"There is only one God in war: the gun. One religion: genocide" (211).
Chapter 20's startlingly dark vignette of the then 13-year-old Innocent's involvement in the Nigerian-Biafran war is so heavily inundated with religious inflections and content, it is difficult to keep up with whether or not religion, and specifically Christianity is being treated as a positive thing. The image of the Madonna weeping bullet holes whose arms were "folded over her Immaculate heart [to keep it] from flying out of her chest" (209) paints a painfully sad picture of what had happened at the church, but as we see into Innocent's thoughts, we see a more jaded interpretation of the events. "He looked at the dead bodies. They had probably converged on the church compound believing they would be safe here, protected by God's benevolence and man's reputed fear of Him. How wrong they had been! He could have told them that" (211). These contradicting tones, coupled with the convoluted lines between the "good" and "bad" guys seems to be less a condemnation of one or the other, but instead a critique on absolutism.
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