Child, Slave, Soldier
By FIAMMETTA ROCCO
February 14, 2014
THIRTY GIRLS
By Susan Minot
309 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $26.95.
In March 2012, a small American charity based in San Diego posted a
video online about the Ugandan rebel Joseph Kony, leader of the Lord's
Resistance Army. Within days, the video had 100 million hits, making
it one of the most viral videos in history.
Until then not many of those who saw "Kony 2012," or who posted the
500,000 comments that followed its release, had heard of the man who
invoked Jesus' name in a personal campaign of rape, terror and child
abduction across northern Uganda in the early years of this century.
By the time the video came out, no one knew for certain whether Kony
was in Uganda or the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic
of Congo or South Sudan (an area in central Africa that covers more
than a million square miles) -- or even whether he was still alive.
Despite the efforts of American military advisers and an extensive
search operation by troops from the African Union, Kony's forces
remain at large today.
Onto this thoroughly modern stage of instant celebrity made exotic by
distant violence and warmed with transitory heartache, Susan Minot has
set a novel of quiet humanity and probing intelligence. "Thirty Girls"
approaches the atrocities wrought by Kony's army with candor yet
without sensationalism, a combination that may not initially attract
readers. But to ignore Minot's book would be a serious mistake.
The novel opens with an abduction. A girls' boarding school in rural
Uganda is guarded by a night watchman and four Italian nuns. Their
leader, Sister Giulia, is so small she takes up very little of her
bed, "being a slight person barely five feet long." The rebels come in
the dead of night. They smash windows and set fire to the chapel, then
lever a window frame out of the wall of the dormitory. When the nuns
emerge, they realize that more than a hundred girls are now missing.
"Sister, they took all of us," cries one of the few who managed to
escape. "They tied us together and led us away."
There is no time, Sister Giulia realizes, for "moving tentatively," no
time for "discovering the damage and assessing what remained." She
hurriedly pulls on a light gray dress, sets a scarf over her hair (no
time, even, to find her wimple), ties her sneakers, "thin-soled ones
that had been sent from Italy," and sets off through the bush in
search of her girls, accompanied only by a young male math teacher.
One of the farmers they meet lets them know "without saying anything
that they were going in the right direction." He can't do more; the
rebels are known to cut off the lips of those they identify as
informants.
In time, Sister Giulia catches up with the group. "Why do you take the
children?" she asks their leader, Captain Lagira. "To increase our
family," he replies. "Kony wants a big family." Lagira offers the
headmistress tea and biscuits, and water to wash the blisters on her
feet. He tells her he has captured 139 girls; she can have 109 of
them. The other 30 he will keep for Kony.
The second strand of the novel concerns an American journalist named
Jane Wood whose ex-husband has died of a drug overdose. Although
they'd been long divorced by the time of his death, she can't seem to
let go of him. She had learned the hard way that he loved drugs more
than he loved her.
Jane has traveled to Africa to write about the children kidnapped by
Kony's forces. She first appears stepping off a plane in Nairobi,
tired and nervous, "as if a layer of self had peeled off and gotten
lost in transit." Within hours, it seems, Jane has eased her way into
the city's expat lagoon, a pool of people (largely, but not only,
white) who inhabit the upscale suburbs of Karen and Langata, driving
dented station wagons, drinking vodka and orange juice at the top of
the Ngong Hills, serving up candlelit dinners at irregular hours and
crashing on one another's couches. They're a long-established type,
these floaty bohemians, as familiar to readers of "Out of Africa" as
to fans of Francesca Marciano and Natasha Illum Berg more than half a
century later. The only difference is that they have sex more openly
than people did in Karen Blixen's day.
Minot tells her two stories in alternating chapters. As Jane takes a
young lover she learns more about herself. (Minot, as always, is
particularly good on the topology of desire.) Jane discovers that she
can be spoiled and clingy but also that leaping into the unknown can
sometimes set a person free. But it's the story of what happened to
those 30 abducted girls that shows Minot's gifts as a writer.
Jane meets one of them, Esther -Akello, at a rehabilitation center in
Uganda. "Your life is your own one moment," Esther reflects, "then
suddenly it changes and belongs to someone else." In simple,
persuasive phrases, she recounts how this happened. Esther had always
liked school. Now she is nearly 16 and uncertain whether she can ever
go back. She was the second of five children. Her father was an auto
mechanic, her mother a nurse. Her parents had met at a dance; he liked
the way she held her hands. Later he told her what he saw in them:
"They belonged to the mother of his children."
Kidnapped by Captain Lagira's men, Esther and the other girls were
made to walk farther and farther from home. "We soon learned things.
You would always be tired from walking and your feet always sore. You
would always be hungry. . . . Some days were worse than others. You
walked past children sleeping on the ground then saw they were not
sleeping, they were dead."
One day Esther is pulled out of the line by one of the soldiers. He
takes her to a hut and unbuckles his pants. "He pulled me over and I
vacated my body. . . . This body only carries me, it is not me. When
that body is being hurt, I will go from it. . . . I made my body not
belong to me."
The rebels beat and rape the schoolgirls, but it's the violence they
make them commit against one another that may have the gravest effect.
Esther and some of her friends are told to gather up sticks. "You," a
soldier says. "You kill that girl." She is on the ground, "curled on
her side holding herself as if sleeping. Her eyes are squeezed tight
and her mouth is bleeding." No one moves. "If you do not do this," the
soldier says, "instead we will kill you. . . . All of you." Esther
recalls what happens next: "Everyone is hitting now. My stick comes
down and the girl no longer jumps. Maybe she does not feel it anymore.
. . . After that day I am a new person. I am no longer a person who
has never killed. . . . At the time I thought, 'This is the worst
thing that would ever happen.' Later I stopped deciding what the worst
things could be."
What happens to the psyche when innocent people are made to kill? Can
they ever recover? The novel's dramatic ending shows that brutality
can happen to anyone. In "Thirty Girls," Susan Minot takes huge
questions and examines them with both a delicate touch and a
cleareyed, unyielding scrutiny.
Fiammetta Rocco is the literary editor of The Economist and the
administrator of the Man Booker International Prize for fiction.
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/02/16/books/review/thirty-girls-by-susan-minot.html?referrer=
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