Brooke Painter

Mr. Pace
English
16 November 2018
All the Layers of Sin

Imagine every crime ever committed upon this earth in a single lifetime. Imagine what

the guilty person would look like if the sin was visible, down to the last white lie, reflected upon

their skin. In Tochi Onyebuchi’s Beasts Made of Night, he conveys how guilt can never truly be

abolished--especially if blamed upon another--, how stark the division of class due to religion

and purity can be, and that sin is a complex definition which is never only black and white.

Onyebuchi's book demonstrates an defining answer to how the world would be shaped if sin

were a tangible thing, and how it would function if guilt became obsolete.

Guilt is one of life’s most destructive forms of emotions. Its power influences the choices

of each person, and thus shapes society. Kos, the city of purity, maintains royals only if they are

wholly free of sin. In order to remain pure, their guilt becomes passed into another person--an

aki-- to carry the burden, and eventually, an excess of shared guilt drives them insane. Worse, the

aki may cross over; where the body is alive but their spirit has passed on. They die, usually

before the age of sixteen. Guilt, especially if it is forced unto them by another, is what destroys

an aki. The same message can be said for reality. Feelings manifest into constant reminders of

suffering which ultimately, if not forgiven or resolved, drain the life from anyone.

What greater method of social division exists than that of religion? Wars fought in its

name all for gaining the notion of peace, justifying horrid acts under the name of God, ultimately

untouchable. In this book, religion reflects the ideals of our society’s views, but with a twist. The

people of Kos worship the ‘Unnamed,’ an unbodied entity that exists in every single particle and

person, with no determined gender or physical shape. The title alone commands no assumptions
that could be misjudged, it is simply unnamed and therefore up for individual interpretation. Yet

there are those who turn any religion into a source of power for them to wield. Mages, abusing

the power of the Unnamed, often commit Baptisms: where a small living sector, or dahia, is

completely destroyed because of an abundance of sin which they personally detect in the area.

Religion controls all, but unfortunately, the malicious often control all religion.

Sin--how unsimple the term actually is. The definition is this: “an immoral act considered

to be a transgression against divine law.” It seems material in text, yet in real life, sin is not so

absolute. There serves a human purpose whereas others wish to believe only in black and white.

Sin is not necessarily all evil or a carrier of corruption, rather, it is a part of life which is

imperative-- without guilt, there would be no humanitarian morals to guide actions; without sin,

there would be no hardships of life, no personal growth. “Telling the occasional lie or being

jealous of someone or stealing a loaf of bread to feed their little sister. (...) It’s not that [sin..] is

exciting, it’s. . . it’s life”(178).

In a society ruled by religion, sin is the ultimate evil, yet also the necessary one. Beasts

Made of Night finds a way to display a world where the repercussions of purity versus sin shape

the city into a hypocritical and biased environment, but also includes the justified understanding

and beauty of the supposed ‘condemned’. It leaves the reader contemplating their own view of

what the true definition of a sin is, and how our own world would look without it.