Desert's End
A dozen years ago, American media covered the atrocities committed by the so-called Lord’s Resistance Army, a gang of thugs passing themselves off as Christian warriors in central Africa. The depravity of men who would gleefully force young girls to bite each other to death left me feeling helpless against relentless human evil. Later, when Boko Haram kidnapped and enslaved other girls in the name of other faith, my own helplessness seemed self-indulgent. It was the helplessness of tormented children that mattered. I began to wonder what could possibly give these girls the means to escape their misery.
I’m a writer; there’s nothing I can do in the real world to prevent or reverse what happens to children in the dark. But I can at least imagine resistance and triumph. One stolen girl, the brilliant and intrepid Korobanti, formed in my mind. The more I thought about her, the clearer her world became to me. The clearer her world, in both its savagery and its beauty, the more important her defiance. I wrote a novella, THE NAMES OF THE DEAD, to follow Korobanti on her route to freedom.
When the novella was finished and Korobanti and her comrades were free, I couldn’t bear to let go of these valiant girls. I wrote another passage of their journey, then a third, then a fourth. The novella became a novel, DESERT’S END. Korobanti’s world expanded from captivity in a nameless forest to a reality more familiar to American readers – to the political and psychological institutions that can enslave almost as well as mindless thugs can. Yet whatever the abuse they endure, Korobanti and her friends grow and learn, they resist, and they prevail.
Every week brings new reports that reinforce the topicality of this story, a topicality that is unfortunately not likely to wane. But if my project began in outrage, it was built in respect for characters who seemed to take over their own lives the moment I invented them. I felt more like a chronicler than a creator, and I found hope in these stalwart young girls. DESERT’S END is a novel of brutal realism, but it is also a novel of transcendence.
THE NAMES OF THE DEAD won the 2021 Sandy Run Novella Award.
DESERT’S END is forthcoming from Hidden River Press.