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The story applies to conscience of a reader. One can hardly deny there is barely a thing more compassionate than a child being offended or harmed. In this case this is exactly the matter.
Chris Abani in his short story “Lottery” describes an event that occurred in Nigeria in the 1970-ies in an ordinary village market place. The event is seen through the eyes of a 10-year old boy.
A 10 year-old child, completely happy with the life, walks out of the house with the aunt to go to the store. Nothing seemed to foreshadow trouble. There was something in the air. The child smelled it – it was a mix of wet earth and the dry roughness of rope. The next moment the author, Chris Abani, shows the sharp difference of where the kid has been “flying” and what the smell perceptions were right until they stepped into the store: “other scents of the market broke through the scents of wet earth – the throat-burning sharpness of peppers, dried fish, the animal funk of goats and chickens.” A man was accused of steeling something and desperately tried to approve himself, but in vain. After getting a slap in a face from the aunt, a chief ran out to the courtyard where the justice awaited!
It was so called “mob justice” held by the elders of the community. The justice they dispensed was never questioned, though the actual crimes were never investigated. The man was lynched! He was burnt alive out front! Everybody saw that, moreover the crowd wanted the children to watch it in order to “learn a lesson”. There is nothing more terrible and disgusting I know than making kids watch such processes, especially on purpose. Moreover, one of the actions of making a sacrifice was to spit on the victim.
I have to admit that the title of the essay does not tell us from the very start about the content. While reading you get so frustrated and multi-feeled about all the participants of the action, that there are mixed feelings of disgust and sympathy.
The author declares that the aunt was a religious fanatic. This is very important, for she later contradicts herself doing what she has done. The society of those times brought up a cruel and savage generation. Even though people went to church and believed in God, the whole image of faith was wrong. The “lynch” sentenced a chief to death, saying he will not burn in hell once he is burning here. This expresses the entire anger and violence of those times.
One more feature of character worth discussing is aunt’s coldness. Young Abani drew close to the aunt in fear but yet she “shook off his clutching hand”. Why would she do this? To seem more cruel? I do not think so. These were the times of political unrest in Nigeria, so the calmness to such “lynching” was evoked by the environment. On contrary, the aunt wanted her nephew to get ready for the future life, and may be, to learn some lesson indeed. On the one hand it was pretty irresponsible of a grown-up to treat a kid like that, but on the other, I doubt that he will ever want to do that same thing!
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