Uwem Akpan's Say You Re One Of Them

While many people live relatively carefree lives, many others suffer from the burden injustice and loss has left on them. The horrors many face during their youth defies the universal perception of a child’s innocence. Unfortunately, everyday society has veiled this behind a curtain for few to acknowledge. In Uwem Akpan’s Say You’re One Of Them, all five short stories emphasize the most cringeworthy sufferings of children. With perhaps the most significant and horrid death scene out of many, the story My Parents’ Bedroom ties together the meaning of this elaborately crafted novel. Indeed, it ends the novel with a note that children are often left alone in such a terrifying world, their joys, hopes, and families destroyed by injustice in an attempt to unveil these hidden truths. Childhood often goes hand in hand with the prevalent and powerful theme of naivety. Akpan exhibits this theme often in Monique, the protagonist in My Parents Bedroom. Under the troublesome weight of nescience that emerges as the Rwandan genocide arrives at her home, Monique suffers greatly due to her incapability to understand herself. Monique recalls a time of an uncertainty: “‘Maman, I’ll always be beautiful!’, I told her one day... ‘You could be beautiful in other ways, Monique,’ she said”. Looking back, Monique still does not recognize what prompted Maman
This story most explicitly highlights that injustice and violence sometimes leaves inept children to face the world after the loss of everything that matters to them. Using emotion to convey clearly the message that such cases do happen, the death scene in the story reaches out to the reader to convince them to do something about it. It brings to emphasis that the nescience of a child along with the injustice of society can leave the child to face the world’s most heart-wrenching