Sam Nichols

Allah is Not Obliged tells a deeply traumatic and chaotic story that nonetheless invites laughter. As a soldier, Birahima is a prime example of “an involuntary manifestation of automatism or reduction of the body to a lifeless machine,” and his frank diction puts a dark spin on “comedy as vitalism” (Stott 27). Being introduced to a child who goes through consecutive near-death experiences, the adult reader wonders how the child will cope and grow into an adult, what needs to be done to end the use of child soldiers, and what is the use of telling this “bullshit story.” But telling the story as it was experienced firsthand in the expected way—pure shock, confusion, tedium, despair—opens the door to hollow pity. There’s no takeaway message other than a trite one, another incarnation of the norm. In order to calculate the impact of his words—not to drown out their message with gratuitous scenes of trauma—the storyteller (Kourouma as well as Birahima) must remain cognizant of the relationship between the narrator’s insider perspective and the reader’s outsider perspective. Birahima’s crude language, jaded naiveté, and annotative definitions break up the monotony of chaos, opening the door to humor. Not only that, his voice comes through with a distinctly abnormal worldview borne of an abnormal life.

Writing is a specific form of re-experiencing. Both writer and reader experience it for the first time with new or different eyes; the writer must shape the reader’s experience in order to impart their intended message with the intended voice. Healing in the West most often involves framing traumatic memories as a distinctly past-tense piece of a grander, more hopeful (or at least, complex) life narrative. This is often achieved by telling the story over and over and processing the emotions that come up with professional help. Western storytelling also uses the Hero’s Journey as the main narrative arc. Both paradigms give the message that “everything happens for a reason,” that trauma must be wrapped in beginning, middle, and end and become digestible through assigning a meaning or lesson to learn. This is the (perhaps unconscious) expectation from the outsider’s perspective. Kourouma, by framing the story as a loop, setting it in stone as a neverending re-experience, confounds the reader who expects a linear narrative. The Hero is always starting from and returning to his place of cynical childhood, speaking from the point from where he is just about to leave. That’s how Allah is Not Obliged ends: an ouroboros of experiencing how it started, how it happened, and how it ended, and ending with being asked how it all started again.

It’s not surprising that Birahima repeats his message, “Allah is not obliged to be fair about all the things he does here on earth,” which is also the title and the first sentence of the book. Truth as a subjective experience of certainty is informed by one’s experiences, and for better or worse, truth can be bent as one rationalizes the surrounding havoc. It’s unclear when exactly Birahima arrives at this conclusion since the entire story is in retrospect. It seems that he didn’t know it from the beginning. Birahima notes, after Tête Brûlée conquered Niangbo, that this “… was about this time that I realized I didn’t understand this fucking universe, I didn’t understand a thing about this bloody world, I couldn’t make head or tail of people or society… Who was there who could tell me? Where could I go to find out? Nowhere” (118). The only high authority that he can go to is Allah. Thus, Birahima views Allah in a cynical way; the idea of a supremely good, all-powerful being does not coincide well with the hostile, unpredictable life he is living. The answer that makes sense to him is that there is no obligation for the supreme good to triumph in any situation. That way, he doesn’t drown in disappointment while keeping his faith. He reveres Allah’s power, specifically the ability to choose without any consequences. It’s no wonder why he wants to be a child soldier. Power is amoral, and that’s why it is so good to have; power is what makes Allah irreproachable, power allows world leaders to decide how history is written, power is what makes people ensure their leader’s survival over their own.

Birahima exerts his own power as the storyteller, after repeating that Allah is not obliged to be fair: “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 fuck off!” (91). From his interpretation of Allah and truth comes his own self-esteem, his particular method of betraying the norm. In contrast, Yacouba affirms Allah’s goodness: for “in his infinite goodness [Allah] never leaves empty a mouth he has created” (38). Allah may not be obliged to, but he does it anyway. Being older than Birahima, he has perhaps learned to lean on hope where cynicism fails. He could also say such a thing purely for comfort, but that goes to show the extent to which both he and Birahima mold accepted belief systems to suit their purposes.

Given that Allah is not obliged, Birahima needs to find a method of navigating the minefield that is tribal warfare. Becoming a child soldier is his only route for finding comfort in the form of protection, food, drugs, and following the herd. Yacouba uses his spiritual knowledge and grigris as his claim to survival through money and power. When the Kamajors overtake the camp at Mile-Thirty-Eight in Sierra Leone and strip everyone before setting them free, Birahima and Yacouba lose their livelihoods: “The traditional hunters had no need of Yacouba the grigriman; they were grigrimen themselves. I was set free too… For the first time, we (Yacouba and me) were confronted with the reality, the uncertainty, or tribal war” (Kourouma 188). The discord between outsider and insider perspective creates a palpable element of dark humor here. For it was not the horrors of war, the rape and murder, the neverending displacement, the cold-blooded betrayal of the social contract that made tribal wars so uncertain; the reader has been adjusting to these circumstances for the whole of the book, but for Birahima it isn’t the brutal capital-R Reality so much as it is the place where Reality happens. No, in this case, it is the fact that he and Yacouba cannot rely on that uncertainty and brutality, that makes reality set in. They cannot be hired for their services which rely on people’s fear (Yacouba) or greed (Birahima). That is how a traumatized brain works in survival mode; one must not only accept the instability and danger but capitalize on it, gain stability through it and not in spite of it. And the next part of the story exemplifies it once again: “The situation is disastrous, it couldn’t be worse than it was. Walahé! That meant it was good for us… We were called up, we took up our duties straight away” (196).

The unspoken question for the reader, as an outsider, is what there is to be done about child soldiers and the unstable conditions that create a demand for them. Surely Birahima is not doomed to be hired and then displaced in different territories ad infinitum, because then how is he going to sit down and tell this story? After the news of his Aunt’s death and the ensuing travel to Man, Birahima is “flicking through the dictionaries that [he’d] just inherited. Namely, the Larousse and the Petit Robert, the Glossary of French Lexical Particularities in Black Africa and Harrap’s. That’s when this brilliant idea popped into [his] calabash ([his] head) to write down my adventures from A to Z” (212). He tells his cousin, the doctor, to “Sit down and listen. And write everything down” (5). So the vocabulary is a vessel for his adventures, and his adventures are vessels for vocabulary. Both provide context for the world he lives in as well as his own mind, with his narrative decisions and his concept of Allah lying at the intersection of the two.

As he explains in the beginning, and the end, he wants to use these dictionaries as gateways for “all sorts of different people” (3) to become insiders, to flesh out the child soldiers that the warlords use to kill innocent people while “everyone in the whole world lets them” (43). But he also wants fellow insiders to read his story because his goal is to weave a story that is accessible. This is a major moment of character development; Birahima uses his newfound power (words of many kinds, a willing listener, a possibility for life outside of killing) to create instead of destroy. He’s not obliged to be fair about it—he stops or leaves out details whenever he feels like it—but he is doing something creative, spontaneous, and unique to himself. And the doctor writes it all down word for word, even the repeated explanations, because he recognizes the importance of telling Birahima’s story in his own voice. It’s a stunning moment of connection that signals that Birahima does not, in fact, believe that his story is “bullshit.” He can find value in looking back, and that’s why the story recurs into itself, why it exemplifies his destructive soldier self and creative storyteller self.

It appears that Birahima lacks character development, that he is stunted in morality and maturity, trapped in the liminal space between his soldier self and his position as escapee storyteller. The reader, too, is caught in a loop of connection and distance, dealing with the horrifying reality at hand and the narrator’s mix of bitterness and blasé attitude towards it. The reader has to feel a sort of moral contagion of Birahima’s story, his own moral dubiousness springing from the desperation around him; the vices of tribal leaders and warring powers spurred by the misery of colonization, the colonization that created the need for these dictionaries in the first place. But Kourouma needs to show this message without telling it; the reader must gain some context for Birahima’s point of view, to arrive at the complexities through a child’s brash words, to laugh at the blips of comedic release. Only then, when all the chaos has come and gone, can Birahima reveal the character development that has been under the reader’s nose the whole time. For Birahima to tell his story on his own terms, to present his strange truth harvested from his strange reality, and for the reader to sit down and listen and absorb it, this is the answer to such difficult topics. Otherwise, his voice would be lost in translation with each revision of history by each new victor.

Works Cited

Kourouma, Ahmadou. Allah Is Not Obliged. Translated by Frank Wynne, The Random House Group Limited, 2006, archive.org/details/allahisnotoblige0000kour_e6g0/mode/2up.

Stott, Andrew. Comedy (the New Critical Idiom). 2nd ed., Routledge, 2014.

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