywhere, in any heart? As the boy reminds us, he too once had a mother, and was loved.