Review by New York Times Review
in 1996, Eunice, a schoolgirl of 15 in Uganda, was kidnapped by Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army and given to Bosco, a fighter, as his bush wife. The story of Eunice and Bosco is the first of four narratives that make up "A Moonless, Starless Sky," Alexis Okeowo's carefully wrought account of individual Africans in four countries across the continent. Although Okeowo calls this opening chapter "An LRA Love Story," theirs is no typical romance. On their first night together Bosco rapes Eunice when she refuses to have sex with him. Yet the pair go on to make a life, have children and, even after their escape from Kony's men, stay together. Their story sets the tone for this rich and urgently necessary book in which Okeowo disregards all preconceptions to reach for the truth. Raised in Alabama by Nigerian parents, Okeowo spent time in Africa, first in Uganda as a newspaper intern and then as a Nigeria-based reporter. "Feeling neither wholly American nor African," she writes, "I had come to see myself as an outsider in both places, an observer at the fringes. It was a perspective that helped me learn to report with clarity." She is, in fact, wholly both, equipped with the empathy to inhabit her subjects' lives, the emotional and intellectual capacity to withhold judgment and a sufficient measure of detachment. In prose of devastating simplicity Okeowo mines the moral complexity at the heart of Eunice and Bosco's story: the question of why abducted girls return to their captors. Many of the men were captives themselves. Some, like Bosco, help their wives escape, risking death to do so. And as Eunice tries to explain, there is the shared understanding: "I couldn't imagine being with someone who had not faced the same conditions in the bush." Okeowo sets out to tell stories of resistance that "are not as easy to notice," concerned less with drama than with the courage it takes to endure. In Nigeria she profiles Rebecca, who has escaped from Boko Haram, and Elder, a government clerk who fights the insurgents; in Somalia she meets a teenage basketball player named Aisha, who receives daily death threats and has survived two attempted abductions yet still goes to the game, track pants under her jilbab. "It was both an ordinary and rare kind of bravery," Okeowo writes, "the kind that they didn't think about every day because they were just trying to live their lives, but that was incredible given the danger they faced." There are moments of sheer audacity. Biram, an anti-slavery campaigner in Mauritania, decides to publicly burn several Islamic texts that justify slavery, even though doing so makes him guilty of apostasy, punishable by death. In potentially giving his life he hopes to start a revolt against the country's slave-owning class. "He was uneasy about the idea of dying, but he didn't have a choice," Okeowo writes in typically understated prose. "So he steeled himself." Boris Cyrulnik, the French psychiatrist and trauma expert who lost his parents in the Nazi death camps and survived as a child on the streets of occupied Paris, argued that the narrative or context given for suffering is what determines survival. The feeling of selfhood of those who have endured trauma is shaped by the gaze of others as much as their experience. Vital to their own sense of self, to their resilience, is an ability to frame their own narrative, something notably done by all the women and men in "A Moonless, Starless Sky." Okeowo has taken their stories, crafted them in all their courage and complexity and placed them at the center of the story of what it is to be human. ? Stories of resistance across Africa, concerned less with drama them with the courage it takes to endure. AMINATTA forna'S latest book, "Happiness," will be published next spring.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [November 12, 2017]
Review by Booklist Review
Journalist Okeowo spent five years reporting from Nigeria. Her work took her across the region, where she met many people whose lives had been dramatically changed by extremism. Eunice and Bosco, both kidnapped by the Lord's Resistance Army, escaped and set up a life together in Uganda. In Mauritania, Biram Dah Abeid became a leader in the movement to abolish slavery. In Nigeria, Abba Aji Kalli founded the Civilian Joint Task Force to fight back against the terrorists of Boko Haram. When Boko Haram attacked her school in 2014 and kidnapped 300 girls, Rebecca Ishaku escaped off the back of a truck. Aisha Hussien, in Somalia, began receiving death threats at age 11 for joining a women's basketball team. Okeowo compassionately tells their stories of resilience while providing historical and cultural context. Her descriptions of working as a reporter provide additional insight. A Moonless, Starless Sky is a captivating look at the on-the-ground effects of extremist groups and the people who live their lives in spite of them.--Chanoux, Laura Copyright 2017 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Okeowo, a staff writer at the New Yorker, offers an evocative and affecting portrait of contemporary Africa with four narratives featuring subjects from war-torn countries who are battling fundamentalism and medieval barbarity where they live. Okeowo, an American raised in Alabama by Nigerian parents, spent five years living in Africa and reporting from across the continent. The people she highlights include a couple from Uganda who met as teenagers when they were both kidnapped by Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army; a Mauritanian activist waging a semisuccessful, but lonely, antislavery campaign; a dual account of a Nigerian girl who escapes from Boko Haram and a government worker who starts a vigilante task force against the group; and a women's basketball team in Somalia that persists-and often thrives-despite deep prejudice and death threats against female athletes in that country. Through these narratives larger issues emerge, such as how ineffectual governments depend on vigilantes to protect their citizens from rebel groups such as Boko Haram, or the way families suffer intergenerational trauma when one or more members have violent experiences. In this memorable debut, Okeowo's in-depth, perceptive reporting gives a voice to the extraordinarily courageous-and resilient-women and men fighting malevolent ideologies and organizations in their native countries. Agent: Jin Auh, Wylie Agency. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
New Yorker staff writer Okeowo grew up in Alabama and graduated from Princeton, but has spent most of her writing career reporting on stories in Africa. In this, her first book, she focuses on individuals in four war- and terror-torn African nations, individuals attempting to lead normal lives in the face of extraordinarily dangerous conditions. In Uganda, a young woman tries to build a life with her children and husband after escaping from the Lord's Resistance Army terrorist group that kidnapped her. Her husband had been part of the group that kidnapped her. In Mauritania, a man battles modern-day slavery in a country where the authorities long denied its existence. In Nigeria, a man devotes himself to fighting Boko Haram and a Chibok girl tries to find a normal life after escaping from her kidnappers. In Somalia, a girl is passionate about playing basketball in spite of death threats from Al-Shabab extremists and clerics who consider the women's sports teams un-Islamic. Countless books have been written on the larger conflicts in these countries, but Okeowo succeeds in evoking empathy for real people living there. VERDICT Of interest to readers following struggles with extremism in Africa.-Joel Neuberg, Santa Rosa Junior Coll. Lib., CA © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Examining conflicts in four African countries through the eyes of those experiencing and trying to fight them.In this remarkable debut, New Yorker staff writer Okeowo, whose Nigerian parents moved to the United States, where she was born, explores significant conflicts in four African countries through the stories of individuals who have been victims of, but have also worked to combat, various forms of extremism. She delves into the lives of a couple who were victims of Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda. She tells of a young woman kidnapped by Boko Haram who managed to escape and of a man who joined in a vigilante organization confronting that terrorist group directly. She pursues the story of a man fighting against pernicious (and putatively illegal) slavery in Mauritania. She shows the struggle for young women in Somalia just to do something as seemingly innocent as play basketball. The author focuses her unflinching gaze on only a handful of people in each case study, which allows her a level of depth and nuance that a wider cast of characters would render impossible. Each of her tales, based on five years of on-the-ground reporting, gets two chapters: one in Part 1, "The Beginning," and the other in Part 2, "The Aftermath." These latter chapters, however, do not necessarily reach a conclusion; rather, they reveal a middle in which anything, including tragedy, could surely still happen. Throughout, Okeowo writes with beauty and grace, and her subjects are compelling. Refreshingly, she does not give in to easy answers. In the cases where the extremists are radical Islamists, she makes it clear that oftentimes the victims of their radicalism are devout Muslims, that Christian leaders and politicians are often equally culpable in local problems, and that complexitynot simplistic good-guy/bad-guy narrativesis a dominant theme throughout the region. Cleareyed, lyrical, observant, and compassionatereportage at its finest. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
