And AK-47s that they shooting into heaven
Like they're trying to kill The Jetsons
--Lupe Fiasco, "Little Weapon"
Cary Joji Fukunaga’s film Beasts of No Nation (2015) began its journey as a novel by Uzodinma
Iweala. Published in 2006, the film’s hypotext appeared on bookshelves a year
earlier than Ishmael Beah’s bestselling memoir A Long Way Gone, which, although categorized as nonfiction, also
began as a novel in a creative writing workshop. Around that same time, in
2008, Emmanuel Jal released his album Warchild,
which received critical acclaim from publications like Rolling Stone. In other words, a general discourse about boy
soldiers, colonialism in a post-colonial world, the relationships between
violence and natural resources arose in the middle of the twenty-first century’s
first decade, and this discourse could be equally packaged as either an entertainment
commodity or a curriculum for high schoolers and neighborhood book clubs.