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Book Review
Review Title: A Measure of War
Book Title: Burma Boy
Author: by Biyi Bandele
Publisher: Farafina
Pages: 212pp
Reviewer: Tade Ipadeola
Of two abiding mysteries of war, the first is
that men who have seen active combat seem to
always recognize each other. When war veterans
who have been at bloody theatres of war write
about their experiences, their pages often reek
with the stench of cordite and of putrefying
flesh. The second is that war is a trade of men
as distinguished from women. It is the most
destructive invention of mankind yet, and the
male gender, which genetically bears the Y
chromosome exclusively, should know better. What
we know of science today is that unlike the X
chromosome, which, with close to a thousand
functional genes is safe from genetic
annihilation, the Y chromosome has just about
eighty functional genes which are under constant
danger of extermination from pollutants and
environmental hazards.
Biyi Bandele came into his own as a
playwright and an artist of the screen. His
fiction is not as profuse as his plays but they
touch on topical issues. Burma Boy, Bandele’s
novel on the Burma campaign of the Second World
War is remarkable first for being the first
effort at giving a fictional account of that
theatre of war, so many decades after, and,
secondly for being an account rendered by a
non-combatant.
Burma Boy bears the marks of
millimetric research. No one who has read the
book can contend that the author has failed to
research his subject. Bandele takes us with him
into the brutal if humorous world of the
Chindits. He pilots us from Cairo, the city in
which the man who would create the Chindits
first attempts suicide to Hailakandi, Aberdeen,
Tokyo, White City and his peculiar dénouement.
To find the centre of gravity of the
book, two readings are required. The first to
follow the story, the second to discern the mind
of the author. If a reader is diligent enough to
do this, two things become clear: the book is
polycentric, like an automobile from a German
car-plant. It really sits on four centers of
gravity but the material making up the creation
is so precisely weighed and distributed as to
make the product feel like it has one center of
gravity. The second, flowing from the first
observation is that the book is way too brief,
too short for the scope of work to be done.
Again, a parallel can be found in automotive
engineering. It is as if, after careful
calibration and deployment of a large engine,
the designer put a ten liter fuel tank in the
vehicle. Bandele’s Aberdeen is not always
Aberdeen as his Tokyo is not always Tokyo. In
war, nothing is what it appears to be. Uncle is
almost never uncle.
Burma Boy begins with an attempted
suicide and ends with an attempted suicide. The
first attempted suicide is sickness and drug
induced. We encounter Wingate, a white officer,
attempting with his hands to terminate his own
life in an African city. Fate intervenes, of
course, and he is rescued. He lives long enough
to create the Chindits, a company of soldiers
from all over the world who, under British
officers, torment the Japanese in Burma using a
peculiar, occidental, philosophy of the
Kamikaze. The last attempted suicide in the book
is by Ali Banana, overcome by grief, beside
himself with human loss. He is rescued of
fortune and, like Wingate, lives to fight
another day.
In between these is the story of the
Burma campaign, of the Chindits,
D-Section and Ali Banana. Someday it would be
recognized that in recreating the ‘caustic’
exchange between British bombs and Japanese
shells, evoking the courage of men under fire,
painting the pity of a pitiless war of privates,
Biyi Bandele deserves a medal for peace. He does
it well. He is assisted, no doubt, by his own
background in the North of Nigeria and his
knowledge of the Hausa language. In relating the
life and times of Ali Banana who became a man in
Burma and not in India as his friend would have
wished, Bandele tells a story of exquisite
delicacy of that journey we all must make,
albeit in peacetime, the journey between
innocence and virtue.
For those who believe Pro patria et
mori, the ‘old lie’ as Wilfred Owen put it, not
even that belief can justify the effective
ending of prime human lives which was the Burma
campaign, which is war. To Bandele’s credit, he
recreates the siege of D-Section in White City
effectively. Other minutiae of war: the
shootings, the shock and random deaths, the
cuckoldry, the fortuitous reprieve from certain
death, are achieved. Burma Boy climaxes,
fittingly, in enfilade, is carried on a dramatic
grace note into afterglow and ends with a
cryptic offering, in Hausa.
Bandele has done what the writers of
the first World War did not do. He has written a
novel, not poetry. He has done what most of the
writers of the Second World War have not done,
he has written a mini-epic on the senselessness
and intransigence of war. He has succeeded
brilliantly in telling us that war is suicide by
another name, that every boy deserves to live
into manhood, that we will never understand
other men’s wars. In sections, Bandele’s prose
is as elegant and joyful as Akin Adesokan’s
prose. This is when Biyi brings in his own
canvass of recognitions. Bandele should have
borrowed another leaf from Adesokan however, in
allowing this human story to expend itself on
the reader. There is too much of the dramaturge
in the clipping of the action and sequences in
Burma Boy, which is a pity.
Burma Boy is a beginning. One hopes
that other, younger, writers would take the
baton from where Bandele hangs it to tell their
own sides of this story. As the author did show,
almost every Nigerian has blood kin slain in
Burma. They too are Burma as they were Nigerian
and so ought to be remembered. In a way, it was
inevitable that Bandele would write the novel
the way he did. The book is a celebration of
Bandele’s own life. He did not fight in Burma
but his father did, and, if his father had died
in that war, there certainly would not be any
Biyi to write this fantastic book. Every student
of Nigerian literature should get to know Ali
Banana for the same reason they should get to
know Okonkwo. Ali Banana, though a boy, is
archetypal. A character that will endure.
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