My favorite line is: “Trust in God but tie your camel tight.”(p 111) Ali Banana easily has the best lines. My favorite:

‘Mules?’ Ali gasped as if stung by a driver ant. ‘Do you know who I am? I’m the son of Dawa the king of well-diggers whose blessed nose could sniff out water in Sokoto while he’s standing in Saminaka. I’m the son of Hauwa whose mother was Talatu whose mother was Fatimatu queen of the moist kulikuli cake, the memory of whose kulilkuli still makes old men water at the mouth till this day. Our people say that distance is an illness; only travel can cure it. Do you think that Ali Banana, son of Dawa, great-grandson of Fatima, has crossed the great sea and travelled this far, rifle strapped to his shoulder, to look after mules?’ (p 38)

Beautiful. And then we find out miles of pages later that this fabulous oratory is delivered by a man who turns out in fact, to be a boy-soldier. Incredulous, such precociousness especially when one realizes that the same child had uttered ‘I here for to killi di Jampani.’ (p 33) It is impossible to see the child in Ali Banana even as the book assures that Ali Banana indeed started out as a thirteen year old soldier. This reader is unconvinced. It stretches credulity. 

In Burma Boy, a tedious tale unfolds through the eyes of a writer unfamiliar with the terrain of Burma and India, the war theatre. It is one thing to be born after an event; it is another thing to have never been at the scene of the crime. The book answers the question each time, with a forlorn “No, I was not there and I have never been there.” Bandele’s knowledge of the geography is not intimate enough and comes across as contrived – as if the writer read about several places and sprinkled the resulting knowledge on several pages of the book. Burma is still a distant, remote land. It is not enough to litter the book with exotic flora and fauna. The landscape is not watered enough, not nurtured enough to keep it alive. Every battle is fought in the same leafy hills, sunken valleys and paddy fields. The book suffers from the rich monotony of a stunted imagination.

Then there is this abiding disconnectedness. For example,  Chapter 4 seems to start exactly where Chapter 3 did not end and this reader is not sure why. Weak synaptic connections try gamely to string the chapters together. Most times the ends don’t touch and the result is jarring. One just feels lost in this vast jungle that the writer doesn’t seem to conquer. And the reader feels like a hapless soldier, captured and frog-marched through a jungle to nowhere. Once the reader recovers from the climactic end to chapter 1, the book never really builds up again; there is nothing to look forward to.

The book’s other major failure is in not mining what is truly harrowing – the fact that these soldiers were indeed little boys conscripted to fight a war by their elders. Once you get to that realization, several passages in the book assume a haunting surrealism, like during a particularly  wretched passage to India; of little boys stowing away their mothers’ delicacies (kuli-kuli and dawadawa) as they go to the war in Burma:

“’While we were at sea over a hundred pounds of dawadawa were found under Aminu Yerwa’s bed after the men sharing his cabin started complaining of  foul smell. The dawadawa had gone bad in the airless cabin and there were maggots gathering inside it.’ Dawadawa, a seasoning made from fermented locust bean, was pungent enough even when fresh.” (p 52)

These were children after all, albeit loquacious children, who afflicted with chicken pox, malaria, and diarrhea, seemed to be fighting diseases and home sickness rather than the Japanese. As a result, the book’s lack of depth startles and rankles and leaves a yawning chasm in the reader. And the reader soon learns that nature abhors a vacuum. For instance Burma Boy does not go to the depth of feelings that forced these young men to fight in a war that they did not ask for. You would have to read another book.

Burma Boy is a cautionary tale about the limitations of oral story-telling in literary world. How many epic stories have we lost because they got lost in the translation to “the book”? Maybe youtube.com will help but I am afraid that we have done our ancestors a grave injustice. Fifty years ago, Chinua Achebe wrote Things Fall Apart and in so doing set out to model how we should tell our own stories. Things Fall Apart was a stunning salvo in response to contemporary literature like Joyce Cary’s Mister Johnson that sought to dehumanize the African. With that book, Achebe assured the world in compelling evocative prose that the sum total of the African should not be expressed in primal grunts and half-sentences. For we were poets, philosophers and scholars before the Westerners came and christened us bumbling illiterates. That war rages on today. I must say that I was particularly distressed by Bandele’s use of contrived English in this book. Indeed our writers’ new-found love with contrived English in its various viral strands threatens to shove us back into those dark ages that Achebe and his peers got us out of. Everything must be viewed in its proper context; as in Things Fall Apart, the language must be a vehicle – of communication, not of eternal damnation to a dark hell that only houses sub humans. We are not children of a lesser god.

I have a frayed copy of James Shaw’s The March Out. You read the book and you are left with no doubt as to where Biyi Bandele got his inspiration from. His Muse drank liberally from The March Out, down to similar scenes, characters and leafy sceneries. Even the signs are the same as in:

WARNING

DEAD JAPS IN THE RIVER

ALL WATER MUST BE CHLORINATED

(p 27 in The March Out and p 140 in Burma Boy)

Biyi Bandele pronounces himself gratefully indebted to the late James Shaw and similar writers whose “unforgettable” accounts chronicled “salutary instances of the courage and resourcefulness” shown by the Africans who served in Burma. I beg to disagree. James Shaw’s The March Out is unforgettable only in its rank racism in depicting Africans as exotic sub humans. The Japanese are referred to as slant-eyed Japs and Africans loll about grinning, shuffling and speaking contrived half-sentences. Hear Shaw:

Haruna looked wooden; he and the others plainly resented my presence. Not wanting an unwilling orderly, I asked for a volunteer, but with no response. Feeling depressed, I told Haruna to leave m, and sat for a time too uncomfortable for even the slight exertion of exploring my hole. Suddenly a presence loomed up, and a voice spoke: “Dis orderly work – me fit do um for you.”

I was surprised at being addressed in English, for the speaker was a Tiv, or Munchi, one of an extremely backward tribe with which teachers and missionaries have little success. Not one in a hundred speaks English or Hausa, and their own jaw-cracking dialect is hard to learn. Training them is difficult at first, but they make good soldiers and boast that they do not fear to die, believing that death met bravely is the only passport to life hereafter…. As is usual in his tribe, his teeth were filed to points like a dog’s and the skin of his face stood up in bumps and ridges. It had been cut open in infancy with a knife, another playful Munchi habit.” (The March Out, p 28).

If you think that passage is beyond the pale, unfortunately, in several instances, Burma Boy cries louder than Mr. Shaw, the bereaved. Unfortunate stereotypes litter the pages of Burma Boy and it gets tiresome. The March Out does have something going for it that elevates it beyond Burma Boy: It has helpful maps of Burma and India and I love the black and white picture of “a typical West African infantryman” wearing a “tribal haircut!”

Stripped of appropriate context Bandele’s characters come across as needless stereotypes that reinforce those in James Shaw’s unfortunate book. So Burma Boy, rather than being an Achebean response to a most unfortunate book about Africa, simply becomes yet another version of the same. Because the book falls far short of the expressed or implied purpose – to give rich voice to Bandele’s father’s “stories of carnage, shell shock, and hard worn compassion.” I would strongly recommend that the reader first read Bernard Fergusson’s excellent introduction to James Shaw’s The March Out. It serves as an excellent context to Bandele’s book. Or better yet, read James Shaw’s entire book.

I find it interesting just reading the very positive reviews of this book by Western reviewers. For me, Bandele can do a lot better than this. Burma Boy is a story hanging in mid-sentence stuck in the deep throat of Bandele’s Muse, still waiting to be told. I understand why the author would like to write a book about Burma in honor of his father, a brave Burma Boy but I am not sure I understand why I would call this a successful response to the stated need to write that book. In the end, Ali Banana concurs with the bemused reader:

“He was a foot soldier fighting a crazy war he didn’t even really understand. He didn’t understand why King George was waging a war in Burma from far away England. And it didn’t matter to him.” (p 206)

Neither did it matter to Bandele apparently. Private Ali Banana is luckier than this reader; in the end, he embraces the liberating arms of madness and engages in juicy dialogue with snakes and trees. Oh, to be so lucky.