When he was a child, rebel fighters devastated Majok Tulba's village in South Sudan. They measured young boys against the length of an AK-47 gun, recruiting those taller to their cause. Tulba was shorter. This arbitrary fact saved his life. In his novel Beneath the Darkening Sky, he uses fiction to explore what his fate might have been if he had been one inch taller.
Through the eyes of Obinna, a nine-year-old who is carted from the home he loves after a raid and trained as a child soldier by a sadistic captain, who takes a dislike to him after he accidentally vomits on his trousers, Beneath the Darkening Sky evokes the disturbing effects of violence and psychological torture on the human mind. Shortlisted for the 2013 Commonwealth book prize and praised by Stasiland author Anna Funder, it uses urgent and absorbing prose to skewer civil war.
After years spent in refugee camps Tulba was granted asylum in Australia. He now lives in Sydney with his family and works as a film-maker and CEO of the charity LifeCare Sudan. But, despite his film background and the tradition of oral storytelling he grew up with, this narrative was best suited to a novel: "I wanted to write a script but I found myself getting drawn into the world of the characters, to the point at which I couldn't even get enough sleep at night."
Beneath the Darkening Sky took about a year and a half to write. In capturing the brutal initiation of child soldiers, he drew on his own memories and those of people he knew, and he came to the conclusion that he needed to faithfully describe violent scenes witnessed by Obinna, his brother, and fellow kidnapped children: "I wanted it to be that way because a lot of people have never seen anything like this, but for many South Sudanese, violence, killings and fields of landmines are facts of life. I had to get it out of my head, for the world to see, so that other people could read it and ask: why is this happening? Maybe there is someone out there who can answer that question." Now that Beneath the Darkening Sky has been published, Tulba is already working on his next "heartbreaking" tale, also set in South Sudan. Eventually, he says, he will share these stories with his children, who currently aged five and under, but only "when they are grown up and ready to listen".
