Allah is Not Obliged

I found the supposed first person voice annoying and repetitive, the events all blended into each other, and there was no real sense of horror, perhaps because the child-soldier didn't seem to have one. Ended up skipping to the last pages. There are several deeply moving books on the horrors in LIberia and elsewhere, and this is not one of them.

The positive reviews of this book talk about the lack of sentimentality as a positive. The effect this had on me was that I feel a deep sense of despair for the people in this part of the world. It seemed utterly devoid of any feeling...any warmth or humanity. Like a colony of ants that only act on instinct and base desire. I can understand that when people are in this level of poverty the sentiments I speak of are a luxury they cannot afford. But I just can't shake the feeling of hopelessness this telling has left me with. Besides this I find the writer's style tedious. He has the protagonist defining words on every page...words that he defined, in most cases, exactly as they're meant...so I don't understand the point of constantly repeating this instead of just using it occasionally.

This is overall a good read if you do not get confused easily. The author often jumps from one character to another and there are MANY of them. However, the story itself is interesting and is told from a very different perspective.

This is a must read. The writer does a remarkable job of unraveling the events i n sierra leone and in liberia that still exist today.

Not a good read!

As a rule I avoid books about war or calamity written from the perspective of child protagonists, in part because this viewpoint leads to oversimplification of complex events and in part because such books are almost always sentimental or precious. I chose this book, told from the perspective of a preteen boy who becomes a child soldier, both for the West African setting (it is set in Ivory Coast, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, but the largest chunk takes place in Liberia) and for the authentic, conversational, foul-mouthed and entirely unsentimental voice. This is the book's strongest quality, one that's even more impressive given that this is a translation (you'd never know it without being told; I'd love to be able to sample the French original and see how it compares). Here's a taste:"The dead child-soldier was called Kid, Captain Kid. Now and again in his beautiful song, Colonel Papa le Bon chanted `Captain Kid' and the whole cortege howled after him `Kid, Kid'. You should have heard it. They sounded like a bunch of retards.""The same goes for me. I don't have to talk, I'm not obliged to tell my dog's-life-story, wading through dictionary after dictionary. I'm fed up talking, so I'm going to stop for today. You can all f--- off!"The dictionaries are an odd conceit: our narrator, Birahima, uses four dictionaries to look up French and African words and explain them as he goes. Occasionally these "explanations" are in the form of sardonic jabs ("`Humanitarian peacekeeping' is when one country is allowed to send soldiers into another country to kill innocent victims in their own country, in their own villages, in their own huts, sitting on their own mats."), but most of the time he's simply defining words most readers will already know ("Every morning he went to the temple and officiated. `Officiate' is a big word that means `to conduct a religious ceremony', that's what it says in my Larousse.").One might wonder how Birahima comes to use these words at all if he doesn't know them (perhaps the entire conceit is meant to highlight the way African fiction tends to explain itself to a foreign audience, by turning the tables on us), but that question pales beside the fact that well before the halfway point, Birahima virtually abandons his own story and never fully returns to it. Instead, most of the second half the book is taken up by a history lesson on the warfare in Liberia and Sierra Leone, interspersed with anecdotes about the backstories of other child soldiers and about various larger-than-life men and women who take part in the wars. Unfortunately, we don't see Birahima interact with these other characters; the stories he tells about his friends end with their becoming child soldiers, and in a way his own does too, even though that occurs early in the book. We never do get to read about the day-to-day lives of child soldiers or how they interact with one another.One could rationalize that a real child soldier would be reluctant to tell his story, and would talk about other things instead, and maybe that's what Kourouma was trying to accomplish, though I'm not convinced a real child soldier would give us dozens of pages of history lessons either. Regardless, I picked up this novel hoping to read a story, and got a book that started out promisingly but grew increasingly disjointed and never did tell that story. Two and a half stars.

Orphaned following the death of his mother, Birahima, ten or twelve year old self-declared "fearless blameless street kid", leaves his native village in Ivory Coast to find his aunt in far away Liberia. He is accompanied by Yacouba, "money multiplier", shaman and "gri-gri man", a man who makes amulets for whatever religion seems appropriate at the moment and claiming to protect the wearer from hostile bullets from the other side. They are caught up in the middle of West Africa's brutal civil wars of the nineteen nineties. Having little education and no training, Birahima joins the hordes of child soldiers, fighting for whatever faction supplies them with food, weapons, protective amulets (gri-gri) and hashish. Ahmadou Kourouma, highly respected award winning Ivorian author, has created with ALLAH IS NOT OBLIGED a vivacious, often hilarious, but also disturbing and thought provoking novel.Published in 2000 in its original French, it was likely the first of fictionalized or factual accounts capturing the life of child soldiers in West or East Africa. Written in the voice of a boy with less than three years of schooling, and with limited French, the author uses his protagonist to convey much more than the intimate reflections of one of the "small soldiers" and what the youth describes as his "miserable existence". The young hero, like the author, is Malinké, an ancient and powerful West African civilization with its own unique language. Birahima shares his story in an unusual and often slang-type French. The author uses this approach to give the reader a flair of the idiomatic Malinké expressions that are full of vivid imagery, curious connotations and convey its distinct African logic. To help the reader understand the young narrator, he explains French, African and pidgin terms and phrases in brackets, using several dictionaries and phrasebooks Birahima has acquired at some point. French terms or concepts are often interpreted in his own child-like way to benefit his African readers, he states. While this initially interrupts the flow of the narrative, it gives Birahima's account a very personal, conversational and often humorous touch. His language does not lack in vulgarity when conveying the often objectionable and brutal reality he encounters. "My characters must be credible and to be credible they must speak in the novel as they speak in their own language..." the author explained in a 1999 interview. The translation by Frank Wynne does convey both the narrative and the odd language quirks expertly.A ten (or 12) year old boy has only a limited horizon and narrow understanding of the politics of his country and geographic region. Growing up in extreme poverty, however, while being confronted with the corruption, violence and power grabs around him, makes him an astute and sarcastic observer. Birahima's journeys bring him face to face with the vicious commanders of some of the most cruel dictators in the region. Each of them relies not only on the effectiveness of arsenal of guns - 'kalashs', AK 47s, being the weapon of choice given to the child soldiers - but any "magic" such as gri-gris, or religious ritual they can muster or buy. Birahima learns to understand the intricacies of power as well as the futility of the traditional powers. His comments are astute. At the same time, kids are kids; he and the other child soldiers need bonds of affection and emotions can run high when one of theirs is killed or punished.As the story progresses, the author mixes Birahima's voice, relaying his experiences as a "small-soldier", with that of a more adult narrator who provides the factual context of the complicated historical sequence of events in, primarily, Liberia and Sierra Leone. Aware of the lack of detailed knowledge most people have of these events, it is helpful to relate these to the reader - a technique Kourouma has used in his previous novels also. Here as in those Kourouma has always tackled social injustice, whether during colonial times or since with the corruption and cruelty of West African dictators being one of his target subjects.With ALLAH IS NOT OBLIGED, the author raises important questions about the absurdity of war, of the power structures that lead to them and the suffering of the innocent people caught up in them. It was Ahmadou Kourouma's last published novel; the author died in December 2003. [Friederike Knabe]

An absolute masterpiece

great

Allah is not Obliged is a child soldiers view of the Sierra Leone conflict, tragic and sometimes humorous a very cleverly written story. If I could mention one fault it would be the constant explanation of certain words or expressions throughout the book.