The first glimmering of the writer's impulse that would become 23-year-old Uzodinma Iweala's novel came when he picked up a newsmagazine in the kitchen of his family's Potomac home and read an article on child soldiers in Sierra Leone.
Iweala was in high school at the time, at St. Albans. Born in Washington to Nigerian parents -- his mother had taken a job with the World Bank, and his father, a doctor, had followed -- he was a privileged teen with dual citizenship, not sure exactly where he belonged. As he read about children abducted by rebel bands and trained as killers, he thought: These kids are younger than I am.
He sat down and wrote a very short story -- not for school, just for himself -- then set it aside.
He moved on to Harvard, where, in his junior year, he helped bring in speakers to talk about conflict in Africa. One was a young woman from Uganda named China Keitetsi. She'd been just 8 years old when she was forced to fight in the civil war there and had lived to write a book about her brutalizing experience. When she finished telling her story, Iweala recalls, her stunned audience was completely silent.
"It almost made your heart stop," he says.
He hung around to talk with her afterward. Keitetsi asked what he was studying. English, he said, but his parents wanted him to go to medical school.
"Oh, really," she said. "Well, you know, I have no parents."
What could he say?
Looking back, he thinks perhaps "Beasts of No Nation" -- the title is from a song by Fela Kuti, one of Iweala's favorite musicians -- was his response.
Set in an unidentified West African country and written in an urgent, first-person voice, Iweala's book tells the story of Agu, a boy who's forced to become a soldier after his father is killed. He wrote it as his senior thesis, with novelist Jamaica Kincaid as his adviser. When it was done, Kincaid sent the manuscript to her agent, who found publishers for it in Britain and the United States. Like a veteran author, Iweala is now on his American book tour. Thursday he'll be at Vertigo Books in College Park.
All of which makes the first-novel thing sound much easier than it really was.
Across the stream, I am feeling in my body something like electricity and I am starting to think: Yes it is good to fight. I am liking how the gun is shooting and the knife is chopping. . . . I am liking to kill.
