Culture July 18, 2012

At the end of Beasts of No Nation, Uzodinma Iweala’s 2005 novel, a rescued child soldier in Africa finds himself in the care of a “white woman from America who is coming here to be helping people like me.” Instead, she seems to be helping herself: “She is always saying to me, tell me what you are feeling. Tell me what you are thinking.” As the young boy, Agu, recounts some of the horror he’s experienced, he realizes “she is not even knowing what war is….When I am saying all of this, she is just looking at me and I