• 1 Ghanaian writer Ayi Kwei Armah’s novel The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1975) is an earlier exa (...)

1In her debut novel entitled Dust (2014), set in 2007, Kenyan writer Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor stages a character called Nyipir, whose father and brother enlisted in the British army and went to Burma – present‑day Myanmar – to fight against the Japanese during the Second World War. All his life, Nyipir has been particularly obsessed with Burma and has always wanted to go there because his father and brother have never returned; however, he has never found the opportunity to do so, and this represents a wound that has never healed. After his daughter asks him: “‘What’s in Burma?’,” he answers: “‘Our people. Went for King George’s war. Didn’t come back’” (Owuor 2014a, 69). The fragmented syntax reflects his own sorrow, pain and possibly trauma related to the loss of those who have never returned from this far‑away land during this sombre period for the Kenyan people. In an interview with Michael Halmshaw, Owuor mentions the Burmese conflict and explains that “[d]ying away from home, away from the soil of your birth – and to do so unseen and unmourned – is a profound horror. As is the fact that we don’t necessarily talk about this absence, even if the feeling of […] loss looms large in different homes” (Owuor 2014b).1 The secondary place granted to this conflict in conversations, not only inside family circles and nation‑wide, but also in African fiction, mirrors its marginal position in both Western and African historiography. The pages historians devote to the Second World War in history books seldom or never evoke the Burmese conflict; when it is dealt with, it appears in mere footnotes. Instead, the emphasis is laid on the war zones in the USSR, the Pacific and Western Europe. The conflict in Burma has therefore been called “the forgotten war” (Latimer), the “forgotten conflict” (Thompson) or, more recently, an “unknown conflict […] of the Second World War” (Murray).

• 2 Bandele expresses his “gratitude” to a number of sources that helped him write his novel, among whi (...)
• 3 In the “Introduction” to a recent study he published as editor, Chris Murray explains that there ar (...)

2In the Author’s Note at the end of Burma Boy, Yorùbá/Nigerian writer Biyi Bandele explains that his father – a former “Burma boy” himself – “immersed” him in “stories of carnage, shell‑shock and hard‑won compassion […] when [he] was little more than an infant” (2007, 216). The first‑hand account of life in the Burmese war zone by Bandele’s father, along with specific works which he mentions in the Author’s Note,2 have enabled Bandele to frontally address this issue in his fourth novel, Burma Boy (2007). The novel is itself a fictional account of the Burma Campaign which tells the story of Ali Banana, a 13‑year-old Hausa boy who enlists in the British army in the name of “kingi Jogi” (Bandele 2007, 39). It is exceptional since, to our knowledge, it is the first African novel to fully and directly deal with this part of the history of the Second World War.3 This appears unsurprising coming from a writer who is well‑known for subverting both Western and African literary orthodoxies, as exemplified in two of his earlier novels, The Man Who Came in From the Back of Beyond (1991) and The Street (1999), which evidence crafty narrative manipulations and use of language. Private Ali Banana himself is a figure of exception, as shown in the following quotation – part of which is used in the title of this article: “With the exception of Banana whose face seemed to grow more baby‑like by the day, a moon‑like face that didn’t need a shave because there was nothing on it to shave, the men’s faces hadn’t seen a shave in months” (175–76). The young Ali Banana is quite unlike the other soldiers as his physical appearance seems to prove; we will see that his character also sets him apart from the rest of the group to which he belongs. In Burma Boy, Bandele’s literary – and, to some extent, historiographical – project seems to be dual. Firstly, he writes against the orthodoxies of canonical Western and African works and genres, among which and above all the Bildungsroman. Secondly, he introduces a representative account of the Burmese conflict in a fictional biographical narrative about a young Hausa private, thereby enabling the “[f]orgotten voices of Burma,” to quote Julian Thompson’s title, to be heard (again).

• 4 The Bildungsroman – coined by scholar Karl Morgenstern (1819) – is originally a German genre, born (...)
• 5 Other critics question whether Goethe’s novel itself is a Bildungsroman. This leads to a confusion (...)
• 6 Mikhaïl Bakhtin writes: “[a] type of novel that provides an image of man in the process of becoming (...)

3In her review of Burma Boy, Emma Hagestadt argues that it is a “classic coming‑of-age tale” (2008). Bandele’s novel can indeed be considered as a Bildungsroman if one focuses on the genre’s emphasis on the development of a specific character, on his “passage from innocence to experience” (Suleiman 1983, 65).4 Moreover, the Bildungsroman “examines a regular course of development in the life of the individual […]. The dissonances and conflicts of life appear as the necessary transit points of the individual on his way to maturity and harmony” (Dilthey 1985, 136).5 The concepts of “regular[ity],” “maturity” and “harmony” are central to the Bildungsroman’s project, as they represent the result of the Bildungsprozess. The protagonist learns from his experiences and, by the end of the novel, is ready to become a worthy member of society, whose values he had initially partly rejected. The journeys undertaken by the protagonist, a great many of which are articulated on a tripartite narrative structure involving departure, a journey – characterised by trials – and a return, also define the genre. The hero leaves his familiar environment and faces various situations that represent fruitful contexts for the construction of his identity, but they lead to personal conflicts. The encounter with such new environments shapes the protagonist’s character and influences him in his “process of becoming” an individual.6 As a teleological genre, the Bildungsroman insists on the importance of the social reintegration of the hero, thereby ensuring a form of stability for him. At the end of the novel, the protagonist has come to terms with his identity.

• 7 Ericka Hoagland analyses the ideological significance and implication of the Bildungsroman which, f (...)
• 8 Tobias Boes observes that “[t]he rise of feminist, postcolonial and minority studies during the 198 (...)

4However, classic Bildungsromane have mainly featured Western, white, bourgeois, male protagonists, who had an easier access to these transformational steps.7 The Bildungsroman has indeed often been perceived as an androcentric genre, as the use of the masculine personal pronoun indicates in Wilhelm Dilthey’s study (in Labovitz 1986, 2), for example. Pin‑chia Feng also notes that “[t]he term Bildung […] implies an endorsement of patrilineage” (1999, 3). However, half a century after the publication of Goethe’s novel, women began to reconfigure the generic tradition of the Bildungsroman, which led to a broadening of the paradigmatic axis of the genre, a process furthered by post‑colonial writers.8 Although Ogaga Okuyade’s reference to the African post‑colonial context is too general and simplistic, his argument is still useful when he explains that “African writers […] adopt and reword the tradition of the bildungsroman form” and “that most third-generation African novels fall within the latitude of the [Bildungsroman] tradition” (2009, 1). Burma Boy is no exception to Okuyade’s argument, yet it does not resemble a classic coming‑of‑age novel, as Hagestadt argues.

• 9 Among these novels, one can name the following examples, some of which are autobiographies: Allah n (...)
• 10 Writing about the impact of the war on young soldiers is however neither new nor intrinsically Afri (...)

5Burma Boy belongs to a series of child‑soldier narratives, a particularly popular African literary phenomenon between 2000 and 2010. Warfare is at the core of these (auto)biographical narratives.9 It is all the more striking in Burma Boy, which, therefore, can be considered as an exceptional Bildungsroman.10 Franco Moretti describes the destructive impact of the war on the development of soldiers, proving that war and the Bildungsroman are, to a certain extent, antithetical: “faced with an increasing probability of being wounded, it is quite reasonable for the subject to try and make himself […] smaller and smaller. Under artillery fire, the favourite position of World War I infantrymen was the fetal one” (2000, 234). The foetal position is the symptom of a regression to the mother’s womb, as if development for the soldiers were completely impossible after the horrors they have been through. The Bildung of the individual therefore becomes impossible in a context of war, since the individual has become disintegrated, fragmented and incapable of growing up. However, Ericka Hoagland introduces the concept of “war Bildung,” which is essential for studying Burma Boy. Hoagland explains:

• 12 By using the expression “art of surviving,” I aim to echo Franco Moretti who alludes to the Bildung (...)

6“War Bildung” – growing up in a time of war – means putting in place strategies of survival in front of (sometimes great) forms of violence, and developing/learning an art of surviving.12 Hoagland adds: “war Bildung [...] represent[s] a second, but not secondary, process of ‘Bildung’ necessary to the protagonist’s development” (12). To her, a form of development takes place even in wartime. This is partly what makes Burma Boy an exceptional Bildungsroman in the sense that the conditions for the Bildungsprozess that are depicted are far from what the Bildungsroman classically stages. War has a considerable impact on the development of the subjectivity of Ali Banana. The following passage focuses on the training every soldier follows in India before he is sent to Burma to fight the Japanese enemy:

• 13 It is worth noting that in sub‑Saharan African societies, the Bildungsroman’s function can be relat (...)
• 14 Elliott L. Gilbert and Don Randall read The Jungle Book as a Bildungsroman. Other critics, like Jes (...)

8The Burmese jungle that Ali Banana and his section cross in order to wage war represents an unusual setting in the context of the (war) Bildungsroman, whether it be Western or African.13 The narrator mentions this difficult “journey” across the jungle (Bandele 2007, 204, 210). A similar environment, the Indian jungle – Burma/Myanmar shares a border with India, and Ali Banana and the other West African soldiers first receive a training in India (32) before heading to the war front in Burma – lies at the heart of Rudyard Kipling’s own Bildungsroman, The Jungle Book (1894), which seems to be intertextually alluded to by Bandele.14 Christie Harner explains that in The Jungle Book, “Mowgli progresses from a half‑wild child into an appropriate servant of the British, utilizing his unique skill set for the benefit of the Empire” (2019, 144). Ali Banana is also making use of his “unique skill,” in the eyes of the British authorities, i.e. becoming cannon fodder for the Empire, in order to wage King George’s war. While Mowgli is developing a voice – supposedly thanks to the “civilisation” brought by the British – Ali Banana already had a voice before he went to Burma, a voice he is losing little by little in this hostile new environment.

• 15 In its general sense “katabasis” refers to a descent of some sort, and to a retreat in a military c (...)
• 16 For example, Ali Banana’s mentor, Damisa, asks him to shoot him dead because he is wounded and does (...)

9This journey is both geographical and metaphorical, and is strewn with hurdles. Ali Banana goes down the Burmese jungle, to the “heart of darkness,” in a descent into Hell, a katabasis that simultaneously evokes a downward movement and a military retreat.15 The jungle is presented as an uncivilised space that is at first frightening for Ali Banana. The other (downward) movement consists in a growing down process of the protagonist. The journey through the Burmese jungle therefore first seems to lead to a reversed Bildungsprozess, since Ali Banana’s geographical mobility is not teleological – as would be expected in the Bildungsroman genre – but circular. This possibly indicates an incapacity to reintegrate society because of the psychological impact caused by the horrors of the war, and the experiences undergone in the jungle.16 This terrain is a space that affects the protagonist’s subjectivity. The very first description of the jungle is given through the eyes of Ali Banana, in an omniscient third‑person narrative. The passage seems to develop a poetics of the sublime with its essential elements detailed by Edmund Burke. In Burma Boy, the jungle is at first an extremely antagonistic environment, as shown in the first jungle scene:

• 17 These flames are actually not fire, as Ali Banana explains later on: “The fire which earlier had fr (...)

10Several elements recall aspects addressed in Burke’s essay, among which the use of hypotyposis. The most striking image appears at the very beginning of this jungle scene, with a reference to a hellish place – an “inferno,” the word itself recalling Dante’s Divine Comedy – whose threatening presence is echoed in the term “fire” later on. The alliteration in [f] insists on the threat the jungle embodies. According to Burke, “[g]reatness of dimension is a powerful cause of the sublime” (1823, 97). The dangerous flames Ali Banana sees at a distance, flames that can “devour” the soldiers, therefore giving the jungle a metaphoric capacity to digest, become an obsession for him and are once again a characteristic of the sublime: “the mind is so entirely filled with its objects, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it” (Burke 1823, 73).17 Among the elements that lead to sublimity, according to Burke, are “Terror,” “Obscurity,” “Privation,” “Vastness,” “Infinity,” “Power,” “Suddenness,” all of them being present here. The fact that the jungle “rose into great hills and fell into steep valleys” offers a feeling of vastness, of infinity even, reinforced by the “precipice,” the “fast‑flowing stream,” and the “shaggy hill,” leading to the protagonist feeling overwhelmed.

• 18 This could be compared to what happens to Damisa himself when Zololo dies: “He was only twenty‑six; (...)

However, if there is indeed a literal emergence of Ali in White City, he emerges as a madman after wandering in the jungle. When they see him back at the camp, the other soldiers acknowledge his madness: “Bloken’s jaw fell wide open. He stared groggily at the mad man talking to him” (212). It is a physical change that has occurred in just a few days. The loss of his mentor (Damisa) is described as a major change in his relation to death and this completely derails Bildung.18 While Ali was considered as a naive and annoying young boy at the beginning, he is now compared to a fifty-year‑old man whom nobody seems to recognise. His identity has been lost in the jungle in the process of the war: he is just an “African man.” The use of “man,” which contrasts with the titular “boy,” indicates a physical change but also a psychological one. There has been a war Bildung and Ali has grown (old); he has also gone back to a state of innocence, as shown by his madness. Finally, what has become of the voice of this lively, talkative chap the reader met at the beginning of the novel?

• 19 For example, Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o deems that a writer should be politically committed: “ (...)
• 20 Claire Gallien explains that “[d]ecolonial studies emerged as a university field [in the years 2000 (...)
• 21 The concept of “subaltern” refers to figures who are not represented historically. This conception (...)
• 22 The memoirs of a former Nigerian Chindit named Isaac Fadoyebo, entitled A Stroke of Unbelievable Lu (...)

14First- and second‑generation African writers have often linked poetics and politics, as literature is not produced in a void, and Bandele, a third‑generation writer, seems to be no exception.19 In Burma Boy, the voices of West African subalterns are put to the fore, partly enabling Bandele to decolonise history.20 In “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak raises the question of the possibility and the capacity for marginal figures to become speaking subjects: she famously argues that Indian women in a subaltern position cannot speak.21 For Spivak, US and European intellectuals who aim to talk about marginalised subaltern subjects end up speaking for these subjects (82–83). One could therefore question the role of intellectuals in the representation of the deceased like the Nigerians who fought as Chindits – “long‑range penetration groups trained to operate deep behind Japanese lines” (Bandele 2007, 21) – and who have left little to no trace in history books.22 Fiction cannot speak for real soldiers, nor can it genuinely represent their experiences, but Burma Boy features a didactic component aimed at educating the reader.

• 24 “[L]es histoires des mondes extra‑occidentaux ne sont […] presque jamais prises en considération da (...)

16By diversifying the voices in the history of the Second World War, by offering a larger picture of this period, Bandele also decolonises History. To quote Sophie Dulucq and Colette Zytnicki, “the histories of extra‑western worlds are […] almost never taken into consideration in global historiographical panoramas, for which they remain blind spots” (2003, 1; my translation).24 The fact that we hear various Hausa voices in the novel – Damisa’s, Danja’s, Ali Banana’s, Zololo’s – is also part of Bandele’s decolonial project since, according to Claire Gallien, decolonialism emphasises “a suspicion towards […] any homogeneous understanding of identity” (2020, 31). Although, as we have seen earlier, Bildung is not satisfying in Burma Boy, this novel enables Bandele to shed light on subaltern soldiers who have long been ignored. By tackling this issue in a direct way, Bandele also writes back to African history as it has been written until very recently, and engages in a historiographical project. He is in line with his “writing back” predecessors of the 1950s and 1960s, like Chinua Achebe, who offered what he would have described as the lion’s version of the hunt, something that made him write Things Fall Apart in 1958. The Nigerian writer famously declared:

• 25 The choice of an adolescent figure both depicts a historical reality – as Isaac Fadoyebo testified (...)

17At first sight, early in the novel, the young Ali Banana shows great enthusiasm at the idea of waging war against the Japanese enemy.25 His ardour is probably linked to the fact that he has not fought in the Burmese jungle yet. An analepsis also allows the narrator to underline the enthusiasm of the soldiers for the army uniform and the status attached to it:

• 26 UCLA’s “Teaching and Research: African Languages” website explains that “[t]he Hausa sound written (...)
• 27 No clear explanation of this expression has been found, but one can guess that in the context where (...)

18The narrator sometimes relinquishes his prerogative of omniscience. For example, when the narrative deals with Ali Banana’s personal matters, such as his origins and the portrayal of his parents, the narrator vanishes in order to let him express himself in direct speech. He does so for conversations between the soldiers that can cover several consecutive pages, thus allowing the reader to hear subaltern voices. In the afore‑mentioned quotation (Bandele 2007, 33), Ali Banana alters the names of the cities which are located on his sea trip to India. This transformation/deformation of topological names can be perceived as the mark of their pronunciation by the young Hausa speaking protagonist: for instance, the capital of Sierra Leone, “Freetown,” is pronounced “Preetown.”26 Standard English is affected by a form of syntax which is influenced by the Hausa language. Moreover, although they are expressed in English, the cultural references are Nigerian or, to be more precise, Hausa. This is the case with the expression “‘Roast me a cassava and you can have the skin’” (39) which is used by Ali Banana when he addresses a Sergeant.27