Yesterday I read the short stories of Uwen Akpan collected in Say You’re One of Them.  I chose the book this summer on a visit to the local bookstore.  I was intrigued by the cover photo of a young girl in a lovely white dress running away, down a sandy dirt path lined with African trees and grasses.  Now that I’ve finished these heart-wrenching stories, both the photo and the title take on their full — and sinister — meaning.  Akpan’s stories are about the young victims of Africa’s worst conflicts, victims too young to escape, and too guileless to hide. They are children who trust the adults around them, even when the facts of their situations scream deception, impotence, and hopelessness.  And when these children assume the guilt for their pain, rather than admit to the complete failure of the adults, their stories become a tragedy and a travesty of childhood.

Akpan uses the facts of these children’s stories in the most chilling of ways: he lets them narrate the details of their situations and they do so without excess or even full understanding of the horror going on around them. These children believe what the adults in their lives tell them, and relay their trust through words and actions that make the betrayal and failure of the adults so much worse, and so much more painful to read about. We the readers know or suspect the truth, and we ache in anticipation of what is coming down the path for these innocent victims — and we want to yell, run!  Run!  Just like the girl on the cover of the book, run away!  But there is no escape.  Even when these children stop trusting in their adults, they are no better off; they have no experience to guide them to safety away from danger and they cannot escape the world the adults have made for them.

Akpan is masterful at capturing the internal voices and the dialogues of his many characters, boys and girls of all ages, Muslim, Christian, and Catholic.  They seem very familiar, with their feelings of jealousy, hunger, joy, relief, and, most horribly, guilt for their situations, when they bear no guilt for the horror they were born into.  Their situations are unimaginably terrible — and yet we are forced to imagine them in every detail through the matter-of-fact narration: street children of Nairobi, feasting on shoe glue to subdue hunger pains; a Rwandan girl facing a machete-bearing mob at her front door, led by her uncle; a brother and sister preparing for what they believe will be their adoption; a terrified Muslim boy hiding his missing hand on a crowded bus, the giveaway of his religion and his sure death sentence.

It is the betrayal of the trust and hope of the children that makes their stories so powerfully sad.  But Akpan’s stories are not just sad stories nor are they meant to undercut the hope and trust of children as weak or unrealistic, luxuries they must be shorn of to survive. In fact, it is the hope and the trust of these very real characters that give us faith in their resilience.  It is their trust and hope that, ironically, may just save them, although it can never erase for them the history of their abuse at the hands of incompetent adults, power-hungry leaders, bloodthirsty religious fanatics, and money-driven mercenaries.