Childhood Traumas: Narratives and Representations 9781138611924, 9780429341274

Citation preview

CHILDHOOD TRAUMAS Edited by Kamayani Kumar and Angelie Multani

CHILDHOOD TRAUMAS NARRATIVES AND REPRESENTATIONS Edited by Kamayani Kumar and Angelie Multani

www.routledge.com

Routledge titles are available as eBook editions in a range of digital formats

9781138611924_Full Cover.indd 1

9/8/2019 9:57:18 AM

CHILDHOOD TRAUMAS

This volume contributes to understanding childhoods in the twentieth and twenty-first century by offering an in-depth overview of children and their engagement with the violent world around them. The chapters deal with different historical, spatial, and cultural contexts, yet converge on the question of how children relate to physiological and psychological violence. The twentieth century has been hailed as the “century of the child” but it has also witnessed an unprecedented escalation of cultural trauma experienced by children during the two World Wars, Holocaust, Partition of the Indian subcontinent, and Vietnam War. The essays in this volume focus on victimized childhood during instances of war, ethnic violence, migration under compulsion, rape, and provide insights into how a child negotiates with abstract notions of nation, ethnicity, belonging, identity, and religion. They use an array of literary and cinematic representations—fiction, paintings, films, and popular culture—to explore the long-term effect of violence and neglect on children. As such, they lend voice to children whose experiences of abuse have been multifaceted, ranging from genocide, conflict and xenophobia to sexual abuse, and also consider ways of healing. With contributions from across the world, this comprehensive book will be useful to scholars and researchers of cultural studies, literature, education, education policy, gender studies, child psychology, sociology, political studies, childhood studies, and those studying trauma, conflict, and resilience. Kamayani Kumar is Assistant Professor, Department of English, Aryabhatta College, University of Delhi, India. Her PhD was on Representation of Child, Body, and Nation in Partition Literature from the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi. She has published several research papers Partition studies, and childhood trauma. She is currently working on a book on Partition and visual culture. Angelie Multani is Professor Department of Humanities & Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, India. Her PhD was on the politics of performance and production of English Language Theatre in India, from Jawaharlal Nehru University. She has published extensively on theatre, Mahesh Dattani, Indian English fiction, and contemporary fiction. Her teaching interests include European drama and fantasy literature.

CHILDHOOD TRAUMAS Narratives and Representations

Edited by Kamayani Kumar and Angelie Multani

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 selection and editorial matter, Kamayani Kumar and Angelie Multani; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Kamayani Kumar and Angelie Multani to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-61192-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-34127-4 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLc

CONTENTS

List of Figuresvii List of Contributorsviii Acknowledgementsxii Introduction   1

1

Poof! Up in smoke: A modern fairy tale

13

KAMAYANI KUMAR

  2

Colours of trauma paint a thousand words: “Leaving Tibet” in paintings by Tibetan children in India

22

ANURIMA CHANDA

  3

War babies

37

BETHANY SHARPE

  4

“Waiting for my mum to come back”: Trauma(tic) narratives of Australia’s stolen generation

50

SOMRITA GANGULY

  5

Drawing an account of herself: Representation of childhood, self, and the comic in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis

62

AMRITA SINGH

 6 Cache-cache: Writing childhood trauma NANCY ALI

v

75

C ontents

  7

Negotiating trauma: The child protagonist and state violence in Midnight’s Children and Cracking India

93

SOMESHWAR SATI AND CHINMAYA LAL THAKUR

  8

Quest into the past: Heroic quest and narrative of trauma in Jane Yolen’s Briar Rose

102

VANDANA SAXENA

  9

Et tu, brute?: The child soldier and the child victim in Shobasakthi’s Traitor

114

USHA MUDIGANTI

10

Children at war: Child(hood) trauma in popular Japanese animation

132

BENJAMIN NICKL

11

Returning horror, re-visioning real: Children and trauma in Grave of the Fireflies

148

RITWICK BHATTACHARJEE

12

Coping with killing?: Child soldier narratives and traces of trauma

160

SARAH MINSLOW

13

We needed the violence to cheer us: Losses and vulnerabilities in Ishmael beah’s A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier

174

RAHUL KAMBLE

14

Children of the trail: The trauma of removal and assimilation

186

AMIT SINGH

15

Child/hood and 9/11 trauma: A study of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

194

NISHAT HAIDER

Index209

vi

FIGURES

1.1 1.2

“Cutting Down Bunks”, Helga Weissova, 13 years old 17 Red Cross Visit17

vii

CONTRIBUTORS

Nancy Ali has written extensively on the experiences of the mostly illiterate female moujahidines in the guerrilla war that was to end French colonization of Algeria. More recently, she published articles on the element of narrativity joining the historical and literary discourses, as well as on collective memory as a political instrument, particularly with regards to the Shoah in France. In September, she starts a fellowship at the Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, on Holocaust Representation in Egyptian Popular Culture since the 1990s. Ritwick Bhattacharjee is Assistant Professor at the Department of English, SGTB Khalsa College, University of Delhi, India. He completed his MPhil from the Department of English, University of Delhi on Stephen King and the effects of the phenomenal fantastic on the everyday reality of human beings. His research interests are in fantasy studies, phenomenology, continental philosophy, Indian English Novels, Disability Studies, and Graphic Novels. His publications range from academic articles on philosophy, fantasy, politics, disability, and translation to journalistic articles and fiction work. Currently, he is working towards the publication on a treatise on pessimism and the nature of spatio-temporal reality within the pessimistic world. Anurima Chanda is a Senior Writing Tutor at the Centre for Writing and Communication, Ashoka University, India. She has completed her PhD on Indian English Children’s Literature from the Centre for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. She was a pre-doctoral fellow at the University of Wuerzburg (July 2016‑Oct 2016, DAAD Programme “A New Passage to India”) working under Prof. Isabel Karremann. She writes for children and has published with leading publishing houses. Somrita Ganguly is a professor, poet, and literary translator, presently affiliated with Brown University, Rhode Island, USA, as a Fulbright doctoral research fellow. She has taught British Literature to undergraduate students in Delhi and Calcutta, and translates from Bengali and Hindi to viii

C ontributors

English. She was selected by the National Centre for Writing, UK, as an emerging translator in 2016. She has been invited as translator-in-residence at Cove Park, Scotland, in October 2017, and in December 2017 she was invited as poet-in-residence at Arcs of a Circle, Mumbai, an artistes’ residency organized by the US Consulate in Bombay. Somrita’s work has been showcased at the 2017 London Book Fair and she has been published in Asymptote, Words Without Borders, in Other Words, and Muse India, among others. She has thirteen academic publications to her credit and is a recipient of the Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund Award (2013) and the Sarojini Dutta Memorial Prize (2011). Somrita has recently completed translating a political biography, an anthology of lyrical verses, a five-volume novel-in-verse, and a contemporary retelling of the Mahabharata. She is currently translating a novel on the Russian Revolution from Bangla to English. Nishat Haider is Professor of English at the University of Lucknow, India. She is the author of Contemporary Indian Women’s Poetry (2010). She has held numerous administrative and scholarly positions on boards and committees, and has also served as the Director, Institute of Women’s Studies, University of Lucknow. Recipient of Meenakshi Mukherjee Prize (2016), C. D. Narasimhaiah Award (2010), and Isaac Sequeira Memorial Award (2011), she has presented papers at numerous academic conferences and her essays have been included in a variety of scholarly journals and books. Her current research interests include postcolonial studies, popular culture, and gender studies. Rahul Kamble is Assistant Professor in the Department of Indian and World Literatures in the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, India since 2010. He teaches courses on Childhood Studies, African American Literature, American Literature, Narratives of Conflict, Drama, Theatre, and Performance, etc. In 2015 he published a co-edited anthology  Approaches to Childhood: Issues and Concerns in Creative Representations. Sarah Minslow is Assistant Professor of Children’s Literature at California State University Los Angeles, USA. She teaches children’s literature and global human rights. Her research has two strands. The first is the potential for children’s literature and media to influence developing attitudes towards Otherness. The second is the intersection between human rights, literature, and film. Also, she works with educators to develop human rights curriculum in the K-12 setting. Usha Mudiganti is Assistant Professor at the School of Letters of Ambedkar University Delhi, India. She teaches courses on literatures in India, North America, and Britain. Her research interests include gender studies with ix

C ontributors

specific focus on India and the South Asian region and the constructions of childhoods in literature. She uses critical theories such as psychoanalytic theory, close reading of texts, post-colonialism, and feminism for her research. Benjamin Nickl is Assistant Professor of Comparative and Transnational Popular Culture Studies in the Department of International Comparative Culture, Literary, and Translation Studies at The University of Sydney, Australia. He received his PhD in transnational culture and popular entertainment studies from the University of Melbourne. His current research projects focus on issues of representation in minority cultures and the figuring of global issues and socio-historical phenomena in transnational popular culture and mass-mediated entertainment. Someshwar Sati is Associate Professor at the Department of English, Kirori Mal College, University of Delhi, India. His research interests encompass postcolonial studies and the Indian English novel, disability studies, and translation studies. Dr Sati has edited three critical volumes on postcolonial theory and literature, Warble of Postcolonial Voices, Volume I and II, and Writing the Postcolonial: Poetics, Politics, and Praxis. Vandana Saxena teaches English at the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Taylor’s University, Malaysia. Her major research interests are South and Southeast Asian literature, fantasy, memory studies, and Young Adult and Children’s fiction. These interests are reflected in her publications and presentations. Her book The Subversive Harry Potter is one of the seminal literary studies on Young Adult fiction. She is currently working on memory and trauma narratives in Southeast Asian World War II fiction. Bethany Sharpe is an independent scholar and received her PhD from the University of Kentucky. Her research explores the causes and consequences of humanitarian efforts throughout the world. She focuses on the role that children have played in the development of a humanitarian ideology in the United States. In addition to her work on Operation Babylift, she has analysed perceptions of child and youth activity during the Palestinian Intifada. Her work has been featured on the website US History Scene and will be in a forthcoming edited volume on childhood and war. Amit Singh teaches English at Ambedkar University Delhi, India. His areas of interest comprise folklore, oral traditions, spatiality, and epics. He is also interested in world literatures, diaspora studies, marginal literatures, and theory and criticism. He offers courses based on these areas at undergraduate and graduate levels. He completed his PhD from Centre for English Studies, School of Languages, Literatures, and Culture Studies, x

C ontributors

Jawaharlal Nehru University. The title of his thesis is “A Study of the Transformation of Awadhi Folk Songs across Milieu and Media”. Currently, he is engaged in investigating the folkloric traditions surrounding the Kumbh Mela at Prayag. He is, also, engaged in an Independent Research on Mallahs of Dumduma Village, Allahabad, Uttar Pradesh. Amrita Singh is a PhD student at the Department of English, University of Delhi, India. She also teaches English Literature at Kamala Nehru College, University of Delhi. Her areas of research include life writing, rethinking culture and power, and reading visual cultures. She has published essays on graphic auto/biographies and literary theory. She is also the co-editor of Kamala Nehru College’s academic journal, Akademos. Chinmaya Lal Thakur is a research scholar at the Center for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. He has recently submitted his MPhil dissertation titled “The Novel and Epistemological Critique: Reading Franz Kafka” at the Center. His publications include a number of essays in journals and magazines as well as the edited volume  Literary Criticism: An Introductory Reader (2018). He writes on issues relating to modernism, continental philosophy, and postcolonial literature and culture.

xi

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book would not have been possible without the essays of the contributors, but we would like to very gratefully acknowledge not just their intellectual participation in our project, but the unflagging faith and commitment they showed in standing with us through the exceptionally long and sometimes delayed process of bringing the book together. Individually and collectively, the contributors have demonstrated confidence and a remarkable collaborative spirit, and we thank them deeply. We would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful and incisive comments which helped us hone the essays and make a better work at the end. We thank the production and editorial team at Routledge for their enthusiasm and work through the publication process. We thank the publishing house Hachette UK for copyright permissions to reproduce the images used in Chapter 1 of this volume. We would like to thank our families for their support and understanding of the absences and preoccupations that a lengthy book project entails. Finally, but certainly not least of all, we thank our respective institutions— Aryabhatta College, University of Delhi, and Indian Institute of Technology Delhi—for their support.

xii

INTRODUCTION

If there is a third principle, its name is childhood. But it dies; or rather, it is murdered. —Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, p. 256 INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION

It is true that academic studies of childhood and its various facets have grown considerably over the last few decades, and it is interesting that different genres like graphic novels, auto fiction anime, cinema, toys, fairy tales, ethnographic studies, to name but a few, are being used to come to a better understanding of children’s studies. Yet, this transition is relatively recent and far from being comprehensive or complete. This slow and painful process of acknowledging children as different from adults in possession of nascent coping mechanisms, rudimentary grasp of language, and liminal power of expression began in the domain of scholarship as late as in the twentieth century. The twentieth century was cited as the “century of the child” (Key 1909: 7) for it was then that for the first time, academics/scholars started to posit an enquiry into “childhood per se”. The comprehension that children inhabit a world which is different from adults in multiple contexts such as psychological, biological, linguistic, cognitive, etc., was still developing. Till the twentieth century, a child was conveniently regarded as a “miniature adult”. The realization that childhood has specific needs and desires that are potentially and drastically different from an adult was nonexistent. That children’s psyches are adversely and uniquely affected in wars waged by adults was also not envisaged. As Llyod De Mause says in his work The History of Childhood “The history of childhood is a nightmare from which we have only recently begun to awaken. The further back in history one goes, the lower the level of child care, and the more likely children are to be killed, abandoned, beaten, terrorized, and sexually abused” (Mause 1974: 1). So profound was the marginalization of children that social sciences “lacked” anything remotely close to childhood studies. Children/childhood studies were highlighted “not by an absence of interest in children . . . but 1

I ntroduction

by their silence” (Prout 2002: 2). Children existed only as “the invisible group par excellence” (Prout 2002: 1). Childhood was completely subsumed by the adult world and children were presumed to be in a safe haven being looked after by their adult caretakers. While narratives of childhood abuse and neglect whether physical or psychological did emerge, they were sporadic at best. For instance, one can cite Dickens’ representation of the exploited child figure in utilitarian Victorian England, Bronte and Eliot’s subtle and profoundly moving portraitures of childhood trauma, yet by and large, children rarely found themselves as the loci of any discourse on childhood neglect or abuse. Again, while discourses on “Holocaustal” events like the Holocaust, Partition, Vietnam were far from scant, very few of them had a child as protagonist. Testimonies of children for instance, Anne Frank’s Diary, were few and far in between. Paradoxically, the very century in which consciousness that the child needs to be represented in discourses came alive also is responsible for perhaps the worst onslaught in terms of battles, civil wars, and genocides experienced by children. The two World Wars, Partition, the Vietnam war, 9/11, xenophobia, rape as an instrument of ethnic cleansing and cultural intimidation left millions of children bereft of care: these vulnerable survivors of invasive and intensive hostilities no longer had access to the “walled garden” of “Happy, Safe, Protected, Innocent Childhood” (Prout 2002: 2). These disruptive and invasive events bring to the fore the vulnerability of a child while also reinforcing the discourse that a child’s consciousness differs from an adult, that childhood is not an unproblematic biological qualifier but a particular cultural phrasing, historically and politically contingent. Concomitantly, concerns about children being exposed to trauma, being rendered destitute or orphaned, forced into foster care, born of rape, sexually assaulted, or compelled to become child soldiers were steadily on the rise. Studies in resilience by pioneers like Norman Germazy and Emma Werner not only helped extensively in understanding how children cope with abuse and trauma but also sought answers to the question as to how and why children sometimes also emerge as the worst offenders. The larger threat evidently being that children exposed to horrific instances of violence, poverty, war, and sexual abuse carry repressed memories which makes them maladaptive as adults. This study does not propose to be an extension of resilience studies but it does strive to examine how children’s losses and traumas have been addressed and represented. Using discourses from different genres like literature, cinema, television series, animation, graphic novels, and paintings, etc., these essays focus on the representations and aestheticization of children as victims, transgressors, or witnesses to horrific instances that have destroyed or threaten to destroy their childhood. What makes the task complex is not just knowing that the idea of trauma sits uneasily next to childhood but the fact that “childhood” itself belongs to 2

I ntroduction

a different realm. For an adult to express anything about childhood can be easily read as a transgression, or at best a reconstruction mediated through the adult’s understanding of the world. As Chris Jenks points out, the concept of childhood is esoteric, primarily because it is difficult for an adult to recall his or her own childhood, The . . . concept of “childhood” is equally problematic; childhood is far more than simply the state of being a child. Although it is something of which all adults have had direct experience, there is a strong tendency to see children and childhood as different from ourselves: the child is familiar to us and yet strange, he or she inhabits our world and yet seems to answer to another. (Jenks 1996: 3) Thus, ironically although every adult was a child once, childhood once passé becomes difficult for an adult mind to comprehend. Also, as Rousseau has observed in Emile, “childhood has ways of seeing, thinking, and feeling peculiar to itself; nothing can be more foolish than to substitute our ways for them” (Coveney 1957: 7). However, more often than not, the task of relating to, interpreting, and expressing a child’s traumatic encounter, his/her experience of horror, falls upon an adult. For instance, studies done on the Holocaust confirm that children’s experiences of Holocaust have until recently remained unaccounted or apprehended through the prism of an adult’s perception—“Child survivors of the holocaust have only recently been recognized as a developmentally distinct group of individuals who survived the war as children and had an experience which differed psychologically from older survivors” (Krell 1993: 383). Thus, while adults and children alike are victims of, and witnesses to, the barbarism and cruelty of horrific events, yet the resources and coping mechanisms that an adult possesses are often not resent in the child counterpart, thereby inevitably leaving the child more vulnerable to what psychologists refer to as “post-traumatic embrace” or the recurrent nature of such intensive trauma. As Freud elaborates, “the traumas of childhood are all the more momentous because they occur in a time of incomplete development and are for that reason liable to have traumatic effects” (Alexander et al. 2004: 33). The issue has been further compounded by the negligence and delay displayed in recognizing children as victims of cultural trauma. As Bella Brodzki, in her study on how the trauma of child survivors of Holocaust stands neglected, writes, for every rupture there was a conscious or unconscious covering over of the void—whether by repression, collusion, consensus, or imposition. It is perhaps because of this phenomenon, coupled with 3

I ntroduction

a lack of understanding of early trauma, that the experiences of child survivors—who were almost by definition hidden children— have been overlooked in clinical and historical studies, even by themselves. (Brodzki 2001: 156) This study then proposes to breach this gap with narratives which even though may largely be through the conduit of the adult’s semiotic framework, nonetheless meet the challenge of close reconstruction, mediation, and representation of a child’s experience of wars, violence, rape, loss of parents and childhood—and are at best retrospective literature. The articles in this volume offer to scrutinize the child as a victim whose vulnerability allows for a profound critique of horrific instances such as war, rape, displacement, etc. Representing childhood as an epitome of “the perfect image of insecurity and isolation, of fear and bewilderment, of vulnerability and potential violation” (Coveney 1957: 7), the volume helps to communicate the horror of any violation most emphatically and in deploying the agency of a “potentially exploitable child”, it ensures that the enormity and magnitude of the issues involved are unveiled in all its starkness (Bharat 2003: 12). The volume has its focus not only on children caught in conflict zones but also zeroes in on the tragic predicament of children who are born of rape. Be it the Partition of the Indian subcontinent, the Vietnam War, Bangladesh, or Yugoslavia, women’s bodies became the territory on which cartographic and nationalistic identities are etched. Children born of such unions were always treated with derision particularly in the more traditional and culturally conservative societies. While ample discourses are available on how women suffered the ignominy of rape, little has been said of children born of such sexual exploitation. They invariably enter “a troubled space” the elision of these children’s rights is extremely tragic. Described through the usage of various derogatory epithets such as children of bad memories, ‘scum-babies’, etc., these children have no space to claim as their own. While the rape of women and their forced impregnation is now recognized as a war crime, children born of such forced sexual unions still need to be acknowledged as victims. Instead, they are subsumed within “women’s issues”. As R.C. Carpenter while speaking on the fate of children born of raped women in ethnic conflict in former Yugoslavia asserts: Women were seen as the victims; children of rape were seen as irrelevant. Constructions of forced impregnation as genocide acknowledged and depended on the child’s presence but treated the child not as a member of the victimized group but as either a non-victim or a member of the perpetrating group. (Carpenter 2000: 433) 4

I ntroduction

Emphasizing this point in another context, Kathleen Mitchell says: Despite the international attention placed on prevention of sexual and gender-based violence and programs directed toward the victims, there appears to have been very little attention paid to invisible victims of this violence: the children born as a result of rape. While literature from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and international human rights organizations recognize the existence of these children, little more than a brief mention of them and their needs is made in the documents published by these agencies. (Mitchell 2005: 37) In this volume, Bethany Sharpe’s paper War Babies, focuses on the impact of the Vietnam War on children born of liaisons between Vietnamese women and American soldiers. Stigmatized as “scum babies”, they were outwardly rescued from an oppressive societal framework by the US government in a magnanimous overture, however, it is these children who after growing up, critique the official discourse of rescue narratives and offer an insight into the troubled “space” they occupy in a host yet alienated nation. Through this and other narratives this volume hopes to represent children’s experience of trauma. The volume in its rich array does not claim to capture children’s self-expression of trauma but it does offer a roadmap to understanding the dialectics of the child as victim. By using the personal testimonies of victimized children, postmemories of traumatic encounters of childhood, and prosthetic memories of vicariously experienced trauma (again from an adult’s perspective), the volume seeks to fill a gap in the definite lack of serious academic and critical studies of the representation of children as violated. These rich and diverse essays focus on literary texts, films, animation, paintings, and testimonials to examine the impact of childhood abuse and resultant trauma. The papers cover a complex array of issues mutilating childhood in multiple ways, from the Holocaust and its aftermath, the Partition of the Indian subcontinent, insurgency in Kashmir, the status of orphans in India post the Chinese invasion of Tibet, civil wars in Africa, the Aboriginal generation’s dislocation in Australia, the Vietnam war, to sexual abuse during childhood, 9/11, and coming of age in Iran. Besides their contextual grounding, the papers can also be categorized on the basis of the texts that are used for critical exegesis. Going by this definition we can again find a rich plethora of genres ranging from auto fictional to fairy tales as a means to explore the nuances of the effects of the Holocaust on the psyche of children and the phenomena of intergenerational trauma. Another paper examines the use of paintings as testimony by children rendered destitute by the Chinese invasion of Tibet, or look at Japanese Anime as part of the cult of war films. What binds these narratives 5

I ntroduction

coming from variant spatial, temporal, generic, and cultural context is the commitment to lending expression to the child as a victim. Though these essays are not to be sanctified as “children’s voices” for many are fictional reconstructions of trauma afflicting children as understood by adults or even by adults revisiting their childhood trauma, they do however, offer an intriguing and crucial exploration of childhood trauma. The essays also bring to the fore the praxis of narrative bearing in mind the problematic that extreme trauma compels speech as well as thwarts it, especially so in the case of children whose access to language is at best still maturing. As Janice McLane observes in many traumas, expression is either impossible or expressly prohibited. For example, in sexual, physical, and/or psychological abuse of children, silence about the abuse is almost always coerced: by force, or by ignoring, mocking, and redescribing the victim’s pain. Abuse victims thus learn to ignore, minimize, or valorize trauma; the violence is not articulated to others, and often barely even to the victim herself. (McLane 1996: 107) What then is the fate of children whose voices are subsumed, lost or even never uttered? This book then is an attempt to substantiate the relatively extant scholarship on child and childhood, child and trauma, and the politics of representation of attending childhood trauma. At the same time, it also opens up further avenues of research by throwing open several tropes of analysis. Its varied spectrum also functions as a critique of the available discourses regarding childhood abuse and neglect. Chapter One, Kamayani Kumar’s paper titled, Poof! Up in Smoke: A Modern Fairy Tale uses testimonial accounts of millions of children who passed through the concentration camp of Terezin during Holocaust. Using memoir, poems, and paintings by children this paper represents how very small children bereft of parental care, displaced from home, in subhuman conditions barely survived to tell their stories albeit not always through the use of words. Their drawings narrate their horror. Evocative to the core these paintings testify to the traumatization children underwent. In Chapter Two, Anurima Chanda also studies paintings by children who have experienced loss of parents, displacement, and alienation. In her paper, Colours of Trauma Paint a Thousand Words: “Leaving Tibet” in Paintings by Tibetan Children in India, Anurima uses the text The Art of Exile, a collection of paintings by Tibetan children in India to lend us a glimpse into the horrors children from Tibet have had to undergo post Chinese invasion of Tibet. Providing a unique impressionistic entry into the innermost spaces of these little ones, Anurima studies the impact of exile and displacement on little children. The paper tries to develop an understanding of a 6

I ntroduction

child’s perspective of such violence as represented through the paintings and is an effort to address the following issues: What is it that these children remember? What is it that they choose to forget? How do they interpret and explain their own experiences to themselves and how do they find ways to cope? In Chapter Three, War Babies, the focus is on the impact of the Vietnam War on children, especially on the rescue narratives that underpin “Operation Baby Lift”. Taking recourse to an adult’s reconstruction of childhood, Sharpe explores alternative ramifications of Baby Lift outcomes. Aimme Phan’s memoir We Should Never Meet focuses on the life of a Baby Lift orphan from the perspectives of the Vietnamese and US actors that were involved. Phan reveals how these orphans felt ostracized and thereby complicated the rhetoric of rescue. She shows that outcomes of rescue do not automatically equate to a future of opportunity and success for those who are rescued—such outcomes occur for some, but, certainly, not all. By looking at Phan’s work, this paper will reveal the ways in which her use of the rescue narrative reframes traditional representations of the Vietnam War and the child causalities of that conflict. In doing so it serves as a channel to the voices of scores of children who have been branded even before their birth. The fourth chapter continues the examination of testimonial accounts to examine a loss which has perhaps never been attended to, as it has been cloaked under the “pure and Christian spirited” discourse of the White Man’s Burden. Somrita Ganguly’s paper “Waiting for my Mum to Come Back” Trauma(tic) Narratives of Australia’s Stolen Generation uses prose narratives, poems, and personal testimonies to refer to an entire generation of Aboriginal Children, (especially those of mixed parentage) that was taken by force from their mothers by the white settlers/colonizers in Australia and trained to be of service to white society. These children came to be known as the ‘Stolen Generation’ of Australia. The paper, through its rich exegesis of select personal testimonies in the form of poems and prose narratives— such as “I Saw Her Hammering Her Fists Into The Roads”, “Where Did My Mum Go”?, “A Stolen Generation . . . Or Two”, and “For 30 Years She Thought Her Mother Had Died” among others—explores the trauma of a generation that was forcibly torn away from their biological, social, and cultural roots and placed in alien hands to serve alien needs. This paper studies the stolen voice of the victims while commenting on the immense damage that this initiative caused, not only to the psyche of the parents and the growth and development of the children, but also to the rich Aboriginal cultural practises. In doing so it adds tremendously to the existing scholarship on children and trauma. Chapter Five shifts the focus slightly towards an adolescent protagonist. Amrita Singh’s paper “Drawing an Account of Herself: Representation of Turbulent Childhood in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis”, an autobiographical 7

I ntroduction

in(ter)vention, again goes back to personal narratives. This coming of age narrative is Satrapi’s account of Marji’s experiences of a childhood marked by revolutionary politics, internal war, encounters with violence, and a troubled religious identity. Young Marji is deeply influenced by the conflicts she witnesses. Humour functions as an important tool to critique violence— the preadult’s perspective allows for a more nuanced understanding than a child’s mind would allow yet at the same time one can sense the insecurities and incomprehensibilities that attend upon a preadult’s attempts to make sense of the changes around her. These narratives both challenge and reinforce cultural ideals, especially those discourses that look at childhood within binary oppositions of pure innocence versus damaged soul, or wistful nostalgia versus terrible pain. The paper while written in an autobiographic style is a graphic novel. This paper by engaging the comic form with Marjane and Iran’s history, gives us a deep and layered insight into the image of a childhood-in-progress. Chapter Six has as its focus Shoah and its impact on the 1.5 generation. Nancy Ali’s Cache-Cache: Writing Childhood Trauma explores how Postmemories of Holocaust continue to impinge upon the lives of children who are survivors of Shoah. Nancy Ali’s work on the auto fictional novel Wou le souvenir d’enfance revolves around the child protagonist Perec’s trauma as a victim of anti Semitism and eventually losing his parents during the Second World War. Resorting to techniques abundant in the oulipian textrepetition, constrained writing, lipogram—Nancy Ali subtly addresses the complicity attending reconstruction of childhood memories by the adult. By focusing on Perec’s use of repetition, fragmentation, and obliqueness, Ali opens up important questions on the relationship between writing and trauma. The essay points to the lacunary nature of memory for children of war whose memories of childhood are founded on an absence. Unlike the survivors who were adults during the war, the children survivors are often incapable of remembering. This translates into silences, suspension points, and non-dits in Perec’s novel in which the inability to remember is coupled with an urgent desire—if not necessity—to do just so. The text is exceptionally layered, rich, and complex. Chapter Seven has Someshwar Sati and Chinmaya Lal Thakur’s analysis on the Partition of the Indian subcontinent. The paper Negotiating Trauma: The Child Protagonist and State Violence in Midnight’s Children and Cracking India uses literary narratives on Partition of India to explore how millions of children of 1.5 Children or the hinge generation were deeply affected by the violent repercussions of Partition. By addressing the core of remembering and reconstructing traumatic memories of childhood abuse that invade the adult mind, it throws open pertinent questions regarding aesthetics and politics of representation. Chapter Eight is Vandana Shanker’s essay, Quest into the Past: Heroic Quest and Narrative of Trauma in Jane Yolen’s Briar Rose. Although 8

I ntroduction

overtly another essay on Shoah it intriguingly employs the genre of the fairy tale to address the horror of Shoah while at the same time commenting on transgenerational transmission of trauma. It posits fundamental questions such as how does one represent and narrate traumas of the past, painful historical events that the older generations have lived through, to generations who have no experiential memory of it. What do we tell the children? What do they need to know? How would it affect their childhood and the process of coming of age? How do children vicariously through transgenerational transmission partake of cultural traumas from which logistically speaking they are temporally insulated. This paper explores these dilemmas in context of contemporary Holocaust narratives which use genres like fairy tales to narrate historical trauma. Told to young second and third generation listeners, texts like Jane Yolen’s Briar Rose and Devil’s Arithmatic, Peter Rushforth’s Kindergarten and Louise Murphy’s The True Story of Hansel and Gretel explore a different mode of storytelling where the real and the fantastic mingle. The storytelling becomes a means to integrate narratives of childhood with personal memories, the familial past, and the trauma of history. Familial relationships are recast into relationships between victims, survivors, and listeners; the growth of the young protagonist is intertwined with the traumatic memories of the older generation. The genre of fairy tales in these texts becomes a means to explore these messy associations. These retellings of popular tales not only tell of the trauma of the past, they also problematize humanist resolutions of conventional fairy tales and comingof-age narratives. In Chapter Nine Et tu, Brute? The Child Soldier and the Child Victim in Sobhasakthi’s Traitor Usha Mudiganti, through a close exegesis of Sobhasakthi’s novel Traitor, explores the implications of the prolonged civil war in Sri Lanka between the Tamils and Sinhalese. A complex novel, some of the experiences narrated in the novel are drawn from the author’s experiences of life as a child soldier in conflict ridden Sri Lanka. The paper offers rich insights into how childhood exposure to conflict can adversely effect psyche and deeply distort one’s sense of ethics. Benjamin Nickl’s paper “Children at War: Child(Hood) Trauma in Popular Japanese Animation” focuses on popular culture in Chapter Ten. While observing the sudden surge in discourses on children at war as a dominant narrative in popular genres of fiction, Benjamin focuses on Japanese War Fiction anime. Nickl asserts that in spite of the complexity of the narrative anime as a genre, it very fluidly, suggestively, and subtly uses child characters and their childhood traumas as discursive sites for discussions of traumatized childhoods in armed conflict zones, in youth culture contexts, and in relation to physical injuries as well as psychological damage and the thematization of death. The paper offers rich insight into the trope of childhood trauma. Like Vandana Saxena’s use of fairy tales vis-a-vis Shoah, this paper makes use of genres ideally meant for consumption by children 9

I ntroduction

enjoying utopic childhood, but alas which have become a powerful tool of indictment and critique of the violation of childhood innocence. Chapter Eleven, Ritwick Bhattacharjee’s paper, “Returning Horror, Revisioning Real: Children and Trauma in the Grave of the Fireflies” is based on a Japanese anime film—Grave of the Flies. Based on a semi-autobiographical short story this film is a deeply moving portrayal of the grief of two siblings who have lost “home”, family, hope, and will to live. Victims of the Second World War, the film showcases the bombing of Japan in the course of war. Through this paper Ritwick critiques the brutality and shame of wars that the adult’s fight, but which infringe upon childhood and rob it of the innocence it signifies. Through the trope of the doll, the child’s play in assuming the stones to be rice balls, the fireflies connoting light and their death connoting disillusionment, the paper communicates the horror of trauma invading a child’s psyche very powerfully. Sarah Minslow’s paper Coping with Killing? Child Soldier Narratives and Traces of Trauma uses theories of trauma to analyse the ways childhood trauma is depicted in three films that portray fictional accounts of child soldiers, War Witch (2012, Kim Nguyen), Johnny Mad Dog (2011, Jean-Stephane Sauvaire), and Beasts of No Nation (2015, Cary Fukunaga). Drawing inputs from two memoirs of former child soldiers—A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah and War Child by Emmanual Jal—the paper argues that the strategy of using child as soldiers is inducing individual as well as collective trauma, the consequences of which would be far reaching. The story of these child soldiers represents the worst of our humanity because they show not only how adults fail children, but how adults exploit and abuse children for greedy, selfish, political reasons. Rahul Kamble’s paper, “We Needed the Violence to Cheer Us” Losses and Vulnerabilities in Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier also focuses on the plight of child soldiers. Using Ishmael Beah’s memoir Kamble explores how children get victimized in wars fought by adults. Abandoned and exploited they suffer loss of childhood, perception of the self, and how this loss makes children vulnerable. Amit Singh’s paper Children of the Trail: The Trauma of Removal and Assimilation examines literature written by those whom the settlers in America termed as the “Indian Problem” and the Native American people refer to as “Trail of Tears”. Using accounts of childhood and children, fictional as well as non-fictional this paper critically disseminates the trauma of displacement countless children went through. Stories such as “Life Among the Piutes” (1883), “Along the Trail” (1941), “Grace” (1989), and Roseanna Snead’s non-fictional account “Two Cherokee Women”, all are about experiences of displacement recounted and remembered through the figure of children. Chapter Fifteen, Nishat Haider’s paper Child/hood and 9/11 Trauma: A Study of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close 10

I ntroduction

situates Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close at the intersection of child/hood literature, post-9/11 melancholia, and trauma studies. The plot revolves around a child protagonist who has lost his father in the 9/11 attack. Nine-year-old Oskar Schell functions as a conduit in this postmodern Bildungsroman. The trauma of children subjected to similar suffering is represented through Oskar’s struggle to understand what has happened, begging people to help him make sense of things that don’t make sense, like his father being killed in the building by people who didn’t know him at all. Foer navigates the loss and fear created by the 9/11 terrorist attacks through the eyes of a child; an individual who is at a stage in life where one is already precocious, vulnerable, and developing. Written from a position informed by Cathy Caruth, Shoshona Felman, and Dori Laub, this paper uses trauma and memory studies to map out a conceptual core to study the loss and tragedy of the boy hero, Oskar. Situating the film Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close within current debates on memory and trauma studies, it attempts to target crucial questions vis-a-vis child/hood literature’s capacity, or lack of it, to represent trauma. Collectively, the essays in this volume in variant ways offer a rich and intense insight into childhood trauma and the attendant politics of representation. While a few essays focus on narratives by children themselves, others constitute the category of retrospective literature that has been written by adults who have experienced trauma as a child. Again, some essays look into the complicity attending any attempts at reconstruction. The project is an attempt to address the lacunae in children’s studies and also hopes to open channels fur further intervention and debate. It compels us to visualize the impact of the UN report which states that in 2015 alone, nearly 50 million children were uprooted . . . each carrying millions of stories . . . which need to be heard. The volume covers several aspects in which child has emerged as a victim, yet a lot of ground remains to be covered. For instance, the volume would have benefitted from looking at children whose “childhood” has been affected/disrupted due to the ethnic conflict between Serbs and Croats, or the conflict ridden East European nations. Closer to home, scores of children have been victims of the ongoing conflict in Kashmir. The trauma of children who are coerced into flesh trade has been untouched. There remains, unfortunately a wide ambit of scholarship and research vis-a-vis childhood and abuse and which would surely follow. Another trajectory that remains to be explored in much greater detail is the violence that is not directed upon children but which children are guilty of perpetrating. Violence that visits childhood manifests itself in multiple ways, the subject is too vast to be taken up for study holistically in one volume. One can only hope that this domain receives more attention and scholarship and enhances consistent efforts to develop mechanisms to save children from abuse and trauma. 11

Introduction

References Alexander, Jeffrey C., Ron Eyerman, Bernard Giesen, Neil J. Smelser, and Piotr Sztompka. 2004. Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bharat, Meenakshi. 2003. The Ultimate Colony: Child in Postcolonial Fiction. New Delhi: Allied Publishers. Brodzki, Bella. 2001. ‘Trauma Inherited, Trauma Reclaimed: Chambert: Recollections from an Ordinary Childhood’. The Yale Journal of Criticism 14(1): 2001. Carpenter, R. Charli. 2000. ‘Surfacing Children: Limitations of Genocidal Rape Discourse’. Human Rights Quarterly 22(2): 428–477. Coveney, Peter. 1957. The Image of Childhood. Harmondsworth: Peregrine Books. James, Allison, and Alan Prout. 1997. Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood: Contemporary Issues in Sociological Studies of Childhood. London: UK Falmer Press. James, Allison, and Alan Prout. 2002. Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood: Contemporary Issues in Sociological Studies of Childhood, 36. London: Psychology Press. Chris, Jenks. 1996. Childhood. London: Routledge. Key, Ellen. 1909. Century of the Child. New York: G.B. Putnam and Sons. Krell, Robert. 1993. ‘Child Survivors of the Holocaust: Strategies of Adaptation.’ American Journal of Psychiatry 38(6): 384–389. Mause, Lloyd. 1974. The History of Childhood. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers Inc. McLane, Janice. 1996. ‘The Voice on the Skin Self Mutilation and Merleau – Ponty’s Theory of Language’. Hypatia 11(4): 107–118. Mitchell, Kathleen. 2005. Children Born from Rape: Overlooked Victims of Human Rights Violation in Conflict Settings. https://www.jhsph.edu/academics/degreeprograms/master-of-public-health/_pdf/Mitchell_Capstone_Paper_2005.pdf (accessed on 3 December 2018).

12

1 POOF! UP IN SMOKE A modern fairy tale* Kamayani Kumar This evening I walked along the street of death. —The Closed Town, Anonymous, Terezin

Shoah is indisputably the most horrendous horrors that human civilizations have endured. A colossal cultural trauma, its impact is far from having lessened with time. Instead, transgenerational transmission of trauma has claimed the psyches of second and even third generation survivors of Holocaust. Psychologists assert that the “conspiracy of silence” that underlined survivor accounts compounded with “survivor’s guilt” has contributed immensely towards lack of cathartic redemption and assimilation of survivor communities who continue to be haunted by the post memories of Shoah. Having said that, one cannot ignore that there is no paucity of narratives on Holocaust—all of which “speak” of the trauma it generated. Yet, paradoxically a lot remains “unsaid”, largely because of the magnitude of horror that the “telling” entails. Representing “holocaust” was consistently challenged by “limits of representation”, and as Adorno wrote, “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”. Of all the discourses available on Holocaust, some fictional, some reconstructions from memories, some testimonies, the most powerful form of discourse is from children who were victims of this horror. Millions succumbed to it in gas chambers, or were starved to death. These children have left behind testimonials which speak volumes of their incomprehension as the world around them collapsed. This chapter focuses on three texts, Terezin: The Story of the Holocaust by Ruth Thomson, I Never Saw Another Butterfly, Children’s Drawings and Poems from Terezin Concentration Camp, 1942–44 by Hana Volavkova, and the memoir Helga’s Diary by Helga Hosokova-Weissova. The attempt is to examine how children used art and poetry as a means to lend expression to their unheimlich experience of being a victim of Nazi persecution at an age where the concepts of race hatred, ethnic violence, and ethnic cleansing held little or no meaning for them. POOF! UP IN SMOKE

KAMAYANI KUMAR

13

K amayani K umar

Of fifteen thousand children who passed through Terezin less than one hundred survived the “model ghetto”. Yet, these children have left behind a legacy of paintings which “speaks” of the brutality of Shoah in a way that does not “rely on conventional historical narratives but . . . produce(s) . . . trauma texts that resist conventional modes of narrativization” (Simine 2013: 38). These children’s art polycontexturally1 (to borrow Israeli painter Brach L. Ettinger’s term) makes us a part of their trauma via “aesthetic wit(h)nessing” (Pollock 2010: 1). Their art not only works as testimony but also as “a keeper of historical memory” (Pollock 2010: 3). It is in such discourses that one finds “an alternative space for expression” (Beliwal 2011: 4). Taking this argument further one can list the support of critical theorists Janet Walker, Ann Kaplan, and Joshua Hirsch who point out that visual media provides a semiotic framework which is “central to the idea of secondary witnessing and vicarious trauma” (Simine 2013: 36) and in this capacity offers a crucial tool for understanding second generation’s response to vicarious trauma. Theatre too was a powerful form of testimony in Terezin and together these discourses resonate with a sobering and chilling reminder of the trauma thousands of innocent children underwent. While they may not have survived to tell their stories . . . their paintings and poems do the same in far more substantive manner. Of the works of these children the paintings and writings of Helga are significant for she not only survived the camp to write her memoir but also used her interest in art to paint “what she saw” while she was in Terezin. Helga survived but she lost her father who was probably gassed to death. Her testimony is of extreme significance for as a child her perception of the world as it crumbles around her while she holds on to hope till the last is extremely moving. Terezin accounts for the largest number of drawings on Shoah—4387 drawings by Jewish children about this Ghetto. The paintings were done clandestinely under the guidance of Friedl Dicker-Brandeis (1898–1944), a remarkable artist from the interwar avant-garde. It was an attempt by this artist to prevent the children’s creative and social intellect from dying under such inhumane conditions. She managed to bring out the individuality of each child and allowed them the freedom to express themselves, unleash their fantasies and emotions, and as a result her instruction had an invaluable therapeutic effect. She continued doing this subversively until in 1944 she and almost all of her students were sent to their death in Auschwitz. Before leaving Terezin she hid two suitcases full of children’s drawings from Terezin which are indisputably an incredibly rich testimony. By riveting the narrative on the viewpoint of children it shifts the onus of the whole discourse drastically. As children have sensibilities tangentially different from adults it often becomes difficult to reconstruct experiences of children. These poems and paintings however, open a window that reveals their pain. That they are different from an adult survivor’s reconstruction of his experiences 14

P oof ! up in smoke

of trauma as a child is what makes them so precious. These remain naked to the core speaking aloud of how these lost, bewildered souls engaged with their experiences of the Holocaust. In doing so, it facilitates the exposition of the psychological effects of the war from a child’s perspective in a manner in which other frameworks available could never achieve. As Silverstein, a child survivor of Holocaust describes the feeling of complete abandon that millions of children in Terezin must have encountered, “With nobody to console you, with nobody to tell you it’s okay, it’ll be better, hold on. Total isolation, total loneliness. It’s a terrible feeling. You know, you are among people and you are like on an island all alone. There is nobody you can go to ask for help. You can nobody ask for advice. You had to make life-threatening decisions all by yourself in a very short time, and you never knew whether your decision will be beneficial to you or detrimental to your existence” (Altman 2010: 71). Terezin labelled as the “Führer’s gift to the Jews”, and a “model ghetto” had a large number of artists and intellectuals under whose influence some semblance of cultural richness survived in the ghetto in tango with humiliation, starvation, disease, and continuous transports to the extermination camps. The children worked under the guidance of Dicker-Brandeis who would give them scraps of paper, and ask them to draw often at random. The paintings collectively suggest a narrative which speaks mournfully of their nostalgia for “home”. The children strove to represent the dystopia that Terezin was; clinging all the while to remnants of hope that found expression in the idyllic pictures of garden in bloom, of human figures scaling peaks to liberation, a lighted menorah. . . . Helga Weiss who was only twelve when she found herself at Terezin used the next three years to come up with a powerful documentary on the plight of millions as perceived and represented by a child. The first picture she drew was of a snowman revealing a child’s desire for representing things which he/she cherishes and desires. However, upon seeing the child’s representation of her memories of a lost “home”, playfulness and innocence of childhood games, etc., Helga’s father told her to paint what she saw. Thereafter, Helga’s paintings became a true reflection of her life, as well as the life of those around her in the ghetto. Several other children who drew under the guidance of Dicker-Brandeis fell into the temptation of drawing glorified images of “home” nestled in idyllic surroundings which were not remotely in tune to the harsh conditions in which they were living. Perhaps, this was their way to cope with the harsh, bleak reality that threatened to shadow each moment of their lives. As Moning points out, “There is indeed a feeling of optimism that radiates from the drawings. . . . While some sought to depict camp life, very few children chose to portray scenes of violence or death that were likely seen every day in the camp. Of the camp pictures, the majority were not dismal or even fearful. Rather, they were completed with cheerful colours. . . . It seems as if the children were using their artwork 15

K amayani K umar

to depict the world they wished was their own. There were no picturesque houses in the country, no bountiful feasts, and no park for play within Theresienstadt. These things existed only in the children’s imaginations, and then upon the paper they chose to create them on” (Monnig 2014: 48). Helga however, was one artist who took her father’s advice and painted what she saw. Children at Terezin saw as Jiri Weil points out “the endless lines in front of the canteens, they saw the funeral carts being used to carry bread and the human beings harnessed to pull them. . . . They saw executions, too, and were perhaps the only children in the world who captured them with pencil and paper” (Mardirosian 2012: 256). While Helga’s works bring home the gruesome reality of Terezin the artworks of other children in contrast profoundly represent the “home” they desired to return, a home which had become a fantasy, or even as obscure as a fairy tale. They speak of tales of faraway places where there are kinder people, no hunger, no death and no grandfathers gnawing at stale bread and rotten potatoes. While almost all of Helga’s art work speaks of some harrowing aspect of Terezin one painting titled “Cutting Down Bunks” (Figure 1.1) is quite significant for it captures the false propaganda that the SS Troops were consistently engaged in both as a preamble to their discourse on how Terezin was a model ghetto as well as in preparation of the Red Cross visit to Terezin in 1944. She shows how the cramped and inhumane living conditions were not what was revealed to Red Cross. Instead, days ahead of the visit the thirdtier bunk was sawed off to make the room look less narrow when in reality she and her mother had 1.8 metres space unto themselves. The drawing exhibits a maturity which is way beyond what ideally should have been a carefree existence of a school going girl. Instead it is steeped in the history of the worst genocide ever. In yet another work she refers to the Red Cross visit, the aim of which was to represent this dystopia as a model ghetto for Jews in the eyes of the world. Titled Red Cross Visit, the painting (Figure 1.2) shows how the Nazis engaged in intensive deception and charade to keep the truth of the dehumanizing treatment of millions of Jews a secret. Another recurrent trope that emerges predominantly in the paintings that Helga made was—hunger. Titled simplistically as Standing in the Queue in Front of the Kitchen shows emaciated, ridden with grief figures waiting for food. In 1943 she made a painting titled Birthday Wish which showed two eager children carrying an enormous imaginary birthday cake from Prague, the pathos of which is heart wrenching. Helga, through her art work, testifies to how the Jews were reduced to mongrels by the Nazis. Deprived of spoons, plates, or bowls they were made to eat from a common bowl with their hands. In her drawing she has captured the inhumanness in stark reality. In one painting Helga has drawn emaciated, stooped women huddled together around a bowl of food eating it with their hands, and in another 16

P oof ! up in smoke

Figure 1.1 “Cutting Down Bunks”, Helga Weissova, 13 years old Source: Terezin: A Story of the Holocaust by Ruth Thomson (London: Franklin Watts, Hachette UK Ltd., 2011). Reproduced by permission.

Figure 1.2  Red Cross Visit Source: Terezin: A Story of the Holocaust by Ruth Thomson (London: Franklin Watts, Hachette UK Ltd., 2011). Reproduced by permission.

she represents how the Ghetto commander would sadistically allow dogs to eat the food meant for the Jews all the while enjoying the perfidy. Like Helga, another ten-year-old child’s work titled, Everyone Is Hungry speaks of the food deprivation and horror that the children went through. One does not know which child drew the stooped, emaciated figures lining for a quarter of litre of watery soup, but it is a very powerful narrative on what these children had to endure. In her diary she writes, “I stuff myself with food . . . I swallow mouthfuls; I’m not hungry, but with each spoonful I swallow a single tear. There is not enough food; there are far more tears” (Hosokova-Weissova 2014: 46). Another time she writes of how for weeks they would not get even a quarter of a loaf of bread and how humans were reduced to fighting like animals for something as despicable as rotten potato peels. While hunger was a recurrent theme in the narratives on Holocaust another common trope that threaded the predicament of the Jews was the constant dread of losing one’s beloved. Helga Weissova in her memoir, Helga’s Diary constantly speaks of her fear of losing her mother. She lies about her age so that she is not sent away to the children’s section and hence taken away from her mother. One change that swept over children during the war years was a sudden sense of responsibility thrust upon them so that the children often played the role of a caregiver to their forlorn and debilitated parents. Another inmate of Terezin, Ella Liebermann, too drew a painting which shows how an infant is being snatched away from his mother by the SS commanders. The brutality of the act and the horror it arouses is extremely potent and serves as a powerful indictment of the Nazi’s acts of violence—physical and psychic. The constant threat of deportation to the concentration camps in the east is another fear that finds echo in many 17

K amayani K umar

paintings of these children. Helga Weiss made a series of drawings of her on the eve of her exit from Terezin in 1945. The last of the series captures the dread of being gassed to death. Drawn in all black with no colour the sombreness of it shows the broken spirited mother and daughter leaving Terezin with their only hope perhaps being able to find Helga’s father before they meet their certain death. The blackness which consumes this work is deeply connotative, suggestive of their doom. The most horrific statement is made by the painting of Yehuda Bacon who drew the emaciated and grief ridden face of his father coming out against the smoke of the gas chambers. Drawn after his father was taken away from Terezin to the concentration camps, Yehuda drew this picture. Although Yehuda is one of the survivors of Terezin, to date his work resonates with the horror and brutality that he and his race suffered under Nazism. “Through their artistic expressions, the voices of these children, each one unique and individual, reach us across the abyss of the greatest crime in human history . . .” (Mardirosian 2012: 264). While some had recourse to art other children expressed their trauma through their poems steeped with their longing for a past which was idyllic when seen in context of the dystopia that defined their lives in the ghetto. As Monnig observes “Children’s poetry in Theresienstadt [Terezin] contained both positive and negative views of the children’s situation within the camp. These poems depicted the daily suffering, the pervasive fear, and constant hunger that represented camp life” (Monnig 2014: 17). However, at the same time, many poems revealed some children’s positivity amid their suffering. A child’s poem entitled “On a Sunny Evening” exclaims, “If in barbed wire, things can bloom, why couldn’t I? I will not die”! Therefore, it seems that the children of Theresienstadt used their poetry as a way to relieve their inner feelings and reactions to life—be they fear, distress, sadness, or happiness (Monnig 2014: 11). Hanus Hachenburg, a child inmate of Terezin expresses through his poem, “I was once a little child”, the extremity of his bitterness (cited in Volavkova 1994). He says that instead of knowing of love, security, and compassion from people who have grown up he has known only fear and repulsion. He ends the poem not stained by dystopic visions but rather the hope that he would sleep through this nightmare and wake up to reclaim his lost childhood. The lines where he speaks of his dream to start “to laugh and play” like a child is indeed profound and haunting. The narrative of the poem shows the child moving from despair to hope. The poem ends on a note which masks the sheer disillusionment that this poem is steeped in, and the child hopes that the new day would bring back his childhood bereft of care, pain, and trauma. Another heartrending expression is contained in a short poem titled “The Garden” by Franta Bass in which the little boy expresses his hope of seeing spring unfold as a distant and unyielding promise (cited in Volavkova 18

P oof ! up in smoke

1994). For a child though he maybe knows that his fate as an inmate of Terezin reads of a certain and harrowing death. The child invokes in his imagination the beauty of a little garden in bloom. The image is of a little sweet boy who walks in the garden and envisions blossoming beauty, love, fragrance, and hope. None of which defined his ugly, harsh existence in Terezin. The poem ends in deep pathos where the boy states that when these blossoms come to bloom, he wouldn’t be there, referring to his knowledge of his imminent death. The zest for life that is evident in these children’s poems shows how acutely they felt their deprivations, disillusioned to the core these innocent souls cry out loud in their works about the most inhumane of all crimes against humanity—“childhood” as a “safe haven” which was completely ruptured in an century which had ironically celebrated its manifesto as being the “Century of Childhood”. It is in this century when a small child speaks of how butterflies cannot live in a ghetto. The poem titled “The Butterfly” speaks of how his seven weeks of existence penned up in the ghetto made him realize that the one he saw was the last. For a butterfly (symbolizing colour, beauty, and freedom) couldn’t possibly exist in such a humiliating and dehumanizing environ. That the one he saw was the last one also speaks of the profound disillusionment of the boy who knows/dreads like Franta Bass that he would not survive the holocaust . . . a verdict which was true but for a hundred of the fifteen thousand children who came to Terezin. Nicholas Stargardt in his work Witnesses of War also records how the lives of millions of children were forever marred. His account of a five year old girl’s conversation with her doll shows how she has transmitted the trauma that she has experienced onto her rag doll, “Don’t cry, my little doll. When the Germans come to grab you, I won’t leave you. I’ll go with you, like Rosie’s mother” Wiping away her doll-child’s tears with the hem of her apron, she continued, “Come, I’ll put you to bed. I haven’t any more bread for you. You’ve eaten today’s ration, finished, I must leave the rest for tomorrow” (Stargardt 2007: 37). Thus, testifying that, “Children were neither just the mute and traumatised witnesses to this war nor merely its innocent victims. They also lived in the war, played, and fell in love during the war; the war invaded their imaginations and the war raged inside them” (15). Thus, while “many of those who did survive Terezin soon will pass away their stories and others’ however, can live through the telling power of the art that was created there”. These little artists used every bit of paper possible and have left a testimony which brings to light the Nazi false propaganda and the hideousness of their act with an unparalleled vehemence and force. As Costanza in her remarkable work on Terezin points out that the 5000 paintings that children made were often done on “tissue paper, tissue for rolling cigarettes, matchbox covers, stamp sheet margins, backs of graph sheets, posters, medical report papers, wrapping paper, bags—any 19

K amayani K umar

scrap became a possible surface for the artists. Sometimes shreds of paper were pieced together to make a surface large enough upon which to draw [. . .] old bed linen and burlap from potato sacks” (Costanza 1982: 120). The purpose was to narrate, to represent, to tell . . . to heal, to build resilience. To conclude one can justifiably assert that artist Dicker-Brandeis used art to help these children “build the courage, truthfulness, and imagination they needed to face their experiences in the camp. By encouraging them to trust their own imagery and to develop their own artistic forms, she helped them build inner resources to honour their own sense of reality, which created a psychological space of empowerment and meaning in the midst of oppression and horror” (Wix 2009: 154).

Notes * The visuals used in this chapter are from Terezin: A Story of the Holocaust by Ruth Thomson (London: Franklin Watts, Hachette UK Ltd., 2011). Reproduced by permission of Franklin Watts, an imprint of Hachette Children’s Group, Carmelite House, 50 Victoria Embankment, London, EC4Y 0DZ. 1 The term aesthetic wit(h)nessing borrowed from theoretical writings of the painter Bracha L. Ettinger (b. 1948) Ettinger creates a neologism by inserting the letter (h) into the word witness. Wit(h)ness now implies not only bearing witness to the crime against the other, but also being with . . . . Ettinger is proposing an aesthetic wit(h)nessing: a means of being with and remembering for the other through the artistic act and through an aesthetic encounter. Art becomes a keeper of historical memory for the injured other by creating the site for a novel trans-subjective and transhistorical process that is simultaneously witness and wit(h)ness.

References Altman, Linda. 2010. True Stories of Teens in the Holocaust: Hidden Teens, Hidden Lives: Primary Sources from the Holocaust. Berkeley Heights, NJ: Enslow Publishing Inc. Beliwal, Anup. 2011. “Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific”. (25) February. http://intersections.anu.edu.au/issue25/metha.htm Costanza, Mary S. 1982. The Living Witness: Art in the Concentration Camps and Ghettos. New York, NY: Macmillan Publishing Company. Hosokova-Weissova, Helga. 2014. Helga’s Diary. New York, NY: W.W. Norton and Company. Mardirosian, Gail. 2012. “Giving Voice to the Silenced Through Theatre”. In The Power of Witnessing: Reflections, Reverberations and Traces of the Holocaust: Trauma, Psychoanalysis and the Living Mind, edited by Nancy R. Goodman and Marilyn B. Meyers. New York, NY: Routledge. Monnig, Elizabeth. 2014. “Coping Strategies of Jewish Children Who Suffered the Holocaust”. Arizona Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies 3 Spring: 188–204. Pollock, G.F.S. 2010. “Aesthetic Wit(h)nessing in the Era of Trauma”. EurAmerica: A Journal of European and American Studies, 40(4): 829–886.

20

P oof ! up in smoke

Simine, Silke Arnold. 2013. Mediating Memory in the Museum Trauma, Empathy, Nostalgia. New York, NY: Palgrave. Stargardt, Nicholas. 2007. Witnesses of War: Children’s Lives Under the Nazis. London: Vintage. Volavkova, Hana. 1994. I Never Saw Another Butterfly: Children’s Drawings and Poems from the Terezin Concentration Camp, 1942–1944. New York, NY: Shocken Books. www.jewishmuseum.cz/en/collection-research/collections-funds/ visual-arts/children-s-drawings-from-the-terezin-ghetto/ Wix, Linney. 2009. “Aesthetic Empathy in Teaching Art to Children: The Work of Friedl Dicker-Brandeis in Terezin Art Therapy”. Journal of the American Art Therapy Association 26(4): 152–158.

21

2 COLOURS OF TRAUMA PAINT A THOUSAND WORDS “Leaving Tibet” in paintings by Tibetan children in India Anurima Chanda In 1994, when Tsering Chophel came to find refuge at Dharamshala— where the Tibetan government-in-exile is headquartered, he was only nine years old. He had been packed off by his mother and her sister with another Tibetan family headed for Nepal, with the hope that he would ultimately make his way to India and find shelter there at the Tibetan Homes along with a good Tibetan education. He had already lost his father at a demonstration in Lhasa and with this latest move he was made to leave his remaining family without any assurance of whether he would be able to see them again. Ever since the 1959 Tibetan uprising, following which the 14th Dalai Lama fled the country with many of his followers, such has been the fate of the thousands of those children and adults who have followed him in exile. From the year 1951, when Tibet lost its de facto autonomy to the invading forces of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), things have been accelerating towards this end of more or less forced migrations. The struggle continues to date while the two forces are engaged in a battle over the questions of political autonomy and cultural self-determination. While the latter’s justification of its action has been based on the argument that Tibet had originally been a part of China and has now rightly been reunited with it, the former has always maintained that Tibet had always been a sovereign state and had been wrongly co-opted within the Chinese, Han Chinese dominated state. Many Tibetans have chosen to flee their homeland and are now living in a perpetual state of displacement, in order to escape the continued forceful assimilatory policies of the Chinese state who have been introducing newer programmes aimed at integrating the Tibetan people, religion, society, and culture into its Han Chinese mainstream. However, the worst hit among these victims are the children—as young as Tsering or even younger, who have had to leave their home, homeland, and families for something that they yet have no understanding of. Let alone the trauma of leaving behind one’s own, these children are not even prepared COLOURS OF TRAUMA PAINT A THOUSAND WORDS

22

ANURIMA CHANDA

C olours of trauma paint a thousand words

to face the trauma that the journey alone holds. Long bus rides through the night leading up to the dangerous journey on foot across giant mountain passes is just a fraction of their worries. On top of that there is the constant fright of being hunted down by the Chinese border patrols always lurking around the corners. The harsh weather conditions accompanying the travellers—bitter cold, the blinding light of the high-altitude sun, lack of food, seem trivial as compared to body parts being chopped off to fight frostbite and the deaths of companions who could not keep up. If the child makes it at all to the host country, the rest of his life is all about being shunted from one foster house to another, until attaining adulthood. Their childhood seems to take a backseat as they struggle to adapt to their new homes in the host country. In the hope of finding a better life these children often lose the luxury of being a child, having to grow up prematurely. What is terrible is that in most of these cases the children are so young when they had to experience this trauma that they do not even know the correct agency through which they can express their pain. Such had been the case with Tsering too when he had first landed in India. Kitty Leaken, a photographer engaged in documenting the story of the Tibetan exiles through photographic exhibits, met him a day later for an interview. She was accompanied by Sarah Lukas, an American who founded the Friends of Tibetan Women’s Association which is invested in making life easier for the exiled people, and a Dutch woman Francisca van Holthoon, who spoke fluent Tibetan and was gathering information for an international organization. Leaken observed how frightened Tsering was apart from being “far too serious for his nine years” (1998: 2). He told his story in a quiet voice, mentioning how his father was killed, how attached he was to his mother’s sister who had arranged for his trip to India and how his mother, a street sweeper, had packed him warm clothes the day he had left. He also mentioned how he was shunted from the care of one Tibetan family to the other with whom he continued his tortuous journey towards India. The cold had been unbearable, the sunlight blinding at such a high-altitude, and food had been scarce. On top of that he had injured his leg, but he had not complained. He could not exactly remember how long the journey had taken, but as soon as he reached Nepal he had found warm welcome among his exiled brethrens. Later on, he had been put on a bus from Kathmandu for Dharamshala to make his way to the reception centre of the Tibetan government-in-exile. The interesting thing was how in between narrating his harrowing experiences, Tsering had picked up the watercolours and the paintbrush which Lukas had brought along and become absorbed in painting. Later on, he had found residence at the Tibetan Homes Foundation (THF) and adapted well to his new home, but Lukas had never been able to forget his reaction to the paint and brush. That was when she decided to start a painting club in order to give to these shy, quiet, and frightened children a medium 23

A nurima C handa

through which they would be able to express their experiences which was much more traumatic than what children of their age could bear. While the club began in 1995, it was a year later that Lukas found an opportunity of sharing them with Frank J. Korom, the Curator of the Asian and Middle Eastern Collection at the Museum of International Folk Art, when he had come on behalf of his organization to plan an exhibition on the Tibetan culture in exile. Korom had been immediately struck by the power of the visual narratives that these paintings represented, realizing that this was the best way that a child battling in a new environment across language barriers could find in expressing themselves. These paintings had been then included in the exhibition “At Home Away from Home: Tibetan Culture in Exile” which later on went to inspire the publication of the book The Art of Exile: Paintings by Tibetan Children in India, complete together with photographs by Leaken, a Foreword by Korom, and an essay by Clare Harris, a Lecturer in the Anthropology of Art Department at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, United Kingdom. The paintings and photographs in this book were also accompanied by oral narratives as collected from the painters themselves through the combined efforts of Leaken, Lukas, and Thinley Gyaltsen, a former student of the THF who acted as both a collaborator and a translator. The book is divided into four parts: “Leaving Tibet”, “Life in India”, “Remembering Home”, and “Political Paintings”. While the four parts together give us a larger understanding of how children adapt themselves to life in exile, it is the first part alone which deals with the child’s first brush with the trauma of separation and the tortuous journey away from home. This paper will proceed through a close reading of the paintings of the first section of this book along with the introductory and conclusive commentaries by the editors, as a unique perspective on the impact of exile and displacement on little children. In a world where such first-hand accounts of children who have had to undergo such trauma are rare, this section of the book will provide us with a unique impressionistic entry into the innermost spaces of these little ones. While attempting to locate and extract the repressed traumatic memories of their violated childhood through their paintings and interviews, the paper will focus on understanding the child’s perspective of such violence. What is it that these children remember? What is it that they choose to forget? How do they interpret and explain their own experiences to themselves and how do they find ways to cope? At the same time, the chapter will also question whether this process of remembering and forgetting are their own or influenced by any larger narrative. While beginning in a moment of individual experience, when exactly does it start manifesting itself in the language of the collective? The Tibetan exile education, which had been one of the major areas of concern for the Dalai Lama, seems to play a huge role in this. The main purpose of such an education was to make sure that the next generation of Tibetans, growing 24

C olours of trauma paint a thousand words

in the alien culture of its host country, did not lose touch with their native traditions. Through this, the government-in-exile was been able to practise a policy of “limited acculturation”—one that helped them avoid getting assimilated within the host culture and preserve a distinct identity of their own. However, the problem with such kind of a narrative is the fact that it promotes identity as a fixed and timeless thing, when in fact it is as Dibyesh Anand forewarns in his article “(Re)imagining nationalism: Identity and representation in the Tibetan diaspora of South Asia” “a process as well as a product” (2000: 272). While this “unified, homogenous Tibetan-in-exile identity” (2000: 272) has helped the disparate groups of people migrating from different parts of the region maintain a distinctive national identity in diaspora, it has also created a space-time projection of the place that is based on the memory of a pre-1959 Tibet which no longer exists. As Korom points out in his “Introduction: Place, Space, and Identity: The Cultural, Economic, and Aesthetic Politics of Tibetan Diaspora”—“[t]he very idea of having to keep the notion of place alive is a clear and creative result of being displaced” (1997: 5). This place, which is an imaginary product, replaces the real place and fills up a void that has been generated by displacement. The longing for such an unattainable place becomes so intensified that as Korom suggests it “replaces the real possibility of returning home” (1997: 4), thus serving as therapeutic in nature. At the same time, it also helps them reaffirm their patriotism to themselves by remaining stateless. The Tibetan society has kept this narrative alive by incorporating it in the education that is imparted to the children living in exile, marking the continuity of the discourse. Against this backdrop, the paper will try to compare and contrast personally remembered narratives from that of the Tibetan diasporic narratives. It will see how both these kinds of narratives bring together memory and imagination, which in turn shapes the idea of displacement that find expression in the paintings by these children. Finally, it will try to show how Tibetan narratives tend to continuously fuel this idea of displacement as a celebrated state since it helps the community retain a permanent refugee status, eternally uprooted, thus keeping alive the dream of a lost homeland that one day will be reclaimed. “Leaving Tibet”, the first section of the book, has paintings about the children leaving home and contains stories of goodbyes, of escapes, of fears of getting caught by the vigilant eyes of the patrolling People’s Liberation Army (PLA), of scary traumatic events while on-the-run, along with some happy interpretations of such escape episodes. This is the part which has been able to capture the child’s own memory of his past to the largest extent. The section is preceded by two untitled paintings by Chompel, one depicting the serene beauty of Tibetan valleys with yaks grazing painted in the traditional thangka style, while the second one shows rows of migrants crossing over to India through the dangerous mountainous passes. In some ways these paintings bring out the mixed feelings experienced by the migrants 25

A nurima C handa

trying to find a balance between their nostalgic recollection of their beautiful homeland, and the traumatic event of having to leave it and the way they managed it. These paintings show how the child dares to retain an innocent nostalgia of his homeland, complete with the beauty of placid yaks grazing in open fields under majestic mountains, while at the same time retaining the memories of his own scary journey to get to his new home. In these paintings, the harsh images of migration co-exist with the beauty of their homeland. In the first painting we find evidence of the thangka style—the traditional Tibetan art form taught to the children at THF, where Chompel has paid painful attention to the proportions of skies, mountains, rivers, grasslands, people, and animals depicted. The green valley seems to be happily nestled among the white snow-capped mountains, which look daunting but unable to penetrate the protective green space of the grassland. The yaks are shown grazing without any trace of fear, while one can see the reflection of the benign green surroundings in the water of the stream that is flowing nearby. The artistic style used in the painting did not go unnoticed by Leaken too, who mentions that, “[t]he techniques they were learning of shading for mountain and sky in a rigorous study of Buddhist iconography were apparent in the paintings they made freely in the club” (1998: 11). This further helps us in understanding his second painting, where the violence and pain of displacement is not jarring but is rather presented in a more symbolic sense. This painting which shows rows of migrants trudging through thick snow and braving high passes in order to get to India, can only give us a partial glimpse of the hardships that the child has had to face. The people travelling look calm and peaceful, not scared and traumatized as was perhaps the case in reality. The mountains are still green—but not a bright shade of green like that of the previous painting. Although there is very little white to represent the severe hurdles like frostbite where arms and legs had to be chopped off to save these refugees on the run, the mountains up ahead are shorn of any green. The snow-capped mountains are hauntingly present in greyish white at the background of the unknowing people who believe they are walking towards a new freedom. It is only the viewer who has that retrospective omniscience to know what they are about to face, on those harsh snowy mountainous terrain, before they reach their desired destination of freedom, albeit in the limited exiled sense. As we are about to enter the section, a quote from Gyalwang, who had come to the Tibetan Homes at the age of twelve, seems to provide us a premonition of what is to follow. I tell this story for my country but I want to request that you change all names and all dates. My parents have been very kind to me so I don’t want them to suffer. (Harris, Lukas, and Leaken 1998: 19) 26

C olours of trauma paint a thousand words

The reality of these children strikes us hard, as we realize how much responsibility has been entrusted upon them at such a tender age. Although they have found shelter in their host country, they are still scared for their loved ones whom they have left back home. They might have adapted fast in the secure atmosphere of their new homes, but no one can fathom the depth of the insecurities that are still repressed somewhere in their minds and can prove harmful for the child if not properly channelled out. Two of this child’s paintings, which have been included in this section, give us an idea of what might have propelled such fear in him. They are also two of the most powerful depictions of the horror that these children have had to undergo. He was made to leave home by his parents at the age of six along with his elder sister, who was then only eight or nine. They were put under the guidance of a sixty-year-old monk; a friend of his father’s who used to stay with them. His parents broke to him the news that he would be leaving Tibet just three days before he actually left, leaving him with not much time for farewells. His constant fear was being “caught by the Chinese” (Harris, Lukas and Leaken 1998: 35), but what happened in reality was equally traumatic. While trying to find their way on a steep slope, their sole adult companion fell down and died. The sister urged him to go look for help, while she waited with the body. The little boy lost his way and was separated from his sister. Although they were reunited years later, the time in between was not easy. I had no food or water. I cried out for my sister. I was tense. Afraid and sad. I slept the night in a cave that I found. Birds were coming in. Big birds like chickens with a long tail. I slept there. In the morning I realized I was totally lost and returned to the cave. I shouted and shouted for my sister, calling her name. I was there for three or four days without food or water. I didn’t wander far from the cave because I was hungry and weak. On the fourth day I went a little bit away from the cave. I heard a man breaking stones. At first I didn’t see anyone. I went down the mountains and found a carpenter. (Harris, Lukas, and Leaken 1998: 35) He was then instructed to go to the police and report. His sister could not be found, but he was held at Dam by the police for two months. To be so young, alone, in the dark, without food and water or any sense of the way, must have been more traumatic than mere words can explain. Finally, being held in Dam by the police for two months must also have been a harrowing experience for him. These are disturbingly present in his paintings, be it the faceless bleeding dead monk, the separated siblings or the small helpless form of the child as compared to the scary big policemen, while he waited to hear his verdict at Dam. 27

A nurima C handa

The first painting, entitled “My Sorrow” shows the greyish mountains at the back, while Gyalwang is standing at the bottom surrounded by rocks and the bleeding dead body of the monk. His sister is shown to be right at the top of the mountain far away from where he is standing. His tiny form against the huge mountains can only speak of how small he must have been when he encountered all this. The monk, represented in jarring red against the dull backdrop, seems to have bled through his head as his face is totally smeared in red and not recognisable at all. His second painting, entitled “Scared” speaks of his experience at the police station. The painting depicts a big spacious room with yellow walls, with two police men in green uniform—one sitting at the desk and making a hand gesture at the boy with a fearful expression on his face, while the other holding a rifle targeted at him. The little boy himself is on the other side of the room, distinctively smaller in size in comparison to the largeness of the room and the police officers, sitting on a small bench with a forlorn expression on his face. There is no door. However, there is a small window on the side with bars. Looking at it through the child’s eyes, one can figure out how tiny Gyalwang might have felt, all alone in a police station recently having encountered a death and the loss of his sister. To him the room must have been huge, while the policemen might have appeared like giant men with all the power. The sense of an overbearing presence is strikingly portrayed through this painting, where the child sits entrapped and helpless. Among the other paintings, “Remembrance of my Friend” by Tseten Chompel and “The Last Good-bye” by Dachung capture the most painful goodbyes the child migrants have had to make to leave their homeland for India. Tseten’s account of his school looks accurately recreated from his memory along with other small details like how the hilly terrain looked, with the top of buildings peeping from here and there. The Tibetan flags are seen flapping in the windy air of Tibet and a boy from a neighbouring house is shown to be flying a kite in that air. Against such a backdrop, are two friends—one offering the other a kathak (the traditional silk white Tibetan scarf), in a way of bidding farewell before he embarks on his long journey. Amidst the pain of separation, there seems to be present on the face of the child a cheery smile pointing out to the high level of resilience that these children have. The reason behind the smile, as Harris points out, might also be a result of the knowledge that “he is not alone in retaining such memories” (Harris 1998: 127)—a fact from which the migrants draw their strength from. What is interesting is the narrative that accompanies this painting. Explaining the use of kathak, Tseten writes, “We use them during Losar, on his Holiness’ birthday, or on a special occasion like this, when someone is leaving and saying good-bye” (Harris, Lukas and Leaken 1998: 25). Tseten, who had left home when he was nine, might not have had any time for such farewells. But the memory of this traditional Tibetan gesture, strengthened further through a collective memory of other friends and their 28

C olours of trauma paint a thousand words

Tibetan teachers, becomes his own symbolic gesture of immortalising that event for ever. This reiterates the trauma of displacement and shows how for the hundreds and thousands—child and adult alike—that have accompanied the 14th Dalai Lama from Tibet since March 1959, “Tibet” exists only in their memories. Their children, born in their adopted homelands, brought up and educated without any contact with their original homeland subsists solely on the memories of the older generation. In doing so, they end up creating what Marianne Hirsch’s would call a “postmemory”, especially as used in her paper “Past Lives: Postmemories in Exile”, for the forthcoming generations who will only know of such ways through the voice of such chroniclers. For a group of exiled people who might never return to their homeland again, this collective pool of memories becomes the only way of preserving the past and recreating it in the present. By reconstructing these past images, the migrants find a concrete way of going back to a past that is no longer accessible, giving it some sort of an infinitude, and thus bringing back stability in their lives. This is also the case for Dachung, who left home at the age of five and might have retained an even vaguer memory. His painting of “The Last Good-bye” must have been reconstructed out of the collective memory of his other friends who have experienced the same fate combined with his own recollections of the day he parted from his family. The separation from his “dad” is foremost in the narrative of his painting where Dachung himself looks much grown up in size (maybe in replicating his real self when he made this painting). In the thangka sense of style, the painting is painstakingly proportional and neat. The trauma of separation might not have been explicitly presented, but the grief is inescapable as the “weeping” father holds his child for the last time. On the side is a blue van where two boys are seen waiting for him with reassuring faces. Dachung writes, “These two are my friends in the bus, who came with me to India” (Harris, Lukas, and Leaken 1998: 41). Although the mountains are green and blooming at the backdrop of the painting, the road which Dachung has to take looks harsh in grey. For the little boy this is the end of one life and the beginning of another, as he emphasises by calling it “the last day” (Harris, Lukas, and Leaken 1998: 41) and finally adds, “[t]he moment is so sad” (Harris, Lukas, and Leaken 1998: 41). All the above instances show us how difficult it is for all these young children, who have still not developed their communication skills or are still battling over language barriers in their host country away from all the known faces, to express a trauma that is almost inexplicable. This is further aggravated by the fact that they do not even fully understand what is happening around them. Harris invokes Sybil Milton’s reading of the art produced by Jewish children in Germany from 1936–1941 agreeing that the “images produced by children living under threat and with the memories of tragedy fresh in their minds can be part of a therapeutic process, a means of 29

A nurima C handa

transmission of cultural heritage, and may provide “spiritual resistance” to some of the horrors of their situation” (Harris 1998: 126). For them, their canvases become a healing space where colours speak out what they could not vent out in words. As Korom has rightly pointed out in the “Foreword”: “This is, for many, a form of therapy to help cope with their sense of confusion and loss” (Korom 1998: XIV). For them art becomes a way of creating images that belong to a past that was, in order to recreate its presence within their host environments and reconstruct the “home” of their memories. In the recent years, with the growth of psychoanalytical understanding of the trauma as experienced by those in exile, especially children, many theories of the past have been deemed outmoded like the general assumption that when such events of displacement occurred “the children were so small that they could not remember what happened” and “could not understand what was going on around them” and so “accordingly could not suffer as a result of it” (Kroger and Hammel 2004: 10). Although children do have fast adaptability, most of the time they tend to repress such memories rather than vent it out which makes it difficult for them to come to terms with the horrors of the past. Their imagination ends up aggravating his suffering, making him experience emotions of guilt, abandonment, and others. So, what is of primary importance is to make them find an appropriate outlet for their traumatic experiences, make them understand it better and accept it. Otherwise, it is a fact that “traumatic childhood experiences express themselves differently than in the traumatization of adults. Thus, children whose personality development has not yet been completed are put in greater psychological danger than adults, and they evidently have other ways of working through the experience of persecution” (Kroger and Hammel 2004: 14). It takes them more time to go back to that exact moment of their alienation and displacement, and come to terms with it. However, when they do so, they finally find an outlet to all their repressed fear (of being alone), grief (of leaving their family behind), and guilt (of not being there with one’s family). Only then can they overcome the weight of the trauma of dislocation and analyse those moments more objectively. Psychoanalyst Judith Kestenberg has aptly pointed this out through her observation: “All survivors had the feeling they must bear witness and tell the world what happened. But children seem to have an even stronger need than adults to work through their traumas, and to do so by expressing their experiences on paper” (Kroger and Hammel 2004: 16). This is what the first section of The Art of Exile bears witness to. As Harris aptly puts it in the concluding essay of this book, “In the first section of escape and the rite of passage we see therapeutic imagery through which the demons of the past are exorcised” (Harris 1998: 135). This was also the idea behind Lukas’ painting club in which she was assisted by Sonam Chophel, the oil painting teacher at the Vocational Training Centre at THF. Art for these children became a way of confronting their 30

C olours of trauma paint a thousand words

worst nightmares by venting them out on paper and accessing images which once had been their reality, but now exist no more. It is through art that they realize that their companions too have a similar story to tell and by celebrating this collective memory they find a way to give each other solace. The use of paint and brush further provides the child with a private space away from the prying eyes of the adults, where there is a complete therapeutic outlet. Unlike the interviewer, the paint and the brush does not jarringly penetrate into their vulnerable mind giving them ample scope to open up their individual perspective on their situation before the words finally start pouring out. The other paintings from this section, representing crucial moments during their escape journey, affirm this idea even more strongly. The children have interpreted the perils they faced during their journey in their own different ways. While some of the children have been unable to forget the constant fear of getting caught by the vigilant Chinese army, some children have chosen to remember the journey as one happy picnic. At the same time, there are others who have retained back memories of climbing steep mountains or crossing huge rivers with really cold water. Tenzin Norbu’s “Hiding” and Gyaltsen’s “On the Way to India” are of the first kind. They clearly bring out the trauma of these escaping children, constantly having had to dodge the vigilant eyes of the PLA and fearing what might happen if they get caught. Norbu’s canvas is one green forest near Dam, where the Chinese are cutting down the trees. The escaping migrants are shown at the corners, hiding behind trees, wearing a chobu—the traditional Tibetan dress, with folded hands as if praying that they do not get caught. There is a small white rabbit on the right-hand side of the canvas, transfixed near the trunk of a tree that has been cut down, almost bemoaning the destruction of its habitat. The soldiers on the other hand, look quite happy with themselves, standing with guns in their hands, waiting for their next victim. While commenting on the destruction of the ecosystem by the Chinese soldiers which as Harris mentions is a part of the exile records, it clearly brings out the fear of a little child who has been told horror tales of what might happen if he gets caught. The second painting is one that has been done by Gyaltsen, which shows a beautiful green forest with a blue flowing stream on the side. The migrants seem to be in a happy mood, cooking food, playing music, or chopping wood. However, there is a green truck hidden behind the trees a little far off from this picnic spot—suggesting that it might be the patrolling Chinese army. This points out the fact that even though the migrants did try to make the best of their situation, the threat of the vigilant army out there somewhere was always there to dampen their spirits and kill their happiness. Tenzin Jigme’s “Offering Tea Along the Way” and Tseten Chompel’s “One Night’s Rest at Nepal Border”, however, paint a very different picture. Tenzin, who made his journey to the Tibetan Homes at the age of seven, remembers stopping on their way to have Tibetan tea. It is an image of 31

A nurima C handa

the daytime, which the adjoining note affirms in the words of Tenzin: “We travelled during the daytime” (Harris, Lukas, and Leaken 1998: 29). The painting shows a group of Tibetan people sitting down together in a circle on the green ground waiting to be served their tea. A small truck is parked on the side while there are beautiful mountains all around and fluffy white clouds in the sky. Tseten’s painting is that of the night time, where people are shown camping on a ground surrounded by trees. There are some who are cooking or sitting, while the others are dancing around a bonfire. Given that the painting depicts a night’s rest at the Nepal Border, it is but natural that the people seem so happy at having accomplished the most difficult lag of their journey. These paintings seem to have drawn out the optimistic vision behind their journeys, treating their escapes more like picnics, where the refugees have gathered together to feast, dance, play music, or gather wood, as if in celebration of the freedom towards which they imagined they were moving towards. The remaining two paintings, Thankchoe’s “Escaping from Tibet” and Tenzin Jigme’s “Swimming out of Tibet”, however, speak of two crucial moments in the events of these respective journeys. This speaks of the immense courage that these children had to have to accomplish the journey. The first one bears witness to the precarious roads that the refugees find themselves in, while journeying to their host country, having to sometimes cross a flimsy bamboo bridge over a river that runs between two steep mountains. Thankchoe confesses that he does not “remember much about the trip” (Harris, Lukas, and Leaken 1998: 27) apart from the dangerous feeling that he had while crossing such water bodies that ran across their roads. While the second one by Tenzin transports us to the cold waters of the river itself, which he remembers as “quite wide” (Harris, Lukas, and Leaken 1998: 39)—much more than his painting could depict. The painting shows how they had to swim across the river to get to Nepal, all the time dodging the Chinese soldiers who were “everywhere with guns” (Harris, Lukas, and Leaken 1998: 39). The only painting that stands out in this section is that of “H.H. Leaving Tibet on a Yak” by Ngawang Youden, having its focus on the Lama’s flight from Tibet rather than on a personal account. The painting shows the Dalai Lama along with two of his companions fleeing across snow-capped mountains on yaks. Far behind are two Chinese soldiers with rifles hanging from their shoulders, trying to give them a chase on their horses. Close to the Dalai Lama’s yak is a bright red sun with a rainbow, which as Ngawang points out “symbolizes good luck with the arrival of His Holiness” (Harris, Lukas, and Leaken 1998: 21). The stories of the Dalai Lama’s escape from Tibet in 1959 must be one of the most often repeated historical narratives within the Tibetan community. Clare Harris also brings to our notice how instead of sticking to the specific accuracy of the story of his escape, the

32

C olours of trauma paint a thousand words

memory takes upon itself a symbolic meaning as it gets filtered through generations: As the Dalai Lama makes his pathway toward the welcoming and auspicious rainbow of the freedom of India, Youden presents the Tibetan beast of burden, the yak, as the appropriate and superior mode of transport for high-altitude conditions. (The Dalai Lama actually made his journey on horseback). . . . For exiled Tibetans the hazards of the Dalai Lama’s journey have become a leitmotif symbolizing the communal experience of a rite of passage. The fact that his exodus is recorded on film and shown in refugee communities throughout the world may have supplemented Youden’s ability to depict and empathize with his story. (Harris 1998: 126) This is also a classic case of what Hirsch would have meant by postmemory: Postmemory is a powerful form of memory precisely because its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through an imaginative investment and creation. That is not to say that memory itself is unmediated, but that it is more directly connected to the past. Postmemory characterizes the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are displaced by the stories of the previous generation, shaped by traumatic events that can be neither fully be understood nor re-created. I have developed this notion in relation to children of Holocaust survivors, but I think it may usefully describe the second-generation memory of other cultural or collective traumatic events and experiences. (Hirsch 2014: 659) Given that it is a rare occurrence to find texts which are created by children at times of great upheavals, this book comes across as an exception in the way it manages to get across the voice of the child without any adult intervention. Whether we take the partition of the Indian subcontinent, civil wars in erstwhile colonised spaces, or other narratives of dislocation and exile, the narratives and cultural artefacts are usually those which have been produced by adults or child migrants who have attained adulthood. The texts are usually political, even if they come from vantages of universal humanity, and are distributed through systems which themselves have a bias. It remains that millions of children who experience exile, displacement, and relocation rarely find a voice to express their own experience, not until they have reached a sensible age of recollecting these memories through a

33

A nurima C handa

renewed understanding of their exilic position. Within the exilic communities too, these children are seen as bearers of their culture and are fed on to the political imagination of the homeland as conceived by the adults. This book, however, tries to give as much space as possible to the individual perspective of the child migrant alone. Although the chronicling happens through the adult, who must collect, archive, arrange, present, and critically analyse these voices, the readers still have an opportunity to move beyond and uncover the underlying voice which is fragile, innocent, and apolitical. Through a close reading of the paintings we realize that the trauma of displacement sits heavy on the child, but his understanding of that trauma is very different from that of the adult. While for the adult, it is the displacement from his nation—an imaginary homeland that exists in their memories, for the child it is the displacement from his family, his friends, the valley where he flew his kite, or the school where he learnt new things. It is the adult who helps them link these fragmented memories to the space on the map and recreate a national identity to keep it alive even though it might be one that is frozen in time. In reality, the Tibet which exists today is very different from these memories. The migrants too have changed accordingly, adapting themselves to the physical and cultural conditions of the host country and thus, creating a hybrid identity. The only thing that has remained unchanged is the moments which these children have artistically recreated through colours, successfully burying their ghosts of the past to rediscover a new identity. This is what Tsering had done when he had “made his home” in India where he had found “the freedom to study Tibetan, to play, and to create” and also found “the freedoms of childhood” (Leaken 1998: 15). Against this backdrop, it is interesting to see how the adult narrative accompanying these paintings harp on the importance of preserving these recollections as an imagination of the nation that was lost behind, while all that the child remembers are moments like that of leaving the friend behind or the weeping father or the separated sister or having tea together or watching out for the Chinese army for fear that if caught they would be put in jail along with their families. The Dalai Lama himself describes this book as: A wonderful book that enables one to understand the sad situation of Tibet through the eyes of Tibetan school children. Many of these children suffer from the separation and loss of their families in Chinese-occupied space Tibet. The book brings to life their childhood memories, the Tibetan spirit and culture, and the future aspiration of these unfortunate children who now in exile have the opportunity for education like their counterparts in the free world. I am confident that the efforts they have made in creating this book of paintings will go a long way in making the world at large, and especially the children, more aware about the plight of Tibet and

34

Colours of trauma paint a thousand words

the contribution that the unique Tibetan way of life can make for humanity. (Harris 1998: Back Cover). What this book in fact does is to point out how the idea of displacement— be it from the land or the family—becomes the only constant in the life of migrant communities like that of the Tibetans. This sense of being in a state of perpetual displacement is what helps the community keep the discourse of their national imagination alive with the ultimate goal of returning back someday—even though this return might never happen, or it might happen only to generate a feeling of alienation on finding that the real land is vastly different from the one of the imagination. The image of this lost homeland, on which thrives the idea of the Tibetan nationalism, is as much (re)created as it really is. The paintings of these children provide evidences of this (re) creation, one that draws colour not just from the child’s own memories, but also from imaginations that are inserted from the adult world narrative of the Tibetan movement.

References Primary source Harris, Clare, Sarah Lukas, and Kitty Leaken, eds. 1998. The Art of Exile: Paintings by Tibetan Children in India. Santa Fe: Mexico Press.

Secondary sources Anand, Dibyesh. 2000. “(Re)imagining Nationalism: Identity and Representation in the Tibetan Diaspora of South Asia”. Contemporary South Asia 9(3): 271–287. https://doi.org/10.1080/713658756 (accessed on 28 March 2018). Harris, Clare E. 1998. “Imagining Home, Imagining Exile: Children’s Paintings from the Tibetan Homes Foundation, Mussoorie”. In The Art of Exile: Paintings by Tibetan Children in India, edited by Clare Harris, Sarah Lukas, and Kitty Leaken, 121–135. Santa Fe: Mexico Press. Hirsch, Marianne. 2014. “Past Lives: Postmemories in Exile”. Poetics Today 17(4): 659–686. www.jstor.org.ezproxy.jnu.ac.in/stable/pdf/1773218.pdf?refreqid=searc h:ffeef229ceede83ddaae52a6d8ae35e2 (accessed on 23 November 2014). Korom, Frank J. 1997. “Introduction: Place, Space and Identity: The Cultural, Economic and Aesthetic Politics of Tibetan Diaspora”. In Tibetan Culture in the Diaspora, edited by Frank J. Korom. Wein: Verlag Der Osterreichischen Akademie Der Wissenschaften. file:///C:/Users/anurima.chanda/Downloads/Introduction_Place_ Space_and_Identity_th.pdf (accessed on 28 March 2018). Korom, Frank J. 1998. “Foreword”. In The Art of Exile: Paintings by Tibetan Children in India, edited by Clare Harris, Sarah Lukas, and Kitty Leaken, XII–XV. Santa Fe: Mexico Press.

35

A nurima C handa

Kroger, Marianne, and Andrea Hammel. 2004. “Child Exiles: A New Research Area?” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 23(1): 8–20. http://muse. jhu.edu.ezproxy.jnu.ac.in/article/176710/pdf (accessed on 23 November 2014). Leaken, Kitty. 1998. “A Way Home”. In The Art of Exile: Paintings by Tibetan Children in India, edited by Clare Harris, Sarah Lukas, and Kitty Leaken, 1–15. Santa Fe: Mexico Press.

36

3 WAR BABIES Bethany Sharpe

In April 1975 American television broadcasts transmitted scenes of deteriorating conditions in South Vietnam to viewers back home. Amidst worries about the causalities resulting from an abrupt US pull-out, President Ford called a press conference and stated that with the great human tragedy of collapse unfolding, “The United States has been doing and will continue to do its utmost to assist these people” (Ford 1975). For the children of Vietnam, this meant that two million dollars would be used to fly 2,000 South Vietnamese orphans to the United States as soon as possible. The endeavour, named Operation Babylift, was portrayed by the government and the media as a last attempt to salvage something honourable from the wreckage of the war. The familiar rescue narrative undergirded most of these portrayals trading on the idea of a more “civilized group” taking guardianship of an “uncivilized” child or group and bestowing the necessary manners, values, and behaviours to flourish in a new and “civilized” society (Dubinsky 2010: 19). With the idea of rescue as backdrop, news interviews, video footage, and in-depth articles spoke of Babylift as the only inevitable solution for the children’s survival with the end of the war. As the memory of Operation Babylift took shape, discussions of the rescue canonised two central themes as the defining purpose of the operation. Both ideas centred on historically relevant understandings of rescue (Dubinsky 2010: 19). First, according to proponents of the mission, Babylift was an important means to address racism in Vietnam and in the United States. The operation became an important vehicle to save the Babylift children, many of whom were the result of American and Vietnamese encounters, from the racism they would have experienced in a country that prized racial purity. However, the operation also meant to showcase the progress the US made in its domestic racial dealings. Second, discourses around the operation suggested that the mission saved the children from the poor mothering of Vietnamese women. The remainder of this article explores the construction of these mythic strands and the ways in which Aimee Phan’s short story collection We Should Never Meet challenges and reinforces these elements WAR BABIES

37

BETHANY SHARPE

B ethany S harpe

in the Babylift memory and, ultimately, serves as a limited attempt to disrupt the traditional Vietnam War narrative.

Phan’s reframing of US adoptive parents In the last weeks of April, 1975, the US government began an evacuation of Vietnamese children, ostensibly identified as orphans, to arrive in the United States. Once in the US, they were to unite with their adoptive parents, or if they had not yet been adopted, they would remain with the adoption agencies helping execute the evacuation. On 5 April 1975, journalists reported that the first official US airlift of Vietnamese children out of Saigon ended in disaster; the huge Air Force craft carrying 243 children crash landed in a rice paddy. At least half of the 305 persons aboard the C-5 Galaxy, the world’s largest aeroplane, were killed or seriously injured and “pages of comic books, toys, and a baby bottle were strewn among the bodies where the mercy flight ended in torn metal and flames 1.5 miles from the airport” (O’Laughlin 1975: A1). The tragic crash heightened anxiety around the success of Babylift as media reports made a guessing game as to whether or not the next plane load of children would arrive safely to start their new life. As a result, the first meeting between the prospective parent and the adopted child took on even greater import; the children who did arrive safely carried poignant reminders of what was lost in that first flight. Descriptions included seemingly mundane details of physical descriptions and hometowns of the parents. Readers learnt, for example, that adoptive parents Barbara Fischlowitz had blond hair (Shaffer 1975), Margaret and Michael Kirby lived in Chevy Chase (Morris 1975: A1), and Lorna and Edward Stevens of Long Island brought their daughters Elizabeth and Sheila, both previously adopted from Vietnam, to greet the Babylift orphans (Carmody 1975: 20). Although such surface details appeared only tangentially related to the events taking place and seemed relevant only to pique the interest of the reader, when placed against the domestic context of a colour blindness philosophy (Winslow 2012: 5, 273) and a sweeping human rights revolution (Moyn 2010: 213), they also proved important elements in how the official narrative of Babylift unfolded. The physical descriptions and geographic locations marked these parents as average Americans from all walks of life who looked beyond race to prove that America stood above charges of racism and imperialism. Such parents underscored that colour blindness was more than just rhetoric as readers witnessed teary-eyed embraces between the new families. From the start, charges of racism plagued the operation as adoption agencies denied many Africa-American applications for adoption in favour of white families (Winslow 2012: 273). In response, proponents of the evacuation denied all charges of racism. Instead, they justified the mission as a way to save the children, many born from liaisons between African-American 38

W ar babies

soldiers and Vietnamese women, from a life haunted by racism and ostracism in a communist Vietnam that privileged racial purity (Lyons 1975: 14; Congressional Hearings 1975: 92). In a meeting called by Massachusetts representative Paul Tsongas (D) to pressure Ford into increasing the number of orphans brought over, the tension surrounding the issue of race continually surfaced. Critics of the evacuation took issue with the idea that “halfblack, half-Vietnamese children would be better off in the United States” by highlighting the still festering racial tensions in the United States (Lyons 1975: 14). One audience member asked, “Do you think they’ll be allowed in the South Boston schools?”(Lyons 1975: 14). Within this racially charged atmosphere, an emphasis on the physical descriptions of the parents and families represented one way to confront looming racial anxieties and worries about the absorption of Vietnamese children into a nation that had yet to reconcile its own volatile racial history (Congressional Hearings 1975: 92). At its core, these physical descriptions demonstrated to readers that the adoption of Operation Babylift babies transcended racial matters that came with American culture (Fass 2007: 11). Remarks from the adoptive parents further eschewed the racialization of adoption. For example, one adoptive parent noted, “All this worry about acculturation is nonsense. . . . Maybe it’s a problem for when they are 16, but not when they are babies” (Carmody 1975: 20). Others noted that nothing mattered but “their beautiful, beautiful eyes” (Kneeland 1975: 1). News from US volunteer agencies that sponsored orphanages in Vietnam reiterated the adoptions as an expression of intense love. One newsletter noted in particular, that meeting the orphans and sisters who cared for them resulted in love that “is the most overpowering emotion of all, and if you let it take over your entire being without any reservations, the feeling is overwhelming”. The children’s youth underscored their innocence and freed them from the cultural associations of race, rendering them a blank slate on which the adoptive parents could inscribe what they wanted (Fass 2007: 11). Based on news reports, it was clear that these families hoped to write a story that ignored the ugliness of race as frontpage news reports proclaimed them as harbingers of a new world in which love would overcome all obstacles. Most importantly, stories reiterated that any potential racial matters that might develop as the babies grew into adulthood in a country not yet reconciled to the plurality of colour would be overcome with a relationship based on love, patience, and material comforts. Parents spoke explicitly of this intimacy as when Adele Kolinsky said of her newly adopted baby, “I love the world. She’s precious and she’s mine” (Myers 1975: 4). When looked at from this perspective, the soon-to-be parents of Operation Babylift stood out as heroes in a nation still wrangling with the colour line (Rogers 2011: 16). Understanding the adoptive family as a vehicle for moving past the colour line to provide the children with a vastly better alternative to remaining in 39

B ethany S harpe

communist Vietnam remained an important undercurrent in the evolution of the Babylift narrative. Indeed, many of the anniversary reports of the operation and meant to update the nation on the status of the Babylift children attributed the success of the adult Babylift children to the overwhelming love and support of colour-blind parents. Parents are often portrayed as seminal figures that broke the colour barrier for their Babylift children. For example, a 2002 Good Housekeeping article about a young women searching for her birth mother wrote that the now adult orphan “says she grew up comfortable with the fact of her adoption” and that it “was kind of like a Cinderella story”. The young woman went on to state that “as far as looking different from the rest of the family . . . it was never an issue. I was brought up believing it didn’t matter what I looked like” (Powers 2002: 112–115). Aimee Phan’s work provides an important contrast to the narrative of Babylift as a colour blind mission of mercy by showing the ambivalence towards adoption that some adoptive parents held. Many of her stories focus on four orphans: Huan, Kim, Mai, and Vinh. The first two arrived as part of the Babylift mission while the second two were part of the refugee boat experience. Phan locates all four in the city of Los Angeles, but the geography of the city only superficially unites the children’s lives. Phan wants readers to know that these children’s lives were determined, in large part, by the vastly different experiences they had with foster and adoptive parents. Yet, as different as they all were, race underwrote many of the decisions made around parenting. Her stories show that, unlike the myth of Babylift, the racial constructions and understandings of others informed much of their life in the United States. Kim, for example, started her life in the United States with an adoptive family, but was shortly returned to the adoption agency. She is given no information about why she was returned other than vague statements by the former adoptive parents that they had not realised “how difficult it would be to raise a foreign child” (Phan 2013: 151). The remainder of her childhood and adolescence is spent shuffling between abusive foster homes where it was not unusual for foster dads to come use the bathroom while she was showering (Phan 2013: 168). Though no direct explanations of the return are given, Phan implies that adoptive parents’ intentions are not always enough to overcome the racial constructions that construct Kim as “foreign”. Kim is haunted by this betrayal of the rhetoric of the American dream, a betrayal perpetrated by the very people purporting to uphold it. The readers feel profound consequences of the parental betrayal as Phan explores Kim’s final descent into aggression and violence. Kim adopts the rejection that was directed by her; she clings to this rejection and uses it as a way to refuse any opportunity to become part of America’s imagined community, even when this entails violence (Anderson 1983: 6). Mai’s experience in her foster home reveals a slightly more complicated rendering of the relationship between America, Babylift, and rejection. Phan 40

W ar babies

tells readers that Mai came over to the United States as a boat refugee. Her family placed her on the boat after hearing stories of the extravagant care that the Babylift children received in hopes that Mai would receive similar attention. At first, Mai, like Kim, lives in multiple foster homes. An altercation with one of her foster brothers causes her social worker to move her to the Reynolds’s home—the foster home that she lives in for the rest of her childhood and adolescence. The Reynolds, who Kim describes as “okay for white people”, are very different from Mai’s previous Asian foster parents; they are white, thin, and vegetarian and Mr. Reynolds wears his hair long while Mrs. Reynolds wears hers short. They also differ in another crucial way. Unlike her previous Asian foster homes where adoption always remained a possibility, from the moment Mai takes refuge in the Reynolds’s home, they make clear to her and the social worker that they are not interested in adoption. Adoption requires an active choice of whom to allow into the intimate bonds of family, and they explain that their refusal to include Mai into these intimate bonds would inhibit their ability to help as many children as possible. Adoption is simply too much of a commitment. Though the Reynolds see adoption as a barrier to helping other children, Mai sees adoption as affirmation of her individual worth. Though she is provided material comfort and support, she is part of a relationship where she is only ambivalently accepted. Fully cognisant of the choice involved in adoption, Mai constantly seeks validation from parents who determined a long time ago that she would never measure up to the requirements of specific, idealized family image. The disparity in the relationship is made even clearer when Mai reveals several years after leaving the Reynolds that she only communicates with them in writing and usually only at Christmas and on birthdays. The Reynolds’s actions help remind readers of the US ambivalence towards children who are not white and help dispel the myth of the colour-blindness of Babylift. Furthermore, The Reynolds position of maintaining a safe distance from those they take in, helps readers see in microcosm the larger relationship between Vietnam and the United States. Though the US claimed support and brotherly love for Vietnam, full acceptance was tenuous at best and never developed into an egalitarian partnership. Phan’s short stories suggest that understandings of race are a primary barrier in the development of an equal relationship. Through Phan’s character, Huan, she exposes the ways in which race informs even the best adoption scenarios. Adopted from Babylift, Huan found a permanent home with a mother whose white skin and red-hair stand in stark contrast to his own Asian features showing that it is “obvious that he and his mother are not biologically related” (Phan 2013: 217). Throughout the book, Phan has interwoven Huan throughout the lives of both Kim and Mai allowing readers to juxtapose life as a wanted adopted child with that of a rejected and only nominal accepted Vietnamese child. On the surface, Huan’s life is everything an adopted child could want: he 41

B ethany S harpe

has wanted for nothing materially and his parents love him unconditionally. The only clue readers are given that Huan has battled rejection is in his interaction with Kim who belittles him for not knowing any Vietnamese. It is not until the final chapter of the book that readers learn of the subtle, unconscious rejection that occurred within his own family. Gwen, the mother, has encouraged Huan to discover more about his native country his entire life. Huan indulges this wish when he takes Gwen on a tour of Vietnam in the wake of his most recent break-up. Phan highlights how race informs subtle, daily rituals Huan experienced through Gwen’s troubling behaviour on the tour of Vietnam. The claims she makes on the country and the assumptions she voices all recall the difference between her experience as a white American woman and her son’s experience as an Asian male. Her assumptions take shape most vividly through her brief encounters with local Vietnamese. For example, in an effort to capture the “true” spirit of Vietnam, she cajoles the tour bus driver to stop by the side of the road where a local family is farming its rice paddies with a water buffalo. She interrupts their work day to take photos and though they are irritated at the disruption Gwen is completely unaware of it. Rather, as she reboards the bus, she is “smiling with satisfaction” (Phan 2013: 235) unaware that her attempts to capture the “real” Vietnam have disrupted precious moments of productivity for the family treating them as objects set out and able to be manipulated only for her amusement. Through Gwen, Phan’s point is clear that the nation that took in Babylift children was never able to fully relinquish racial assumptions about its new charges. Through Kim, Mai, and Huan readers also explore the learnt “selfhatred” that some foreign adopted children have experienced due to the constant racial tensions they must confront as outsiders in the United States (Allen 2009: 23). The consequences of this ongoing struggle remain largely individual in Phan’s story. For example, readers learn about the ways in which Mai tries to overcome her sense of rejection by clinging to a selfdestructive friendship with Kim while Kim attempts to forge a relationship with a Vietnamese merchant she thinks would fit well the role of mother, and Huan struggles to learn how to reconcile his mother’s racial stereotypes with his own Asian heritage. These characters cope with rejection in largely isolated and quiet ways and work towards solutions within their own immediate and intimate relationships. The isolation of Phan’s characters serves as an important example of how rescue rhetoric, like that of Babylift, actually occludes the individual experience in favour of a communal event that provides a sense of unity for only a select few.

Phan’s reframing of Vietnamese mothers By 1975, many in the US were trying to make sense of the spectacular US failure in the war (Herring 2002: 278–279). For some, the Vietnamese 42

W ar babies

mothers of Babylift children unwittingly, and by association with their military, male counterparts, served as an important explanation of why the US lost the war. As descriptions of the evacuation, and later an important court case attempting reunification between children and mothers, filtered through the news, reports highlighted the mothers as incompetent, irresponsible, and ultimately unworthy of motherhood. Such characterizations had profound consequences due to the ideological connections many in the US had between mothers and the future of the nation—the failure of mothers reflected a failed nation (Kerber 1976: 199–202). In the Babylift narrative, Vietnamese mothers became striking examples of general Vietnamese incompetence. Incompetence in motherhood, and the consequent failure in nation building, served as the second important element in the rescue narrative—Babylift saved the children from poor mothering and from the fate of a failed, incompetent nation. The ease with which US media reports cast subtle aspersions on Vietnamese mothers stemmed from their conspicuous absence in the narrative. They were largely written out of the story by those telling the story (Joyce 2013: 5–6). What few references appeared about them and their decision to place their children in an orphanage were most often embedded in the chaotic conditions surrounding the final days of war. People learnt that many mothers feared the impending onslaught of the communist takeover and sent their children to the orphanages as a primary means to escape the country. Twenty-eight year-old-mother Nguyen ThiLiem encapsulated this predicament when she sobbed “Maybe the Viet Cong be here. Maybe they rocket. Maybe they bomb. I don’t want my babies to die”. She made these comments as “she signed a waiver permitting the adoption of her three children” (Steele 1975: 29–30). The action of voluntarily sending away their children momentarily imbued Vietnamese mothers as the archetypal good and patriotic mother. Sending children to orphanages to receive a better life made visible the most elemental sacrifice of motherhood—a good mother would do anything to protect her child and, by extension, the state(Garner and Slattery 2012: 31). At its core, US conceptions of motherhood revolved around building, growing, and strengthening the nation through relationships with children (Luibheid 2002: 55–56). Mothers birthed future citizens and instilled appropriate republican behaviours and values as they raised their children. One of the most important behaviours mothers could cultivate in their children was loyalty to the nation-state and its mission to transform the world in its own image (May 1988: 137–142). Thus, for Vietnamese mothers to send their children away from a communist country represented the ultimate sacrifice to help sustain the vision and fight for a global free-market world. However, for many, the image of the “good” Vietnamese mother remained elusive as doubts and stereotypes about the political maturity of the South Vietnamese and their loyalty to a larger vision of a free world surfaced. For 43

B ethany S harpe

many in the US, patriotic mothering served as the corollary to military performance on the battlefield (Garner and Slattery 2012: 31). Thus, the fates of military men, patriotic mothers, and the future nation intertwined in the Vietnam war (McAlister 2005: 305). The connections between mothering and military duty remained strong during the Vietnam War as American observers carefully monitored the deteriorating conflict. The catastrophe of Vietnamese mothers to carefully cultivate proper liberal-democratic behaviours accompanied the military disaster to capture the political and physical state. Due to the mutually reinforcing nature of expected gender performances in war, what happened on the public front punctuated events in the private realm. Suspicions around how much responsibility the South Vietnamese military could or would shoulder to carry a win over the North arose and suggested that an over-reliance on US expertise was a result of laziness and leanings towards dependency. During the last years of the war, Nixon’s Vietnamization policy further entrenched dependency perceptions as the South Vietnamese struggled to combat the North’s effective Guerrilla tactics (Herring 2002: 226–229; Perlstein 2008: 477–478). Writing for Newsweek, one author explicitly described the relationship between Vietnamization and dependency as the “grand illusion” that “failed to take into account the extent to which a client can become dependent on its patron—not only materially but psychologically as well”. He continued stating that although US training and support were intended for only a limited time, “it was only natural that its leaders would become overly attached to the security blanket that American support and technology provided” (Steele 1975: 29–30). Such characterizations implied that South Vietnam was simply not ready for the challenges and responsibilities of a global citizenship (Klein 2003: 11–13). Doubts about the South Vietnamese military prowess informed perceptions of how Vietnamese women performed their expected role as protectors of the state’s future. Political and military questions soon reframed Vietnamese mothers as incompetent and devoid of the appropriate skills to raise a generation loyal to free-market driven society. Mothering failures often came to light through descriptions of Babylift children arriving in the United States. Though the children ostensibly came from orphanages, comments on their individual histories implied that well before entry into such an institution, their Vietnamese guardians failed in their parenting duties. For example, adoption expert Susan Kilbanoff, stated that many of the children faced a difficult adjustment to life in America and would do things like stealing “because that is the only way they have learned to survive” (Matthews 1975: 40). Images of thieving children arriving on the shores of the US reiterated to audiences that the adoptive parents would need to deliver intensive instruction in proper liberal-democratic behaviours that the children failed to receive during their time in Vietnam. Other descriptions emphasised the 44

W ar babies

sickness and lack of cleanliness in the children. Dr. Alex Stalcup, physician to Babylift, noted in the Congressional Hearings that these sick and dirty children “were the cream of Vietnam’s crop” (Congressional Hearings 1975: 87). The children’s unkempt and sickly appearance reminded readers that the Vietnamese mothers failed in their duty to raise the proper kinds of citizens needed for the free world. Reports that cast Vietnamese mothers as failures in the nation-building process reaffirmed US ambivalence towards Vietnamese mothers as “good” mothers. Reporter Gloria Emerson captured this ambivalence when she wrote of a widespread belief in the United States “that even the nicest Vietnamese do not really love or know how to take care of their offspring” (Emerson 1975: 9). To be both a good and patriotic mother required sacrifice which entailed “a choice that must be made to give up something of value in order to get or keep something of greater value, and the loss must be viewed as regrettable” (Garner and Slattery 2012: 145). The sickly state and questionable behaviour of Babylift children acted as evidence that Vietnamese did not fully understand the value of the children in their care, which in turn lessened the act of sacrifice for Vietnamese mothers. A civil court case in California underscored the ways in which many in the US worked to diminish the sacrifice of Vietnamese mothers. Working with the Babylift children, aid worker Tran TuongNhu discovered that some of the children had parents. Concerned about the adoptive status of the children, a group of lawyers brought a class action law suit against the federal government in Nguyen Da Yen v. Kissinger charging that as children with parents, they were being illegally detained in the United States and should be returned to Vietnam (Bergquist 2009: 623). Filed on behalf of families in Vietnam, the court case gave voice and presence to the biological mothers that went missing in news and media reports and forced a public reckoning on Vietnamese mothering. Although initially voicing concern for the children, the US Court of Appeal for the Ninth Circuit reversed a decision declaring that the case would no longer be considered a class action and that individual children would now have to fight for reunification(Bergquist 2009: 623). Nguyen Da Yen v. Kissinger and a lack of public support made clear that the rescue narrative allowed room for only one hero and that such a role would not be shared with the Vietnamese mother. The court reversal and its reluctance to engage in a speedy review process of adoption records continued to mark the mothers as either absent or “bad” in the same vein as the photos and stories of the orphans. Relying on the trope of bad mothers allowed many in the US to simply deflect questions about how children lost their parents in the first place (Sontag 2003: 109–110). To explicitly probe the existence of the mothers and delve into the reasons for placing their children into adoption agencies opened the doors for a direct examination of US action in the war and revealed too direct a link between American action in Vietnam and the results of the war 45

B ethany S harpe

(Sontag 2003: 68–69). Instead, reports generalised war conditions stating that the war “made even traditional reliance on extended families difficult” (Flaste 1975: 89). Attributing babies’ origins to the general chaos of war helped sidestep such examinations and few of those involved in the Operation including media, the public, and the administration, ever fully fleshed out how the disruption of family life stemmed from American involvement in the war (Congressional Hearings 1975; Emerson 1975: 39–40). Such limited details reinforced to adopted parents and many in the viewing public a need to create a story that fit the available framework of information at the time. Babylift became that vehicle. Phan’s short stories in We Should Never Meet reinforce the ambivalence Babylift proponents expressed towards Vietnamese mothers. Phan begins her collection of stories with the tale of Lien, the oldest child of a rural Vietnamese family. When the war strikes their village, decimating their crops, the family decides to send Lien to the nearest city to find work. She does so and dutifully saves her money for her family. She finds work selling fish in Cai Rang, the largest floating market in the Mekong Delta. While working in the city, Lien becomes pregnant and unable to face the shame of a pregnancy out of wedlock she delivers the baby to the Blessed Haven for the Children of God, an orphanage run by nuns. Phan gives few details of the baby or how it was conceived. Readers can only guess at the gender of the child, whether the father was an American GI, or whether the child was the product of a rape. Instead, what Phan focuses on are the calculations Lien is forced to make in determining whether or not to keep her child. Readers listen to Lien’s story as she reflects on her childhood during her painful delivery learning that unlike most female children in Vietnam, her parents valued and cherished girls as much as boys in the family. For Lien, as the first child, this meant that her parents also charged her with “all the privileges and honor” that first born males received (Phan 2013: 14). However, in becoming pregnant, Lien betrays that honour, privilege, and responsibility—a betrayal that raises suspicions around her mothering ability. Though readers might want to root for Lien, Phan’s depiction of the adoption process and Lien’s reaction to it further depicts Lien as an unfit mother undermining sympathy that readers might hold for this character. In particular, Phan portrays Lien as unfit for motherhood by focusing on key moments when Lien could reverse her decision to abandon the child and reclaim her role as mother. These include the times when Lien watches the nun at Blessed Haven from the bushes. The nun waits several moments to ensure that the mother (Lien) does not come forward to reclaim the child. The central role that choice plays in this story acts as a moment for Lien to redeem herself as a mother. Instead of seizing those moments, Lien pursues her choice to abandon the child. Though Phan explains to readers the practical realities that inform her entry into motherhood, many of which provide important openings for 46

W ar babies

sympathy between the reader and Lien, the process of giving up the child is shown as a calculated decision with little emotional investment from Lien. Waiting for the nun to finally scoop up the infant and take it inside, Lien thinks, “It wasn’t fair. So many open mouths to feed and outstretched hands, expecting her to fill them. She couldn’t have another one. She didn’t ask for this” (Phan 2013: 23). Even when readers are given the circumstances of just how much Lien’s family depends on her remittances and that to care for one child would jeopardise an entire family’s survival, the choice of placing her child in the care of someone else marks her as a questionable mother (Dubinsky 2010: 126). Such an emotionally distant portrayal of giving up a child reminds readers of the Babylift myth that Vietnamese mothers were simply too immature to shoulder the burden of raising an appropriate citizenry. Within this first story, Phan does provide other representations of the mothering experience in Vietnam, but these depictions tend to reinforce ambivalence towards Vietnamese mothers. If Lien is emotionally distant and calculating, the young mother she shares a room with during her delivery is opportunistic. Noticing Lien’s reluctance to form any bond with the child, she states she went through the same emotions with her first child not wanting to look at it knowing that she had to give it up. She counsels Lien to consider carefully her options especially if the father is an American soldier. She tells Lien, “You know, this baby could help you, if the father’s an American. That’s why I’m keeping this one” (Phan 2013: 12). With one young mother ready, eager even, to abandon her child and the other keeping hers only out of hopes of receiving help from the American father, Phan develops a story in which the mothers of Babylift children conform to and reinforce the myth of unfit mothers.

Conclusion During the chaotic evacuation of April 1975, and shortly thereafter, the memory of Operation Bablift grew to almost mythic proportions. Armour developed around the operation that reflected the mission’s purpose as benevolent and altruistic. Proponents claimed that this act of benevolence saved the children of the mission from the racism and communism of North Vietnam specifically and the incompetence of Vietnamese mothers more generally. Furthermore, what criticisms were propelled at the operation, such as the glaring fact that not all the orphans were truly orphans, were brushed aside. Perhaps the most devastating consequences of this was the failure of the US court system to right the terrible wrong experienced by Vietnamese families. Instead, the myth-making continued as media reports revisited the Babylift children throughout the years highlighting their successful integration into US society. However, with the passage of time, chinks are beginning to show in the myth that surrounds Babylift. Aimee Phan’s 47

B ethany S harpe

work provides a useful lens to unravel the mythic strands of this mission in order to highlight the less salubrious effects that also accompanied the rescue mission. Through characters like Kim and Huan, readers uncover the deep sense of rejection and pain that many in the operation had to contend with throughout their lives. As much as Phan’s work moves the narrative of Operation Bablift forward, her stories simultaneously show how much work remains to be done in deconstructing the myths. As much as readers may want to root for the mothers, the final judgement declares that these children are still better off in US homes. In this way, much like the court’s hesitation in reunifying mothers and Babylift children, Phan’s work does not make readers uncomfortable enough to reimagine Vietnamese mothers in ways that would reveal US responsibility.

References Allen, Kevin Minh. 2009. ‘Operation Babylift: An Adoptee’s Perspective’. The Humanist 69(3): 21–25. Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities. London: Verso. Bergquist, Kathleen Ja Sook. 2009. ‘Operation Babylift or Babyabduction? Implications of the Hague Convention on the Humanitarian Evacuation and “Rescue” of Children’. International Social Work 52(5): 621–633. Carmody, Deirdre. 1975. ‘Vietnam Children in Stopover Here’. New York Times 9 April: 20. Print. Congressional Hearings: United States; Congress; Senate; Committee on the Judiciary; Subcommittee to Investigate Problems Connected with Refugees and Escapees. 1975. Indochina Evacuation and Refugee Problems: Hearing Before the Subcommittee to Investigate Problems Connected With Refugees and Escapees of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, Ninety-Fourth Congress, First Session, April 8, 1975. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. Dubinsky, Karen. 2010. Babies Without Borders: Adoption and Migration Across the Americas. New York, NY: New York University Press. Print. Emerson, Gloria. 1975. ‘Collecting Souvenirs: Operation Babylift’. The New Republic 26 April. Fass, Paula. 2007. Children of a New World: Society, Culture, and Globalization. New York, NY: New York University Press. Print. Flaste, Richard. 1975. ‘Controversy Is Growing: Airlift of Vietnamese Children Evokes Emotional Debate in U.S.’. New York Times 9 April: 89. Print. Ford, Gerald. 1975. ‘Press Conference No. 23 of the President of the United States’. Digital Archives of the Ford Presidential Library. www.fordlibrarymuseum.gov/ library/document/0248/whpr19750403-008.pdf Garner, Ana, and Karen Slattery. 2012. ‘Mobilizing Mother: From Good Mother to Patriotic Mother in World War 1’. Journalism and Communication Monographs 14(1): 5–61. Web. Herring, George. 2002. America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 150–1975. New York, NY: McGraw Hill. Joyce, Kathryn. 2013. The Child Catchers: Rescue Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption. New York, NY: New York Public Affairs.

48

W ar babies

Kerber, Linda. 1976. ‘The Republican Mother: Women and the Enlightenment: An American Perspective’. American Quarterly 28: 178–205. Klein, Christina. 2003. Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Kneeland, Douglas. 1975. ‘Many Children Found Ill on Arrival from Vietnam’. New York Times 7 April: 1. Print. Luibheid, Eithne. 2002. Entry Denied: Controlling Sexuality and the Border. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Lyons, Richard. 1975. ‘Washington Meeting on Children’s Airlift Is Jarred by Charges of Racism and Elitism’. New York Times 8 April: 14. Matthews, Tom. 1975. ‘The Orphans: Hard Passage’. Newsweek 21 April: 39–40. May, Elaine Tyler. 1988. Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era. New York, NY: Basic Books. Print. McAlister, Melanie. 2005. Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East Since 1945. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Morris, Larry. 1975. ‘S. Vietnamese Child Arrives from “Hell” to New Home in Md’. Washington Post 5 April: A1. Print. Moyn, Samuel. 2010. The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Print. Myers, Donald. 1975. ‘To Save One Child, You Save the Whole World’. San Bernardino Sun 5 April: 4. O’Laughlin, Peter. 1975. ‘Orphan Airlift Jet Crashes, 178 Die’. Washington Post 5 April: A1. Print. Perlstein, Rick. 2008. Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America. New York, NY: Scribner. Phan, Ammie. 2013. We Should Never Meet. Los Angeles, LA: Picador. Powers, Kathleen. 2002. ‘A Baby Named Hope’. Good Housekeeping August 2002: 112–115. Rogers, Ibram. 2011. ‘ “People All Over the World Are Supporting You”: Malcolm X, Ideological Formations, and Black Student Activism, 1960–1972’. Journal of African American History 96(1): 14–38. Web. Shaffer, Ron. 1975. ‘Asylum Bid Poses Dilemma’. Washington Post 5 April. Sontag, Susan. 2003. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Steele, Richard. 1975. ‘Orphans of the Storm’. Newsweek 14 April: 29–30. Print. Winslow, Rachel. 2012. ‘Colorblind Empire: International Adoption, Social Policy, and the American Family, 1945–1976’. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Santa Barbara. Dissertations and Theses. Web.

49

4 “WAITING FOR MY MUM TO COME BACK” 1 Trauma(tic) narratives of Australia’s stolen generation Somrita Ganguly Since adults often are deeply invested in a desire for childhood innocence, constructing of children’s responses to trauma (whether in books or in popular culture) generally adhere to two poles: Because children are imagined as innocent, they are figured almost iconographically as the ultimate victims of trauma. . . . Alternately, because children are imagined as innocent, they are also figured as the survivors of trauma, those who can offer adults spiritual advice in how to triumph over pain through simple, honest, essential values like love, trust, hope, and perseverance. . . . This dualistic configuration . . . creates another version of the child as “other” by proposing both child fragility and strength. —Visser, 2014: 116

In the 2008 period piece, Australia, Baz Luhrmann deals with the story of an English duchess, Lady Sarah Ashley, falling in love with an Australian drover, in the arid Australian landscape. However, her ability to believe in, what Irene Visser calls, “simple, honest, essential values like love, trust, hope, and perseverance” (2014: 116) are inspired by a child whom she meets in the alien landscape. Set in 1939, the movie focuses not only on the unfurling emotional drama between the protagonists, the English lady and the Australian drover, but also on an entire generation of mixed-race children taken away by force from their mothers by colonial masters and trained to be of service to the white society. In this chapter it has been my attempt to read select life writings of such children—first-hand accounts, recorded either when the victims were still young, or recalled and written down at a later stage—using the theoretical framework of trauma in literature. The poems discussed here have been sourced from personal blogs and poetry journals from Australia maintained by the aforementioned survivors/victims, where 50

“ W aiting for my mum to come back ”

they document their sufferings in the form of memoirs. I make an attempt to study the psychologies, poetics, politics, and ethics of these trauma narratives, while briefly discussing the efforts of literary critics in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to understand history, memory, and trauma. These are not stories that children want to tell, but they must. These are not stories that children want to hear, but they must. These are “processes of remembering” (Balaev 2014: 2), acts of challenging, and efforts at achieving catharsis through giving vent and/or sharing. “WAITING FOR MY MUM TO COME BACK”

SOMRITA GANGULY

The stolen generation In his chapter in the book Lives in Migration: Rupture and Continuity, Martin Renes describes this generation of children, known today as the Stolen Generation, as “a large group of mixed-decent children forcibly removed at great distances from their Aboriginal families and raised to fit into white society” (2011: 31). Or, as Lee Emmett defines it in his poem that deals with the trauma of a child being forced to become something that s/he is not, “stolen generation/ is soft term for pain/ suffered by indigenous families/ ripped apart” (Emmett n.d.). In this process of assimilation, the whites did not only exclusively target illegitimate children of mixed parentage, then called “half-caste children” (Wexler 2009: 137), but also, sometimes, indigenous Aboriginal children.

Luhrmann’s Australia The childless Sarah Ashley in Luhrmann’s epic venture, mentioned in the introductory paragraph, develops a strong liking, which soon turns into maternal affection, for Nullah, a young boy of mixed-race. She gives her all to protect Nullah from being sent away to a place called Mission Island. While, on the one hand the fictional name of the place might be attributed to a lack of imagination on the part of Lurhmann, the nomenclature, on the other hand, distinctly points to the white-male-Christian mission in Australia—comparable to the missionary enthusiasm for conversion shown by the British in colonies like India—of training children, as horses are trained, to be of service to the masters. Nullah’s parting words to Sarah at the end of the movie are evocative. He says, “Mrs. Boss, I’ll sing you to me” (Australia 2008). The song is indeed a recurrent motif in the fabric of the story that Luhrmann weaves. Nullah sings to Sarah when he first sets his eyes on her, she sings to him to comfort him after the death of his mother, and as Nullah is dragged away to Mission Island by the white settle-colonisers of Australia, he cries his farewell to Lady Ashley, with the words “Mrs. Boss, I’ll sing you to me” (Australia 2008). This, however, is not their final farewell, and Sarah promises to the little child, who is cruelly removed from her care and 51

S omrita G anguly

protection at Faraway Downs (the cattle ranch that she had inherited after her husband was murdered), “I will hear you” (Australia 2008). Sarah and Nullah are briefly reunited when the Japanese bomb Darwin, nearly wiping out all existence from the island country in 1942. The drover helps Nullah escape this fatal attack, and transports him back to the safety of Faraway Downs. Nullah, though, was not meant to stay with Sarah. He is eventually asked by his grandfather, King George, an Aboriginal Elder, to leave civilized society, and undergo a journey which was a kind of Bar Mitzvah for Aboriginal children; a rite de passage from boyhood to adolescence, a journey that the Aborigines called “Walkabout”. When King George had initially invited Nullah to undertake the journey, Sarah had stopped him from going. Love, after all, is one of the greatest colonizers. In her blinding need to mother Nullah, and in her fear of losing him, she selfishly prevents him from dissolving into his natural society. However, the War, the period of separation from Nullah when he was sent to Mission Island, and the death and destruction brought about by irrational human violence, helps Sarah finally realize the importance of what Nullah had said to her long before, “King George tell me I gotta go Walkabout; if I a man, I gotta go Walkabout” (Australia 2008). King George beckons his grandson again, after the bloodbath at Darwin, when there is considerable peace (surprisingly, we never hear King George speak in the movie, and one cannot ignore the possibility there of the whitemale-affluent filmmaker, deliberately denying the subaltern a voice, to further his own project in a white-consumerist society like Hollywood). This time, Sarah steels her heart and is ready to give up possession of the boy. Human beings cannot be, and should not be owned. Nullah parts from his foster mother, again with the same vow, “Mrs. Boss, I’ll sing you to me” (Australia 2008). Sarah knows that she will wait for him to return someday, and bids him adieu with her promise, “I’ll hear you” (Australia 2008). Not every indigenous child, however, was fortunate enough to find a foster mother like Nullah had, between the late 1800s to mid-1970s when the white Australian government carried out this process of assimilation. This paper attempts to read the plight and testimony of those children that were weaned away from the security of their mothers’ laps and placed in hostile environments, expected to bloom and “waste their sweetness on the desert air”.2

Trauma of the stolen generation: speakable and unspeakable Kenneth Kidd in his essay on trauma directs us to the etymology of the word: Traum is the German for dream (though the word “trauma” comes from the Greek for “wound”). (2005: 124) 52

“ W aiting for my mum to come back ”

Applying trauma theory to any text helps us to challenge, in the words of Christa Schonfelder, “conventional forms of narrative” (2013: 10). The surge in trauma theory and trauma studies in the 1960s had several causes and vectors. Recognition of the sexual violence that women and children are subject to, a growing awareness of post traumatic stress disorder or shell-shock, also known as traumatic neuroses, as a critical neurological condition in all war veterans, but also particularly in those who had returned from Vietnam, and an increasing willingness to talk or write about the psychological scars left behind in the survivors by the Holocaust were the primary motivations. According to Kenneth Kidd “[m]any people believe that the Holocaust fundamentally changed the way we think about memory and narrative . . . presumably . . . because we no longer have the luxury of denying the existence of or postponing the child’s confrontation with evil” (2005: 120). The narratives that I explore in this paper are survivor testimonies of the children who were forced to undergo a process of assimilation by their masters. The memoirs are recorded by the survivors/ victims, in both autodiegetic and homodiegetic voices. Some writers are young, some adults, but all are people continuing to live with the trauma of their childhood experiences. Linda Meyer Williams (1994) in a significant essay for the American Psychological Association highlights that long periods with no memory of abuse, or, as in the case of the life writings that I am reading in this paper, with no documentation of abuse or its memory should not be regarded as evidence that the abuse did not occur. Not all members of the Stolen Generation have recorded their sufferings but those who have, show through their writings that their tragedy lies mainly in their essential defencelessness: They took me from my mother But I didn’t even know I was just a few months old And she knew not where I’d go (Keig 2014: 45) Several early trauma studies theorists believed that the experience of trauma often goes unrecorded because of “language’s inability to locate the truth of the past” (Balaev 2014: 1). T.S. Eliot, as also several other Modern writers suffering from the crisis of language, have talked about the shadow that falls between the emotion and its expression, between the thought and its execution, between the concept and its creation.3 However, even before one arrives at the philosophical stage of language being a failure, one has to grapple with the other potent problem of trauma narratives getting lost because the experience is often enshrouded by repression and silence, guilt, and shame. Balaev throws light on the unspeakability of trauma: Early scholarship shaped the initial course of literary trauma theory by popularizing the idea of trauma as an unrepresentable event. 53

S omrita G anguly

A theoretical trend was introduced by scholars like Carouth, who pioneered a psychoanalytic, poststructural approach that suggests trauma is an unsolvable problem of the unconscious that illuminates the inherent contradictions of experience and language. This Lacanian approach crafts a concept of trauma as a recurring case of absence that sunders knowledge of the extreme experience, thus preventing linguistic value other than a referential expression. . . . The unspeakable void became the dominant concept in criticism for imagining trauma in literature. (2014: 1) In another essay, Balaev points out that “a central claim of contemporary literary trauma theory asserts that trauma creates a speechless fright that divides or destroys identity” (2008: 149). Trauma does cause irreversible damage to a person’s psyche but trauma does not necessarily have to follow Freud’s prescription of being, what Balaev calls, a pre-linguistic event” (2014: 2). The compelling narratives of the Stolen Generation are stories of recognition, retaliation, regret, and/or resistance: My love for the land means little When Concrete and bitumen burn my feet It will do little for my tribal name I’m living and drinking the devil’s brew On a Whiteman’s street I cannot hunt in car parks or reserves. . . I cannot show stealth or throw spears I am lost forever As A Fringe Dweller (Buttigieg 2008a: 1) The Stolen Generation poems that this chapter looks at begs for alternative approaches to reading trauma because these writings force us to arrive at conclusions, different from the approach that Balaev alludes to, regarding trauma’s influence on language and representation. Balaev, therefore, recommends that the correct way to read trauma literature and come up with a theory on the basis of that literature would be by starting with a definition of trauma “that allows for a range of representational possibilities” (2014: 2). Dirk A. Moses, in his essay on the suffering of the indigenous community in Australia at the hands of the settler-coloniser, does not shy away from seeing this practise of uprooting children from their natural surroundings and forcing them to grow diasporic roots as “genocide”(2008: 17). This 54

“ W aiting for my mum to come back ”

act of brutal colonising, besides being a violation of basic human rights, led slowly, but surely to the death of the rich, Aboriginal culture as well: We are older now Wiser We hurt privately much more In ways inexplicable to white fellas We were close as little kids to our tribal glue We were learning of the land the gathering Hunting The dance the Corroboree Not of religion Not of white education Or books We read the seasons and the wind the fire and the rain We wanted our brother and sisters Our mothers and fathers our birth trees Our hunting rights and our black land Our brown footprints still own this land forever But we were stolen And Scarred forever (Buttigieg 2012: 1) With an entire generation of young people stolen away from its habitat and, therefore, unavailable to receive the shared knowledge of the community and inherit the wisdom of the ancestors, old Aboriginal practises such as “Dreaming”,4 “Walkabout”5 and tracing “Songlines”6 remained merely as fossilized reminders of a culture that was destroyed because of the coloniser’s need to appropriate or assimilate. The onslaught of white migrants from Continental Europe anyway led to the displacement of the Aboriginals from their lands to peripheries. The action of settlement in Australia, the terra nullius,7 was objectionable right from the start. European invasion was falsely given the colour of occupying an empty landscape. The land belonged to the subaltern that could not then speak for its rights, silenced by the forces of canonical, white history. Further destruction was caused to the Aboriginal people when the new settlers, primarily of an Anglo-Celtic origin, started removing the “black” children from the homes that they belonged to. These young victims grew up, in the words of Martin Renes, “decimated, stripped from kin, culture, and traditional country” (2011: 32). Anna Haebich (1988) explains how some people find the term “Stolen Generation” problematic because they think that the phrase is unnecessarily emotive, and therefore misleading. The contention of the white settlers has always been that these children of mixed-origin were removed for their own 55

S omrita G anguly

safety and to be provided with better lives. Karl Marx in this theory on how power operates in everyday lives had pointed out that the forces of power do not use coercive means to win but that they justify their actions by manufacturing consent from the victims. Ranajit Guha (1997) in his book Dominance Without Hegemony has argued against this Marxist understanding of power and said that the exception to this rule is provided by the instances of British colonies in India. The white master did not ask for the subaltern’s permission before dominating over the natives. The benign rationale of providing better lives, in my opinion, therefore, does not, similarly, hold good for the Stolen Generation either. By bringing these children into the mainstream of white Australian society, I believe, the colonizers pushed them to the margins of a healthy, happy existence, instead of providing for them: Scrub away your blackness Said the nuns in the Church school Religion’s here to save you But you must obey our rules Rule one – you just be grateful You’re in white society Rule two – you must be silent And accept humility (Keig 2014: 45) The voices in these narratives by people like Paul Buttigieg, David Keig, Amy, Lee Emmett, or Kate Hughes, are confessional or confrontational, exploring an “unclaimed kernel of experience” (Forter 2007: 259). In some poems one can decidedly identify a tone of resistance to nostalgia, while in others, as Kenneth Kidd points out, one realises that “the speaker does not possess the truth; the truth possesses the speaker. . . [and t]he traumatized speak in spite of themselves” (2005: 124). The children of the Stolen Generation grew up either entirely unaware of their roots and legacy, or unfortunately, only far too aware of their uprootedness, acutely ashamed of the hybrids that they were turning into, uncomfortable of the liminal spaces, that Homi Bhaba (1994) talks about, which they had been relegated to: I scrubbed and scrubbed my body Till I couldn’t scrub no more The scrubbing didn’t make me white Just made my skin red raw I was being made to feel ashamed you see Of being just what I am (Keig 2014: 45)

56

“ W aiting for my mum to come back ”

The severity of the lives that these children were forced to live under the missionaries is only painfully evident from some of these testimonies. Institutions like Carrolup, to mention one example, where the children were incarcerated—for indeed such was their condition —kept them “contained in substandard housing, fed ill-nourishing food” (Wexler 2009: 139). They lived like cattle, “barely clothed or bathed, subjected to physical labor, exposed to disease, and educated by untrained and mostly hostile teachers” (Wexler 2009: 139; emphasis mine). The trauma was both physical and psychological. The children lived in these institutions up to the age of 14, suggests Wexler; unless they were adopted by some white family before that, or found themselves menial jobs in white homes where they performed never-ending domestic chores at minimum pay. If they did not secure for themselves such futures, at the end of their “schooling” they were let off with “a few dollars and a set of new clothes” (Wexler 2009: 139). Cut off from their families, roots, and culture, and simultaneously devastated by a flawed system of education and missionary zeal, they roamed the rest of their lives, miserable, and lonely: Only one year old When she was taken away. . . Along with her sisters She was taken to a place Too young to understand The difference of race Treated like dogs Taught and trained Told how to act And how to behave (Amy 2004: 1) Wexler points out that many of the individuals, once out of the homes or institutes, took to alcoholism, wasting their lives, ending up in prison, or inviting early death. Instructors at these institutions ensured that the Aboriginal identity of these children was suppressed and gradually killed. As Renes puts it, “mission life almost erases the emotional bonding [. . .] with parents’ (2011: 39) and their dispersal led to their ‘cultural death’ ” (2011: 39). These “dark deeds in a sunny land” (Wexler 2009: 142)8 stain the white Australian history black. The Draconian system which robbed the children of their childhood is something that one needs to necessarily condemn. There was no egalitarian, noble purpose behind this mission, as has sometimes been pointed out by the perpetrators of such hate-crimes. Their action

57

S omrita G anguly

led only to the extermination of the Aboriginal population and culture. The abduction of the children was exploitative and cannot be justified by any means. The better tomorrow which the children were promised was never given to them. Removed from the security of familiar surroundings, they were thrust into unpredictable, uncertain futures: Happy and cheerful with my family one day With tears and screams I was taken away Put into an Aboriginal children’s home Who was I to turn to? Where was I to go? (Hughes 2008: 28) The unfairness of the absolute impunity and callousness with which these young lives were ruined is overwhelming. Nothing is more authentic than the tales of suffering related by those who suffer. This paper has revisited some such tales: Someone Turns out the last light A Blackout And A dormitory full of black kids sigh Unknowing Waiting for parents to return A shallow promise from government guardians If you sleep A white education waits If you wake And Forgive The theft of your black soul And The destruction of your family (Buttigieg 2007: 1) The Stolen Generation has been writing back because their fates deserve more than to be locked up in some police files, dying a jaundiced death. Their stories need to be read and archived. Despite the difficulty of representing trauma, one must. While this paper looks particularly at poems written by the Stolen Generation, there are prose passages,9 autobiographies,10 sketches and art work11 too that one can peruse to fathom the full extent of the trauma that these children underwent. The magnitude of their suffering brought about by this separation from their families has been aptly

58

“ W aiting for my mum to come back ”

summed up by historian Peter Read, one of the first people to document the fate of the Stolen Generation: In Australia today there may be one hundred thousand people of Aboriginal descent who do not know their families or communities. They are the people, or descendants of people, who were removed from their families by a variety of white people for a variety of reasons. They do not know where they come from; some do not even know they are of Aboriginal descent. (1989: IX) The removal of these children from their niche led to the severing of emotional, physical, topographical, and cultural bonds, their lives turning into an endless wait for a brighter future that often did not dawn on them: I sat by a big iron gate. . . Waiting for my Mum to come back And black kids like me beckoned Are you coming in? I laughed then asked if they knew where my Mum had gone You are one of us they said Stolen Come on in We are all waiting for our Mums to come back. (Buttigieg 2008b: 1) The indiscriminate violence that the Stolen Generation suffered at the hands of white colonizers in the name of protection destroyed the Blakian Innocence of these children. Most could not return to normalcy post this trauma. Some did. They, who did, left behind for us a legacy of written accounts of their undoing. They needed to write because writing is therapy. They chronicled on behalf of their community, remembering their shared suffering, re-membering their broken bodies and souls, revisiting their collective memories and rewriting their personal history: My heart in my mouth again, I’m writing this for you, wherever you are. . . . It is me, I am still here. No, don’t worry, I won’t appear out of that old time to discomfort you. And no, at this Distance, I’m not holding my breath for a reply. (Malouf 2008)

59

S omrita G anguly

Notes 1 From the poem, “Where Did My Mum Go” (Buttigieg). 2 “Full many a flow’r is born to blush unseen/ And waste its sweetness on the desert air” (Gray). 3 TS Eliot writes about this most famously in “The Hollow Men”. 4 “Dreamtime” for the indigenous people of Australia, refers to a mythical period of time when according to the Aboriginals, the Ancestral Beings or Spirits moved across their land and created life. “Dreaming” alludes to the Aboriginal man’s ability or attempt to see and comprehend the Law and be in contact with these Ancestral Spirits. 5 “Walkabout” is a ritual that helps the Aboriginal male child attain a state of communion with his Ancestral Beings. Through this practise the indigenous children of Australia learn to trace the “Songlines” left in their country by their Ancestors and thereby to achieve a realization of the “Dreamtime”. 6 “Songlines” are “invisible pathways connecting all over Australia: ancient tracks made of songs which tell of the creation of the land. The Aboriginal’s duty is ritually to travel the land, singing the Ancestor’s songs: singing the world into being afresh”. This succinct definition of “Songlines” appears on the cover of Bruce Chatwin’s 1987 book, The Songlines. 7 An eighteenth-century legal term for a land that belonged to no one. 8 Wexler borrows the phrase from the title of a book by Reverent J.B. Gribble, published in 1987 by the University of Western Australia Press: Dark Deeds in a Sunny Landor or Blacks and Whites in North West Australia. 9 Philip Coller’s letters, for example, now widely available on the internet, can be looked up. Or even Kevin Gilbert’s 1978 of interviews Living Black. 10 Back on the Block by Bill Simon or Wandering Girl by Glenyse Ward, for instance. 11 Wexler’s essay, referred to in this article, talks of the rediscovery of such artwork produced by the young inmates of Carrolup.

References Amy. 2004. ‘Stolen Generation’. Poems and Quotes. www.poems-and-quotes.com/ poems/102385 (accessed on 1 December 2015). Australia. 2008. Film. Dir. Baz Luhrmann. Perf. Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman, et al. Twentieth Century Fox. Balaev, Michelle. 2008. ‘Trends in Literary Trauma Theory’. Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal 41(2): 149–166. Balaev, Michelle. 2014. ‘Literary Trauma Theory Reconsidered’. In Contemporary Approaches in Literary Trauma Theory, edited by Michelle Balaev, 1–14. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Bhaba, Homi. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Buttigieg, Paul. 2007. ‘The Stolen Generation’. Paolo’s Poems. www.paolospoems. com/aboriginal-poems/the-stolen-generation/ (accessed on 1 December 2015). Buttigieg, Paul. 2008a. ‘Aboriginal Death’. Paolo’s Poems. www.paolospoems.com/ aboriginal-poems/aboriginal-death/ (accessed on 1 December 2015). Buttigieg, Paul. 2008b. ‘Where Did My Mum Go’. Paolo’s Poems. www.paolospoems. com/aboriginal-poems/where-did-my-mum-go/ (accessed on 28 November 2015). Buttigieg, Paul. 2012. ‘The Stolen Generation (Later on)’. Paolo’s Poems. www.paolos poems.com/category/aboriginal-poems/ (accessed on 23 February 2018).

60

“ W aiting for my mum to come back ”

Chatwin, Bruce. 1988. The Songlines. Melbourne: Picador. Emmett, Lee. n.d. ‘Stolen Generation’. The Voices Network. www.voicesnet.com/ displayonepoem.aspx?poemid=155010 (accessed on 1 December 2015). Forter, Greg. 2007. ‘Freud, Faulker, Caruth: Trauma and the Politics of Literary Form’. Narrative 15(3): 259–285. Gray, Thomas. 1750. ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’. Poetry Foundation. www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44299/elegy-written-in-a-country-churchyard (accessed on 28 November 2015). Guha, Ranajit. 1997. Dominance Without Hegemony. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Haebich, Anna. 1988. For Their Own Good: Aborigines and Governments in the South West of Western Australia. Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press. Hughes, Kate. 2008. ‘Who Am I?’ Koori Mail 421: 28. Keig, David. 2014. ‘The Stolen Generation’. The Australia Times Poetry 2(9): 45. Kidd, Kenneth. 2005. ‘ “A” for Auschwitz: Psychoanalysis, Trauma Theory, and the “Children’s Literature of Atrocity” ’. Children’s Literature 33: 120–149. Malouf, David. 2008. ‘Revolving Days’. Australian Poetry Library. www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poets/malouf-david/revolving-days-0429001 (accessed on 1 December 2015). Moses, Dirk A. 2008. ‘Genocide and Settler Society in Australian History’. In Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History, edited by Dirk A. Moses. New York, NY: Berghahn Books. Read, Peter. 1898. ‘Introduction’. In The Lost Children, edited by Coral Edwards and Peter Read. Sydney: Doubleday. Renes, Martin. 2011. ‘The Stolen Generations, a Narrative of Removal, Displacement and Recovery’. In Lives in Migration: Rupture and Continuity, edited by Martin Renes. Barcelona: Universitat de Barcelona. Schonfelder, Christa. 2013. ‘Introduction: Wounds and Words: Childhood and Family Trauma in Romantic and Postmodern Fiction’. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Zurich. Visser, Irene. 2014. ‘Trauma and Power in Postcolonial Literary Studies’. In Contemporary Approaches to Literary Trauma, edited by Michelle Balaev, 106–129. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Wexler, Alice. 2009. ‘Koorah Coolingah: Children Long Ago: Art from the Stolen Generation of Australia’. Studies in Art Education 50(2): 137–151. Williams, Linda Meyer. 1994. ‘Recall of Childhood Trauma: A Prospective Study of Women’s Memories of Child Sexual Abuse’. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 62(2): 1167–1176.

61

5 DRAWING AN ACCOUNT OF HERSELF Representation of childhood, self, and the comic in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis Amrita Singh An account of oneself is always given to another, whether conjured or existing, and this other establishes the scene of address as a more primary ethical relation than a reflexive effort to give an account of oneself. Moreover, the very terms by which we give an account, by which we make ourselves intelligible to ourselves and to others, are not of our making. They are social in character, and they establish social norms, a domain of unfreedom and substitutability within which our singular stories are told. —Butler, 2005: 21 DRAWING AN ACCOUNT OF HERSELF

AMRITA SINGH

The image on the cover of Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (2003) is of an unsmiling veiled girl posing for the camera. The image is set as a cut-out in the jacket of the book such that it seems as if the young girl is looking out of a window, staring directly at the reader about to unveil her story in the pages that follow. It immediately introduces her as the protagonist, who is recognizably a young Muslim girl, whose “story of childhood” it is. This image also opens the first chapter, titled “The Veil”, which proceeds to give the reader a sense of how the veil came to be a norm in modern Iran, whose socio-political history the author Marjane Satrapi briefly explains in the introduction. The paratexts viz. the cover and Introduction, along with the first chapter, function to rupture the title and frame the problematic that informs the debates raised by the Persepolis texts.1 Satrapi has assiduously delineated for a non-Iranian audience its expectations of images of conflict, primitivism, and violence against universal human values, which sets up the Manichaean binary of the oppressed East versus the civilized West. The veil functions as one of the most intractable symbols of cultural difference between Muslim societies and non-Muslim societies, and the “visual image 62

D rawing an account of herself

of the child that opens (and covers) Persepolis is a dissonant combination of the familiar (the iconic cartoonish figure of the child) and the strange (the veiled and radically other)” (Whitlock 2006: 976). The dichotomy between the child protagonist Marji and the authorial/narratorial persona of the adult Marjane serves as both a proxy for and a portrait of Satrapi herself, one who is fashioned as a reliable witness of public history even as she tells her own individual story in comic form. Thus, this article seeks to examine how the familiar (Euro-American) comic form can be employed in conjunction with the autobiographical “coming-of-age” narrative to represent the impact of traumatic historical events that shape the childhood of the protagonist. It seeks to assess the nature of the child/adult subject that emerges through this intervention, even as it disrupts the safety and universality of its representations. In Persepolis, Satrapi challenges the position that sees childhood as an apolitical category and a romanticized state of innocence to explore the subjectivity of the child persona by framing the personally identifiable elements with the politically dissonant. Mediated through memory and language, Marji/Marjane’s “experience” of growing up in Tehran in the 1970s and 1980s is “the very process through which [she] becomes a certain kind of subject owning certain identities in the social realm, identities constituted through material, cultural, economic, and interpsychic relations. . . . It is not individuals who have experience, but subjects who are constituted through experience” (Smith and Watson 2001: 25). Her experience matters, as much as that of her parents, or any of the adults living through the upheavals in Iran at the time. Satrapi chooses the comic, both as a medium as well as a vehicle for storytelling, to relay the bildungsroman narrative. In its coalescing of the visual and verbal, the graphic medium lays bare the procedures by which the drawn subject is led to observe, analyse, interpret herself, and recognize herself as a domain of possible knowledge. While “the autobiography of memory” is composed “simultaneously of narration and commentary, past experience and present vision, and a fusion of the two in the double ‘I’ of the book” (Chute 2008: 108), graphic narratives meet and exceed this criteria in displaying the autobiographer’s shaping “vision” wherein the author literally (re)appears in the form of a legible, drawn body on the page. Satrapi draws on western traditions of popular comics and their quasi-literary avatars like Art Spiegleman’s Maus, and more specifically on the Franco-Belgian tradition bandes dessineés (literally “drawn strips”). Manuela Costantino identifies Persepolis with Spiegelman’s term “commix” which is used to “designate multi-layered graphic stories and emphasize the co-mixing of private and public spheres necessary to the recreation of the past” (2008: 431). Gillian Whitlock’s term “autographics” is also useful as it draws attention “to the specific conjunctions of visual and verbal text in this genre of autobiography [the memoir], and also to the subject positions that narrators negotiate in and through comics” (2006: 63

A mrita S ingh

966). Hillary Chute and Whitlock both express enthusiasm and faith in the medium of comics because it effectively attends to the relation between visual cultures and the transmission of memories of trauma and violence where multiple autobiographical I’s are verbally and visually inscribed. It “can perform the enabling political and aesthetic work of bearing witness powerfully because of its rich narrative texture, its flexible page architecture, its sometimes consonant, sometimes dissonant visual and verbal narratives, and its structural threading of absence and presence” (Chute 2008: 94). The experience of traumatic events is not located in the drawing or relaying of (violent) events in Marji’s past, but rather in the way the adult Marjane comes to terms with what remains unassimilated of those events in her life as well as public history (cf. Caruth 1996). However, the autobiographical mode itself is not traditionally a part of Iranian women’s literature, as metaphorical unveiling is considered to be as indecorous as physical unveiling (Naghibi and O’Malley 2005: 224). Satrapi circumvents this bias by adapting the underground tradition of the seemingly inconsequential, cartoonish autobiographical subject of the commix with her use of a child narrator, who may be portrayed as small and insignificant, inadequate, and ineffectual, but is able to challenge the characterisation of the heroic figure in conventional comics as well as the authority of adult figures (Naghibi and O’Malley 2005: 241). In the opening panel of the book, while enabling the reader to focus on specific details in the first shot of Marji in the veil sitting unsmiling with her classmates, in the subsequent panel Satrapi makes the cartoon universal. The girls’ diverse, playful, and irreverent reactions to the veil are humorous: some use it to be the “monster of darkness”, others to stage a mock execution, as dog leash and as a skipping rope (Satrapi 2003: 3). Satrapi is playing on the fact that when it is imposed in 1980 it is as foreign to them as it would be to non-Muslim school-goers in any other part of the world, and that children regard impositions of order as opportunity to dissent. Satrapi commits the act of, what Scott McCloud calls, “cartooning, which is not just drawing the cartoon but a way of seeing”: cartoons “amplify new ideas by simplifying them and cartoon-like sketches embody general concepts in a way that no photo-realistic image of an actual thing can” (Maggio 2007: 238). The technique of cartooning is useful here as it links to the child’s expressive resources in the visual world and emulates the simplification that adults adopt while communicating with children. As Edward Said has remarked on his memories of reading comics as a child, [comics] seemed to say what couldn’t otherwise be said, perhaps what wasn’t permitted to be said or imagined, defying the ordinary processes of thought, which are policed, shaped and re-shaped by

64

D rawing an account of herself

all sorts of pedagogical as well as ideological pressures. . . . I felt that comics freed me to think and imagine and see differently. (2002: II) He has argued that much more needs to be said about the association of the comics with juvenilia and nostalgic memory work; by recalling autobiographically the child that comics built, there is a return to earlier experiences that are formative and haunt the adult engagement with both the memory and the comic form itself. The child’s perspective allows for a simplification, but the nuances of the adult point of view make their way in to the text drawing attention to the fact that private history cannot escape the weight of public history: “We didn’t really like to wear the veil, especially since we didn’t understand why we had to” (Satrapi 2003: 3). In its use of the visible frame as part of the aesthetic, cognitive, and narrative form, the comic presents “a segmented flow” that lends itself to “re-historicizing” the more personalized expression (Elahi 2007: 314). This sets the tone for the narrative as Satrapi challenges the acceptable mode of perception by giving non-Iranian readers an occasion to re-evaluate their notions of Iran and its people as well as their own understanding of the comic and the child’s coming-of-age narrative. Satrapi goes from identification of Marji as the “other” to identifying her as a “child like us” to further destabilizing the sense of familiarity by highlighting events that point to the particularity of her experience. Marjane plays Monopoly, is obsessed with American pop culture of the 1980s via Michael Jackson tapes, Nike shoes, and posters of punk rock legends like Kim Wilde, all familiar signifiers to western audiences, but “what gives Satrapi’s work radical potential is its refusal to be wholly appropriated into a Western frame of reference by introducing slippages that feed into and from her self-conscious portrayal of her people” (Naghibi and O’Malley 2005: 231). For instance, when twelve-year old Marji is almost taken to jail for wearing a denim jacket and sporting a Michael Jackson badge (which she tries to pass off as that of Malcolm X, “the leader of Black Muslims in America” [Satrapi 2003: 133]), she comes home, does not share the harrowing experience with her mother, puts on her tape and starts dancing to “We’re the kids in America” (Satrapi 2003: 135). At this juncture the reader is made to un-recognise the familiar cultural artefacts and instead confront the circumstances that make their possession illegal, dangerous, and dear to someone like Marji. The irony of the song is not lost on the reader, as it “becomes an anthem for young Iranians who feel stifled by the Iranian regime’s limits on personal style” (Elahi 2007: 318). In an earlier episode in the chapter “The Cigarette”, twelve-year old Marji is severely scolded by her mother for bunking school with her fourteen-year old friends to go to a café to check out boys. A heated argument follows at the end of which she

65

A mrita S ingh

retaliates by calling her mother a dictator, “the guardian of the revolution of this house” (Satrapi 2003: 113). It is a personal and singular experience, which is depicted by the question mark that signifies her mother’s response who does not quite understand why such a statement of rebellion is being made by her daughter. Parental authority and authority of the regime are conflated by comparison, but as a larger adolescent experience. In the following pages the revolt against parental authority and the demonstration of rebellion by smoking her first cigarette, thereby “kissing her childhood goodbye” (Satrapi 2003: 117), is defamiliarised. As Marji goes down into the basement, her thoughts are interspersed by images of violence and persecution arising of the “real” revolt happening outside. She coughs and sheds tears for both the rebellions, as painful but necessary steps in the fight for freedom. Hence, Persepolis subverts the assumptions of universality evoked by the narrative, at times challenging, at times reinforcing, cultural ideals, especially discourses that look at childhood within oppositions of pure innocence vs. damaged soul, or wistful nostalgia vs. terrible pain. The comic book has traditionally been seen as an immature and thus incomplete form, just as childhood is generally perceived as an incomplete state, but its reformulation in to such a “graphic novel” avatar is seen as more adult, mature, and serious. The comic mode seeks to unhinge these distinctions, which is also a familiar trope used in Iranian films as well to deal with complex issues without compromising lightness: regardless of how grim a cartoon, it’s somehow still umbilically connected to the brighter side of childhood. Our hard-wired inference is innocence. Which is why [Waltz with Bashir], a movie about memory, is as devious and subversive as it is brilliant and nightmarish. It’s a psychopathic teddy bear. It’s a shiny red lunchbox filled with plastic explosives. (Anderson 2009) For the child the memory of traumatic events is a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world, not like a healable wound on the body but an event experienced too soon, too unexpectedly to be fully known. “Understanding comes after the dropping of preconceptions, a destruction of a false sense of security, or in some way the loss of innocence” (Harris 2010). Satrapi demonstrates the need to move away from taking the “children have no subjectivity” position by giving us a young Marji who witnesses the world albeit through her limitations. As a subject she has the capacity for reflexive mediation and comes to know herself through a process of self-discovery through historically specific categories of truth, propriety, and normality. Even as a six year old, Marji displays an awareness of political realities: she challenges the imposition of the veil, she recognises 66

D rawing an account of herself

that despite her parents’ liberalism their maid does not eat with them, she is conscious of her family’s class position as they drive around in a Cadillac, and one of the earliest books she reads is a comic book on Marxism. Later, when she hears the account of a family friend who was held prisoner and subjected to extreme forms of torture—excessive whipping, burnt with an iron and then cut into pieces—it is the iron that captures young Marji’s imagination: “I never imagined that you could use that appliance for torture” (Satrapi 2003: 51). The iron begins to signify much more than its original purpose, making her privy to a knowledge that most girls her age (in other geopolitical locations) would be oblivious to. The horror of a “man cut into pieces” has no frame of reference for the child (or even the adult) and is rendered intelligible only through familiar everyday objects. Here, he is depicted as a dismembered doll, not a human being, appearing as it would in the child’s realistically erroneous but emotionally and expressionistically informed perspective. In fact, the chapter titles themselves are derived from ordinary objects—cigarette, socks, key, bicycle, letter, passport—that may be rendered ironic, humorous, or extraordinary depending upon the significance that the reader or protagonist or narrator may attach to them. Satrapi’s use of visual metaphor and symbolism in cartooning signals the child-protagonist’s confusions, interpretive difficulties, and mental turmoil that comes from limited foresight and intellectual understanding. Nevertheless, the retrospect-ing adult narrator relies on the child’s emotions associated with certain events, not exactly retrievable from memory but are revivable and re-creatable in verbal-visual form. The drawn strips use “communicative memory”, which exists within the indistinct and everyday realm, to represent “cultural memory”, which “comprises that body of reusable texts, images, and rituals specific to each society in each epoch, whose ‘cultivation’ serves to stabilize and convey that society’s self-image” (Mickwitz 2016: 60). When Uncle Anoosh makes his way back to Iran after being in exile in Russia, he relates to Marji their family’s struggle against the Shah’s regime and implores her to always remember their history of loss and resistance: “I tell you all this because it is important that you know. Our family memory must not be lost. Even if it is not easy for you, even if you don’t understand it at all”. “Don’t worry I’ll never forget” (Satrapi 2003: 60). Family becomes an important site of reference and self-construction for the child, and Marji relies on her family’s love, support, and liberalism. She honours the commitment to Uncle Anoosh by recounting their story as an adult, and especially in making it available to a diverse range of audiences. Ultimately, from being a universalized image of childhood the texts expand to more particularized, re-historicized representations of childhood within the specific context of an ancient culture now ravaged by revolution and war. A larger politicized history of the Iranian people is indicated in parallel moments in the childhoods of Marji, her parents, her friends, and others around her. For instance, Marji’s fear when she learns that Uncle Anoosh 67

A mrita S ingh

is “on a trip” and her visit to him in prison before his execution (Satrapi 2003: 67–69) is similar to her mother Taji’s anxiety every time there was a knock on the door, followed by her father’s arrest and then her visit to him in prison (Satrapi 2003: 24–25). Such moments not only bridge the past and the present but highlight the repetitive nature of trauma and loss. In another chapter titled “The Key”, two contrasting images of childhood are visibilized: young boys going to war and Marji going to her first party (Satrapi 2003: 102). In the first panel, the fate of young boys is visualized: usually from poor socio-economic backgrounds, they are lured into going to war, where many of them die with “the key to heaven” around their necks, the promise of paradise with its riches and beautiful women. Rendered faceless, their black bodies are in free fall, being pierced by sharp objects. Marji and her friends at the party are depicted dancing fervently, with Marji looking “sharp” in punk attire of a necklace of nails and hole-ridden sweater. This is set in immediate contrast to the key and the shrapnel-ridden bodies of the child-martyrs. A parallel moment occurs in Persepolis: The Story of a Return (2004), when as young adults, Marjane and her friends throw and attend parties as a mark of underground rebellion, sometimes with disastrous consequences (a friend falls off the roof while escaping a police raid at one of the parties) and other times with detention and fines paid off by their parents (Satrapi 2004: 153–155). The silent comment between the panels suggests that while Marji and her friends manage to experience “coming-ofage”, other children in Iran are not so fortunate. These depictions eliminate any need for commentary or explanation, showing that in a graphic narrative the images do not illustrate the verbal text, nor does the copy explain the visual image. Satrapi also toys with the expectations associated with children’s learning and memorizing methodologies that depend upon juxtapositions and repetitions. Repetition in the graphic narrative functions as a medium for inscription of meaning, “in the instances when the act of repeating, and not the repeated serves to interpret, negotiate, and disrupt meaning. Repetition can establish and reinforce the authority of the repeated or undermine and even abolish such authority” (Segall 2008: 43). In an earlier instance, a seven-year-old Marji leads her maid to a demonstration against the Shah, much against the wishes of her parents, especially on a day when many are killed by the regime’s retaliating forces. The last panel on the page frames the two girls sitting dejectedly with slap marks on their faces, the narrating voice filling in the thoughts: “In fact it was really our own who had attacked us” (Satrapi 2003: 39). (This is repeated in Marji’s declaration of her mother’s dictatorship in the episode with the cigarette.) Similarly, in the chapter where Marji experiences war first hand, when the Iraqis begin bombing Tehran, father and daughter run home thinking her mother would be terrified. “War always takes you by surprise” (Satrapi 2003: 81) and in this case her mother is caught in the shower unaware of the changing milieu outside. There is serious implication in this statement 68

D rawing an account of herself

about the volatility and suddenness of conflict and its consequences in the everyday life of the people caught in the midst, but the authorial injunction quickly renders it humorous. Satrapi cleverly and intimately undercuts a political issue, always relating it to the personal and immediate, especially showing what the charactorial persona perceives. Yet, the ultimate import of the matter (or its lack) is made the readers’ prerogative. Humour is a valuable resource for comic artists to depict serious issues without compromising on intent, and to articulate dissent and force the reader in to an active role. As Marjane herself reflects in Persepolis II, when she’s hearing a joke of a soldier blown into pieces and then sewed back together with the penis mis-arranged: “That day, I learned something essential: we can only feel sorry for ourselves when our misfortunes are still supportable . . . once this limit is crossed, the only way to bear the unbearable is to laugh at it” (Satrapi 2004: 112). Such self-deprecation is located at the point where the “I” encounters “failure” in its narrative effort to give an account of itself. In the context of autobiographical practise, “I” give an account to “you” and “you” call me to be me, where speaking is always a “speaking to” the “other”. Judith Butler frames this in terms of ethical responsibility, which she defines as the reality of relation between the I and the other, based on the apprehension of (self) limitation. This does not mean that the account is not true or fabricated; in fact, the issue that autobiographical texts raise is not of the fidelity to actual life but rather of narrative integrity.2 The author’s point of view clashes and merges with the persona’s first-person narration, laying bare its own constructedness. Not only does Marjane the character have to confront herself, the author-illustrator too has to confront her constructed character and her own self on the page. Here the distinction between the self and the other breaks down leading to a moment of autobiographical reflection not narrated, not explained by words but literalised in image. One such instance occurs at the end of Persepolis I when Marji looks at herself in the mirror before she has to leave for the airport and repeats to herself her grandmother’s injunction: “I will always be true to myself” (Satrapi 2003: 151). We only see a partial reflection of her, without the veil, perhaps suggesting that she is not quite ready to identify with the image she sees. In Persepolis II this earlier panel is mirrored in the image of Marjane as she readies herself for her return home from Vienna. She puts on the veil which she hadn’t needed for four years, and literally has to face herself: the failure of a dissipated and wasted life of freedom, and more importantly what she is and is not, and what she has become. This panel occupies more than half the page, and for the first time we see her full face in the mirror. It is an anxious, worried face uncertain of its future. This is also a moment for authorial introspection of her exilic state: “So much for my individual and social liberties . . . I needed so badly to go home” (Satrapi 2004: 91). These symmetrical panels represent the uncanny moment, where the self is recognized as an estranged 69

A mrita S ingh

other that threatens to interrupt the notion of stability and familiarity that the self assumes of itself. Every time the subject looks into the mirror, she memorizes the particular image, to be recalled and identified (and compared) when the act is repeated. This repetition functions at the level of memory recollection but as a narrative strategy it expects the reader to recognize it as repetition as well as perceive the difference between the images. (Also, this chapter recalls the first chapter in Persepolis I, “The Veil”.) The split is not only between the experiencing-I and the narrating-I but also between the western and non-western precepts of framing the self and the other. Marjane has to not only identify with the Iranian, woman, Muslim part of her subjectivity but also the version that is popularly disseminated in western discourse. This ethical relation of difference that Butler claims leads the subject to identify herself through mis-identification, which contributes to a sense of unbinding and disorder. This can also be witnessed in the series of images that depict the changing demographics of her body literally visualize the work of (self) interpretation and transformation to humorous effect. Her sex, marked by the changes in her body signify her othering, just as seeing her reflection in the mirror becomes a moment of watching and being conscious of herself as an other body (Satrapi 2004: 35). Moreover, this is also the moment that juxtaposes her bildungsroman journey—when she left Iran for Europe she was still a “child” but she returns having grown into an adult woman. To arrive at her teenage life in Vienna, Marjane’s coming of age has required her to not just shed the veil, but also the icons of her childhood, symbolised by the posters of Kim Wilde and Iron Maiden which she gives away to her friends before leaving Tehran (Satrapi 2003: 149). From seeking models of heroism in figures such as Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, and Leon Trotsky, on the lines of the worthier heroic figures of conventional comics, as a seven-year-old she finds heroism closer home in Uncle Anoosh, Uncle Taher, her grandfather, friends, neighbours, and so on, and later in soldiers, martyrs, and war veterans like her future husband. The putting on of the veil, and the ramifications of this act, dominate the latter part of Persepolis: The Story of a Return. The cover of the second book features a veil-less adult Marjane, but she is equally unhappy and bewildered as the child on the cover of Persepolis I. While in Austria she had faced complete, unrestrained freedom, living the stereotype of a dissipative young adult to the hilt. Back home, even while she is admonished to learn how to wear the veil correctly, she rejoices in the fact that “Things were evolving . . . year by year women were winning an eighth of an inch of hair and losing an eighth of an inch of veil” (Satrapi 2004: 139). The veil is an important subject for Satrapi because it comes to exhibit dissent. For instance, a panel in Persepolis II replicates an X-ray image that depicts women’s self-stylisation and politics, not to produce a distinction between the inner and outer posturing of their selves, rather to contest the homogenising stereotype of the 70

D rawing an account of herself

veiled woman. Underneath the veil, women can have short hair, ponytails, buns, big bottoms, make-up, therefore keeping their individuality intact. In the chapter title itself—“The Convocation”—Satrapi plays with narrative expectations of the traditional black cap and gown at university commencement ceremonies, contrasted here with the black veil, dress, and chador. In another panel, Marjane is caught in the dilemma of drawing portraits in art school in Tehran, where the students are forced to draw in segregated studios and the only model permissible for the women students is a woman veiled from head to toe: “we tried . . . we looked . . . from every direction . . . and from every angle . . . but not a single part of her body was visible. We nevertheless learnt to draw drapes” (Satrapi 2004: 145). Their dissent is marked in their “homework”, wherein they pose for each other in their homes and so actually practise and learn. In the series of panels that follow, the now more discerning adult voice (as opposed to the child’s at the beginning of the text) explains to the reader how the veil and dress restrictions function in repressive societies as forms intended to deaden the mind, and does not carry the same signification in other societies. Marjane’s dissent is expressed through the red socks she wears under her otherwise black dress and veil (Satrapi 2004: 148). Visual iconography works to reify any subject in question, not just those marked by religious impositions, as Satrapi clarifies in an interview: When you are fourteen and they tell you not to do something [French banning the veils in public schools], of course you want to do it . . . the western woman is so entranced by the idea that her emancipation comes from the miniskirt that she is convinced that if you have something on your head you are nothing. The women who are forced to wear the veil, and the women who are portrayed naked to sell anything from car tyres to orange juice are both facing a form of oppression. (Costantino 2008: 434) Thus, Satrapi’s art reflects a more deliberate veiling to reveal more than what the first-person narrator may intend to divulge. Monochromatic stylisation aids in Satrapi’s game with the readers, as the combination of heavily black backgrounds and minimal drawing techniques, with effective use of positive (black on white background) and negative (white on black background) images, keeps the drawing evocative. Satrapi herself emphasises in an interview that the books could have been done only in black-andwhite because colour disrupts the scheme of things, calling for a particularity and resonance, symbolism, and thorough encoding (Root 2007: 154). Naghibi and O’Malley also point out that “the bold-lined, black-and-white, and almost rudimentary artwork . . . belies the ambiguities and grey areas the text explores” (2005: 242), especially in the blanks, margins, and the 71

A mrita S ingh

gutters. One also has to negotiate the gaps and silences on the page as well as in the narrative, such as the story of her maternal grandfather which is not completed and his ultimate fate not revealed (perhaps because it is not known to young Marji either and so not part of her childhood memories, something that the authorial persona does not intervene in). For Satrapi the use of the comic genre is learnt and affected but she fuses into it subtle pointers to Persian artistic tradition viz. ancient Persian miniatures, murals, and friezes, which especially appear in the scenes where there is a discussion of pre-contemporary history and public movements which are drawn as stylised and symmetrical formations of bodies. She encourages her audiences to read not just between but also upon the covers. Each cover of the four French volumes displays the picture of proud rebel-like figures on horses. On the first two volumes, these figures look like the Persian historical heroes of Iran’s rich and complex history; on the last two volumes, the horse rider is a woman, one of which is clearly Marjane, in a pose echoing Joan of Arc. “These covers appeal (even subconsciously in the way advertising often does) to the French buyers’ strong sense of pride in heroic rebels fighting against foreign invasion in order to protect freedom and a sense of national identity” (Costantino 2008: 433). The covers of the English editions on the other hand play into the market of expectation that such a text would generate. In this way, Persepolis offers a unique mediation of trauma in boxes or strips of grief. As Scott McCloud suggests, no other art form gives so much to its readers while asking so much from them as well. Comics are not a mere hybrid of graphic arts and prose fiction, but a unique interpretation that transcends both, and emerges through the imaginative work of closure that readers are required to make between the panels on the page. (1994: 92) The “illustrations of faces and bodily postures may capitalize on the availability of visual coding for human emotions, eliciting readers’ feelings before they even read the accompanying text” (Gardner and Herman 2011: 10). The reader experiences the text on a multimodal plane, and juxtaposition and repetition enable her to make connections between events and act as a visual reminder of objects or issues that are significant. The reader is also positioned as witness and not a mere spectator and is made to “see” the protagonist’s experiences. The reader may laugh at the humour but at the same time is made to feel a sense of discomfort at her own laughter. The reader is rather the viewer who is not located outside the text taking in its mystification, but in the space of the page where “she is not ensnared in time but must slow down enough to make the connections between image and text and from panel to panel . . . addressing complex political and 72

D rawing an account of herself

historical issues with an explicit, formal degree of self-awareness” (Chute and DeKoven 2006: 770). Marji’s witnessing of history and her bearing witness (to communicate her experience to her adult self and others) is made possible by the readers of this autographic who in turn becomes witnesses to Marjane’s narrative (cf. Mickwitz 2016: 63). They are made to view “both the act of witnessing and the act of bearing witness thereby duplicating the role of witness as it is enacted” (Glass 2006: 5). The “visual retracing of trauma is enabling, ethical, and productive” (Chute 2008: 459) as the account of herself is not a result of reflexive action alone but telling the story is itself a critical act. Satrapi is able to dismantle the assumptions of innocence, naïveté, and universality that this combination of a child protagonist and a cartooning style seem to produce. She re-constitutes the expectations of both her child and adult readers by re-envisioning the political history of Iran and showing how the memory narrative can determine the subjectivity of both those who transmit and transcribe memories (Glass 2006: 6). As the “familial scribe” who is “entrusted with the transmission of family history” (Glass 2006: 12), Satrapi subverts westernized models of framing the child, the autobiographical subject, the Iranian and the Muslim woman as alterities to be appropriated into a western subject position. Instead, she plays on familiar stereotypes only to feed in slippages and offer occasion to disrupt a seamless assimilation of images. Like Marji, she does not pressure her viewers to “know” or comprehend these experiences fully, yet Persepolis invites notions of shared experience and leaves them open for exploration, questioning, discussions, and the imploration to not forget.

Notes 1 Persepolis was published in French in four parts between 1999 and 2002. In the English versions, Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (2003), trans. L’Association, New York: Pantheon (hereafter, Persepolis I) is a collation of the first two books in the French series, and Persepolis: The Story of a Return (2004), trans. Anjali Singh, New York: Pantheon (hereafter, Persepolis II) is a collation of books three and four from the French. The covers of the French editions picture Marjane in poses from Persian mythology and history, whereas both the English editions carry the image of Marjane’s textual avatar in a veil. 2 Satrapi belies the question of fidelity of art to life, especially by expressing that as soon as the story is written, it is a story, not a documentary. Of course, writers “cheat”, making sure that all characters and events are related to themselves. The only “true” thing in the world, she says, is imperfection, and that is how she sees herself and all her characters (Interview with Root).

References Anderson, John. 2009. ‘ “Waltz With Bashir” Brings a Dark Memory Into Light’. Washington Post 23 January. www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2009/01/22/AR2009012203855.html (accessed on 30 October 2015).

73

A mrita S ingh

Butler, Judith. 2005. Giving an Account of Oneself. New York, NY: Fordham University Press. Caruth, Cathy. 1996. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Chute, Hillary. 2008. ‘The Texture of Retracing in Marjane Satrapi’s “Persepolis” ’. Women’s Studies Quarterly 36(1‑2): 92–110. Chute, Hillary, and Marianne DeKoven. 2006. ‘Introduction: Graphic Narrative’. Modern Fiction Studies 52(4): 767–782. Costantino, Manuela. 2008. ‘Marji: Popular Commix Heroine Breathing Life Into the Writing of History’. Canadian Review of American Studies 38(3): 434–447. Elahi, Babak. 2007. ‘Frames and Mirrors in Marjane Satrapi’s “Persepolis” ’. Symploke 15(1–2): 312–325. Gardner, Jared, and David Herman. 2011. ‘Graphic Narratives and Narrative Theory’. SubStance 40(1): 3–13. Glass, Susannah Ketchum. 2006. ‘Witnessing the Witness: Narrative Slippage in Art Spiegelman’s “Maus” ’. Life Writing 3(2): 3–24. Harris, Robert. 2010. ‘A Glossary of Literary Terms’. Virtual Salt 15 June. www. virtualsalt.com/evalu8it.htm (accessed on 4 July 2010). Maggio, J. 2007. ‘Comics and Cartoons: A Democratic Art Form’. PS: Political Science and Politics (2007): 237–239. http://apsanet3b.inetu.net/imgtest/PSApr07Maggio.pdf (accessed on 12 May 2010). McCloud, Scott. 1994. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York, NY: Harper Perennial. Mickwitz, Nina. 2016. Documentary Comics: Graphic Truth-Telling in a Skeptical Age. London and New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Naghibi, Nima, and Andrew O’Malley. 2005. ‘Estranging the Familiar: “East” and “West” in Satrapi’s “Persepolis” ’. ESC 31(2–3): 223–248. Root, Robert. 2007. ‘Interview With Marjane Satrapi’. Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction 9(2): 147–157. Said, Edward. 2002. ‘Introduction’. In Palestine, edited by Joe Sacco, I–V. Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics. Satrapi, Marjane. 2003. Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood. Trans. L’Association. New York, NY: Pantheon. Satrapi, Marjane. 2004. Persepolis: The Story of a Return. Trans. Anjali Singh. New York, NY: Pantheon. Segall, Kimberly W. 2008. ‘Melancholy Ties: Intergenerational Loss and Exile in Persepolis’. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 28(1): 38–49. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. 2001. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Whitlock, Gillian. 2006. ‘Autographics: The Seeing “I” of the Comics’. MFS Modern Fiction Studies 52(4): 965–979.

74

6 CACHE-CACHE Writing childhood trauma Nancy Ali When Georges Perec published W ou le souvenir d’enfance in 1975, many in the French public were surprised to discover that the prolific writer was a survivor of the Shoah. Perec belonged to the Oulipo writers, known for imposing arbitrary constraints—often burrowed from mathematics—on their texts for the sake of renewing tired literary forms. For readers who were used to Perec’s playful writing, W was a shockingly serious text. The book sold only 3500 copies when it was first published (Sirvent 2007: 8). It was not until interest in the memory of the Shoah in France experienced a boom that his book garnered more of a following.1 Today, it stands as one of his most significant achievements and one of the founding texts in literature written by child survivors of the Shoah. The particularity of the experience of children who have come of age at times of war or genocide has led to a formalization of the subject area in child psychology. The particular effects of the Holocaust, the archetypal historical trauma in the euro-centric psyché, on children, whether they faced the fate of the ghettos, camps, or clandestine life, have been the subject of much interest for theorists of trauma. Literature produced by survivors who were children during the war demonstrate unifying characteristics on both the thematic and stylistic levels that point to the individuality of their experience. Over the last decades, the Holocaust has served as a fertile lieux de mémoire in children’s literature of war or children’s trauma literature. Through the prism of Perec’s monumental work, we will explore the distinctive qualities that are shared by children writers of the Holocaust, and examine the correlation between narrative choices and the nature of traumatic memories. CACHE-CACHE

NANCY ALI

Childhood, interrupted The techniques and conventions that writings of children survivor literature subvert has resulted in texts that are at once different from other Holocaust literature and from literature not dealing with the Holocaust written from children perspectives (Vice 2004: 4–5). From both the testimonies and 75

N ancy A li

literature furnished by survivors who were children or adolescents during the war, common experiences are recounted such as the moment of encountering loss, the sense of displacement and constant terror and instability (Suleiman 2006: 184). Stylistic similarities include fragmentation, the use of autofictional characters, multiple storylines, and the recourse to fairy tale. Because of their lack of concrete memories, these children often resort to fiction and imagination. A double life W ou le souvenir d’enfance is divided into two parts, each part itself composed of chapters alternating between fiction and autobiography. The fictional chapters read like an adventure novel intended for children, a type of Jules Verne or Gulliverian text in which journeys, shipwrecks, mysterious islands, orphans, and investigations are recurrent. Gaspard Winckler, a deserter from an inconspicuous army who survived hiding under a stolen identity, is approached by a mysterious man who commissions him to find his namesake, a deaf-mute child who disappeared in a shipwreck off the island of W. The fictional chapters are juxtaposed with an autobiographical narrative that remembers the earlier years of the author’s childhood. At the age of four, Perec lost his father, killed at the start of the Drôle de guerre. He lost his mother two years later when, in 1943, she was deported to Auschwitz where she was eventually killed. Meanwhile, Perec lived out the rest of the war shuffling different pensions of Villard-de-Lans in unoccupied France, until he was adopted definitively by his father’s sister and her husband in the wake of the war. In the second part of the novel, the fiction tells the story of Winckler’s journey in search of the deaf-mute child on the dystopic island W, founded on Olympian ideals of sport and Darwinian laws of survival. On this island “Le struggle for life est ici la loi” (Perec 1975: 123).2 The island bears a haunting resemblance to the concentration camps in which Perec’s mother was destined: the competitions and “selection process” to which athletes are subjected, the systematic dehumanization and abuse of athletes, the Aryan names given to winning athletes, the striped uniforms worn by the athletes, the Fortius Altius Citius sign on the gates of the villages hauntingly reminding us of the Arbeit Macht Frei that crowned the gates of Auschwitz. The story of W alternates with the autobiographical chapters focused on Perec’s childhood years after he was separated from his mother and eventually, orphaned. The structure of the novel suggests a violent splitting in the author’s life (Burgelin 1988: 138). Split-time narration is a common feature of texts written by child survivors, where sections dedicated to the traumatic past alternate with a later time, usually the time of writing, and narrative point of 76

CACHE-CACHE

view oscillates between child and adult (Vice 2004: 12). The or—instead of and—in the book’s title suggests that the fantasy of W and Perec’s childhood story are interchangeable. W is an alternative or synonym to the author’s unfortunate childhood (Suleiman 2006: 186–187). The story of W is “d’une certaine façon, sinon l’histoire, du moins une histoire de [son] enfance” (Perec 1975: 18).3 As the novel progresses, the story of Perec’s childhood— in particular the fate of his mother in Aushwitz—and that of the island of W collapse onto one another. The imagined fantasy becomes hauntingly real and the autobiography itself unfathomable (Astro 1987: 869). The alternating structure highlights the realism of fiction and the extraordinary of reality. The self as other This novel is as much Perec’s novel as it is that of Gaspard Winckler the adult, who narrates the first part in first-person and the second part in voiceoff. Perec is at once Gaspard Winckler the deaf-mute child, lost at sea, and Gaspard Winckler the deserter who hides behind a stolen name. Winckler’s mother was named Caecilia, while Perec’s was Cécile, and like Perec who lost his father at the age of 4, Winckler lost his at 6. The doubling of the real and fictitious with regards to the autofictional protagonist narrator of the novel that jointly form Perec’s voice refer to his fractured existence and the identity crisis from which he suffers. It also refers to the sense of double life hidden children like Perec had to endure during the war. Living under a different name and a different religion, these children experience the most literal and violent identity splitting (Waintrater 2006: 143). Just as the child is learning to construct an identity, he must learn to hide it. Writing on one’s childhood as an adult, from the prism of the present, is to write about an Other. This childhood is in itself inaccessible, as both autobiographers and historiographers tell us, it is subject to the emotions, values, and intentions of the writer in the context of the present. Add to this sense of otherness a self-distancing that one must arrive at in order to work through the trauma caused by the war. The psychoanalytical notion of split subject that refers to the child entering the symbolic order becomes more complicated in the case of Perec, who is separated from his family, his name, his roots, and denied all the ties so necessary in the early stages of identity formation. Perec was also required to adopt a new identity that further separated from their families. Trauma causes a shattering of subjectivity and disrupts subject formation, causing a permanent splitting in the ego that psychoanalysis seeks to repair or at least expose. Trauma disrupts the coherent integrative capacity of the personality and causes a splitting or dédoublement of the ego marked by the co-existence of “two simultaneous streams of thought” (Van der Hart 77

N ancy A li

1989). Children who have endured traumatic events demonstrate clinical manifestations of trauma such as borderline personality, dissociative disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder, all of which point to the disintegration of the field of consciousness (Terr 1991: 10). Pierre Janet put down a critical and systematic explanation of psychological dissociation in children, and was the first to claim it as the most immediate psychological defense against traumatic experiences. The splitting or the dédoublement of the ego, according to Janet, is a defining characteristic of dissociative character in children resulting from a traumatic experience. Self-reflection Perec starts the autobiographical chapters of his narrative with the admission that “je n’ai pas de souvenirs d’enfance [. . .] j’en étais dispensé: une autre histoire, la Grande, l’Histoire avec sa grande hache, avait déjà répondu à ma place: la guerre, les camps” (Perec 1975: 17).4 The statement sets his novel on the tone of the presumed, the conditional, the subjunctive, not a past that really did occur but a probable past. It establishes the entire narrative on an absence (Magne 166). The metatextual writing of Perec, in line with other postmodern writings, problematizes any textualization of reality and challenges our modes of representation established upon verisimilitude. W ou le souvenir d’enfance highlights the lacunar, reticular, and oblique qualities of memory. Discussing the souvenirs of the past, Perec uses the “il me semble”, a formula of modalization which suggests the faultiness of memory (Brunel 2001: 243). It inscribes the autobiography under the sign of doubt. Adults deform childhood memories to accommodate them in the framework of the present (Halbawchs). The effect of trauma on the process and products of remembrance further complicates access to the past. Instead of affirmations and assertions, Perec shares imprecise memories, erroneousor approximate (Beaumatin 1985: 285). It is not childhood itself that is revealed in this novel, but the relationship between the adult writer and his memories or renarrativized traces from his childhood: “je cherche à atteindre dans mon travail, c’est la manière dont cette enfance m’est redonnée” (Perec 1990: 91).5 Narrative “brings together” otherwise dispersed “traces” such as archives, testimonies, photographs, and other “already written” texts, at the risk of doing violence to them (Ricoeur 1983: 11–12). Narrativity—be it in the literary or historic text—imposes meaning on historical events. Genocide, however, resulted in a deconstruction of existing narrative forms and rejects any neat resolution. There is no consolation in a story of genocide. The memories or the traces, not the thing in itself, serve as the object of Perec’s genealogical excavation. Working through historical trauma on the personal level requires ongoing self-reflection, according to Lacapra, and “should be understood as an open, self-questioning process that never 78

CACHE-CACHE

attains closure” (LaCapra 2014: XXIII). For this reason, writings on childhood trauma often include meditations by the author—now an adult— reflecting on the difficulty of remembering, and the difficulty of transcribing the experience in writing (Suleiman 2006: 184). On the collective level, Adorno has also described working through trauma as a particularly self-reflective process because it requires an introspective critique of our epistemological and ethical discourses (Ball 2008: 168). This includes our modes of representation, systems of thought, and very language.

Towards an autofiction The last two decades of the twentieth century have seen a resurge in autobiographical, memoires, and other forms of self writing. Even the Nouveaux Romanciers and Tel Quel writers—whose textualized writings of the 1960s were founded around the rupture between language and reality—shocked their readers by abandoning their earlier antirepresentational writings and taking the pen to write their life stories (Nathalie Sarraute’s L’Enfance, Robbe-Grillet’s Le Miroir qui revient, Marguerite Duras’L’Amant). Unlike traditional autobiographies, these examples of a critical retour au sujet are not structured linearly from childhood to present day, with an ongoing reflection on known historical events. They are typically fragmented, centred around a few memoires that are more often than not traumatic, and inscribed in a more philosophical meditation on issues of memory and loss (Kahane). For our earliest years of which we have no recollection, we turn to members of our families to help fill in the blanks. But what if the nuclear family, that is the first place of transmission according to Halbwachs,6 as well as the places on which we rely to trigger our memory, are gone? Perec delves into his family photos and through the annals of history—the newspapers, journals, and archives of the time—researching the context of his childhood as a historian or an investigator approaching a subject of which he is a passive bystander. When these channels fail, he turns to fiction and imagination to fill in the blanks. Resorting to fiction and imagination to fill in the blanks of memory is a common feature across narratives written by children survivors of the Shoah Serge Dubrovsky—who like Perec was a hidden child during the war (Suleiman 2006: 256)—writes in another of his works, Le Livre brisé, “si je me remémore, je m’invente”. In the writings of these child survivors, the fiction in the word autofiction becomes even more pronounced because not only are they writing of a childhood they cannot possibly remember, but the very referent to which their texts refers is in itself inducible and unnameable. The term autofiction was coined by Dobrovsky in 1977 to describe another of his novels, Fils, as “Fiction d’événements et de faits strictement 79

N ancy A li

réels” (Doubrovsky 1977).7 The autofiction subverts the classic pact of an autobiography offered by Lejeune. In the autofiction, even if the events described have really taken place, they are not simply referential but also fictional as they occur under the sign of the probable not the definitive (Suleiman 2006: 162). The autobiography unfolds under the sign of fiction, a childhood too hard to believe, while the fantastical novel that tells of dystopic life on W, becomes the real. In the autobiographical chapters, Perec uses the conditional of the fantastical mode or children stories, to highlight the fictionality of his souvenirs while in the fictional chapters, he uses the imperative to highlight their verisimilitude. By choosing the neutral récit instead of fiction or autobiography, Perec is choosing a neutral place between fact and fiction, imagination, and the real. The autofiction is established on two narratives with strongly opposing referential pacts, namely the referentiality of the autobiography and the imaginary of fiction. It a problematic genre because its “paradoxical pact” demands referentiality at the same time that it denies it. Child as witness Childhood, the primal scene of innocence, is morality’s last line of defence. Society with all its discourses vows to protect the child and delay the child’s exposure to violence and confrontation with evil. In a total war, however, children are not off limits. It is enough to remember that only 11% of European Jewish children before the war lived to see its end (Suleiman 2006: 181). Horrors once contained to soldiers or to the battlefield spread to reach society’s most vulnerable, making children witnesses a truly untapped source of historical knowledge. Children of war grow up too fast, even in the eyes of the law. The age of majority in France was reduced from 21 to 16 for Jewish children as if at that age they had ceased to be children (C’etaient des enfants 2012). With this reality, it is only natural that the childhood narrative, once the setting of idyllic adventure, be invaded by evil tropes and imagination. Using the conditional tense to reflect what could be rather than what was, Perec recounts his longing, as a child, for the mythological childhood that has been narrated to him by nursery tales and schoolbooks. He recalls iconic images most of us were fortunate to take for granted: Moi, j’aurais aime aider ma mere a debarasser la table de la cuisine apres le diner. Sur la table, il y aurait eu une toile ciree a petits carreaux bleus [. . .] Puis je serais alle chercher mon cartable, j’aurais sorti mon livre, mes cahiers et mon plumier de bois, je les aurais posés sur la table et j’aurais fait mes devoirs. C’est comme ca que ca se passait dans mes livres de classe. (Perec 1975: 99)8 80

CACHE-CACHE

Nursery rhymes do not speak for all experiences, nor do childhood tales apply to all children. One must ask, whose childhood does the classic narrative tell? Narration in autobiographical chapters exhibits an objective, detached pseudoscientific tone, not unnoticed by Perec who refers to it as the tone of an ethnologist. Psychiatrists point out that patients grieving the loss of a parent often recount the details of the event in an administrative, detached manner, much like Perec: “Elle fut internée à Drancy le 23 janvier 1943, puis déportée le 11 février suivant en direction d’Auschwitz” (Perec 1975: 52–53).9 All that remains of Perec’s mother is some administrative details “des renseignements, quasi statistiques” (Perec 1975: 49),10 such as her birth and death, place of birth, marriage certificate, rendering his mother an anonymous victim. Perec was adopted by his aunt on his paternal side, and as a result had access to more information on his father than his mother. His mother’s past, her childhood stories from Poland, her upbringing, her language (Yiddish), have perished along with her in Auschwitz. She is the absent or lost object in the psychoanalytical sense, which Perec’s therapeutic writing seeks to reclaim. The objective tone of the ethnologist faithfully conveys the perspective of a child of Perec’s age at the time, who sees the details (gas chambers, deaths) but fails to grasp the bigger picture. Historical details are irrelevant to the child: “Longtemps j’ai cru que c’était le 7 mars 1936 qu’Hitler était entre en Pologne. Je me trompais, de date ou de pays, mais au fond ça n’avait pas une grande importance” (Perec 1975: 35).11 In this child testimony, it is not the facts that matter, but the manner in which they are remembered in transcribed in writing. Child testimonies on the Holocaust and other historical traumas are characterized by loss of affect and a meticulous attention to detail that tends to ignore context (Vice 2004: 2). Surviving diaries entries by Jewish Parisian children during the War, displayed at the C’était des enfants exhibition at l’Hôtel de Ville in 2012, confirm this observation, as their writings on everyday life in the ghettos and camps demonstrate a dry, objective tone when discussing realities that are utterly shocking to the adult reader. One entry written by Maurice Cling, an eleven year old who was the sole survivor from his family, writes when he arrives to Dachau: “Arrivée au camp: Descente du train espoir, soulagement. Sang sur la neige. Je mange de la neige. Un chariot plein de cadavres nous dépasse. J’ai perdu ma chaussure dans le wagon” (Gensburger 2012).12 The testimony, accompanied by drawings of the camp, with a sketch of what appears to be a gas chamber, is dry and impersonal, symptomatic of a child point of view that does not impose big picture interpretations to events or facts. The extraordinary (dead bodies) is placed on par with the banal (lost shoes). A traumatizing event such as witnessing a death enters into the order of things for the child: 81

N ancy A li

“Je ne sais pas ce qu’aurait fait mon pere s’il avait vecu. Le plus curieux est que sa mort, et celle de ma mere, m’apparait trop souvent comme une evidence. C’est rentre dans l’ordre des choses” (W 49).13, 14 Having to accept an imposed destiny, an arbitrary punishment, having to resume normalcy under the most extraordinary and unjust circumstances in order to survive, is the Kafkaesque element in Perec’s child experience.15 Perec’s interrupted text in which there is no cathartic resolution or “bringing together” differs strongly from Elie Wiesel’s highly meditative, politicized, and emotionally charged narrative, La Nuit, which also recounts his horrors during the War. One can trace the difference between the two testimonies to the age gap between the two authors at the time of the traumatic event: Perec was 4 at the start of the war, while Elie Wiesel was an adolescent. The striking difference in their literary testimonies points to the constitutive role of age in regards to experiencing and remembering trauma.

Games and constraints After having crossed over the Swiss border in 1944, the young adolescent Edith Mayer—who was hidden in a convent under a false identity during the war—writes in her diary: “Mon rêve est réalité Nous voilà en liberté! Plus de cache-cache, Plus de mensonge, Plus de faux papiers Plus rien qui me ronge” (Gensburger 2012: 103).16 Having to hide their Jewish identity or adopt catholic sounding names in order to survive, to go unnoticed and pass for français, these children often perceived their new realities as a game. Cache-cache takes on a real-life dimension, and any slip could be fatal. The synergetic bond between ludic and literature well predates the Oulipo and our general postmodern obsession with play. But what sets Oulipian writing apart is that their textual constraints were self-imposed and arbitrary (Motte 1984: 18). Perec himself produced impressive projects like La Vie Mode D’Emploi, modelled after a puzzle, and the longest lipogram in the world, La Disparition a novel of 300 pages written without a single occurrence of the letter e, the most frequent vowel of the French language. At play in W, however, Perec confronts the ethical and psychological constraints imposed by the effect of trauma on memory and writing. Gone are the arbitrary constraints and textual experimentation of his earlier oulipian works and in their place appear constraints of “emblematic value” (Beggar 2000: 128) that carry an existential undertone. How does one bear witness to a robbed childhood? How does one tell that which cannot be told, namely the Shoah? Experimentation W ou le souvenir d’enfance is a foundational autobiographical text because it rejuvenated an otherwise redundant and neglected genre. Perec brought originality to a genre that, according the Lejeune, has not borne witness to 82

CACHE-CACHE

much formal or thematic innovation. The classic childhood narrative is typically linear, and in it, childhood is mythologized and romanticized (Lejeune 1991: 71). For Perec’s unusual story, however, existing forms won’t suffice. Experimentation offers the adult writer a place to confront that which cannot be confronted. It also offers him a means to repair a fractured existence and sense of self. The arts cannot express themselves as they once did, using the same forms or language of before. It is perhaps the same question that Adorno posed with his provocative statement: “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” (Adorno 1982: 34). The complicity of modern systems of thought in the Nazi affair has translated into anxiety and self-reflexion in philosophy and literary criticism. Trauma disrupts reality and its modes of representation (Ball 2008: 250; Bernstein 1998: 625; Kristeva 2005: 122). Dominick LaCapra has observed that narratives and testimonies that deal with trauma rarely exhibit the classic Aristotelian structure of beginning-middle-end that features a cathartic resolution and relief (LaCapra 1999: 704). In the same light, Perec’s narrative is fragmented, open-ended, and rejects closure. Meaning relies heavily on subtext rather than explicit exposition. Experimentation is a common characteristic of literature written by child survivors of the Holocaust as they try to invent a form that can aptly describe the kind of rupture and sense of loss they experienced.17 Their writings tend to abandon the conventional form and subvert traditional literary techniques: hybridity in the place of a single homogenous genre, multiple narrators in place of a single one, discontinuity in the place of a linear story, fragmentation in the place of an organically unified structure. An aesthetics of lack Perec belongs to the 1.5 generation of survivors, a term coined by Susan Suleiman—herself a survivor of the Holocaust—to refer to those children who were too young to have concrete memories of the war yet old enough to have lived its events and bared its traumatic consequences (Suleiman 2006: 179). Although these children do not remember their childhood, childhood is at once elusive and omnipresent, looming over their lives as constant reminder of absence: absence of loved ones and also estrangement from one’s self (Waintrater 2006: 143). Their texts lurk on the “edge of memory”, constructed on an absence of memories rather than on the content of the memories in itself (Suleiman 2006: 11). Perec writes: [U]ne fois de plus les pièges de l’écriture se mirent en place. Une fois de plus, je fus comme un enfant qui joue à cache-cache et qui ne sait ce qu’il craint ou désire le plus: rester caché, être découvert. (Perec 1975: 14)18 83

N ancy A li

For Perec, the game of cache-cache, that is hide-and-seek, does not refer alone to his fatal game of survival with the Gestapo. It also refers to the involuntary constraint at the heart of his work: how to say the inducible, how to remember a childhood of which he has no memories. For writings produced by the 1.5 generation of survivors—who remember the force of trauma yet not necessarily the details of its content—we must focus not just on the content of their stories but also on its form. Their narratives transmit the incomprehension of the child in the face of extraordinary events (Vice 2004: 3). The aporia and unreadability that accompanies testimonies on the Holocaust has become its main counter trope, and it points to both the power and limitation of narrative (Kidd 2005: 121). This obliqueness19 has come to characterize writings of the 1.5 generation, where absence and suspension, subtext, and the nondire are powerful textual signifiers and generators of meaning. The aesthetic and psychological paradox of saying a lot without saying much at all can be observed across adult survivor writings on traumatic events from childhood (Suleiman 2006: 208). In Perec’s narrative it translates into an aesthetics of lack, a strategy of meiosis in which less is more (Motte 2004b: 59). The importance of absence in the novel explains why most critics have approached it with psychanalytical tools. Remembering trauma Of his mother, Perec retains only one real memory, the moment of their separation at the Gare de Lyon where he would board a convoy of the Red Cross headed for Villard-de-Lans in unoccupied France. Shortly after, his mother was rounded up and transported to Drancy in January 1943, and then finally to Auschwitz where she would die. The recurring references across Perec’s oeuvre to the exodus of Gare de Lyon, mentioned three times in this novel alone, points to the repetitive and layered nature of traumatic memories. The work of mourning itself is a gradual process that occurs in what Freud calls a “piecemeal” manner (Motte 2004b: 57). Hence the belatedness of traumatic memories, where the effects of the traumatic events are experienced at a significantly later time than the event itself (Kaufman 1998: 46). This is also why another dominant characteristic of traumatic memories is that they tend to come in layers (Heck 2007: 138). As in a palimpsest—like Perec’s remembrance of the Gare de Lyon—different, sometimes conflicting, memories of the same event are superimposed one on top of the other. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud tells us that compulsive repetition is a characteristic of traumatic memories (Ball 2008: 5). Remembering a traumatic event is extremely painful as it often implies reliving the event and re-experiencing all of the emotions it involved once again: the fear, the loss, the sadness. However, as obvious from the compulsive repetitiveness 84

CACHE-CACHE

of traumatic memories, remembering is a necessary part of the mourning process. The only way to work out trauma, is through it. Traumas of childhood are typically strongly visualized and repeatedly perceived (Terr 1991: 10). They manifest in flashbacks or intrusive thoughts, both considered dissociative phenomena. They are des idées fixes like landmarks that stand out from the habitual personal consciousness (Hart and Horst 1989: 7). They can slip into the consciousness and take on real life reenactments, and they manifest in tactile, positional, and smell memories. Affected children are said to re-feel and sense the past trauma in the present (Terr 1991: 12). The scene in Gare de Lyon, the “l’exode (exodus)” (Perec 1975: 72) as it is aptly called, is the ultimate episode of uprootedeness (Sagnol 2006: 228). It represents Perec’s departure from normal life and from origins. The moment of separation from the parents is a common leitmotif across testimonies of children survivors of the Shoah, as it becomes a formative event in their subsequent life. Using the term “exodus” to refer to his departure on the Red Cross train, Perec draws a link between his personal story and the more general story of Jewish experience.

Children literature and psychoanalysis Because Perec himself discusses his personal experience with psychoanalysis in his short essay “Les lieux d’une ruse” and because the writing of W ou le souvenir d’enfance was carried out in parallel to his own psychoanalysis therapy with the analyst Pontalis (Burgelin 1988: 63), his novel is often read through a psychoanalytical prism.20 Psychoanalysis is, after all, a theory on childhood (Suleiman 1994: 18). One of its classic paradigms is that the first years of one’s life provide the key to understanding one’s present (Ibid., 18). Philippe Lejeune calls W a psychoanalytical autobiography that demonstrates a “montage of symptoms” in lack of interpretation (Lejeune 1991: 65). Perec, the analysand, unravels his mind and searches his unconscious, his memories, for the truth of the past, a truth that is forever irretrievable. The reader thus assumes the role of the analyser and tries to put the pieces of the puzzle together. In children’s literature, psychoanalysis finds a natural setting. Children’s literature and psychanalysis overlap in themes, conventions, practises, and tropes which is why they are usually treated as interdependent discourses. Psychanalysis is a subject, method, and field of children’s literature (Kidd 2005: 123). Both clinically and theoretically, it offers a powerful medium across which childhood trauma is observed and treated because it speaks to the unspeakable. The psychoanalytical procedure allows the patient to speak “in spite of themselves” as if the truth is being revealed by another voice. It seeks access to the “unconscious witnessing of the subject” in search of a truth unavailable to the speaker (Kidd 2005: 124). This unavailable truth 85

N ancy A li

applies to childhood memories—by virtue of early age, and to traumatic memories as well, which the mind pushes to the background, unprocessed. Anamnesis through photography Perec describes—without reproducing—nine photographs, in in the second part of the novel: one of his father, two of him and his mother, one of his mother alone, one of him alone, one of him on a rock, one of him and his aunt Esther, one group family photo, and finally a photo of the crematoriums that he saw in an exhibition in Paris after the war (Magné 1998: 9). Photography plays an important role in the work of mourning, because photographs prolong the presence of the lost object for the subject, helping him/her cope with the loss and unburden the ego (Motte 2004b: 57). A photograph is a presence of an absence (Hutcheon 1989: 91), the lost object in psychanalytical terms. Photographs of lost loved ones are prominent tools in the personal grieving process. On the collective level, photographic proof of the Nazi crimes, such as the exhibition on the camps mentioned by Perec, helped mediatize the Shoah and trigger its memory boom, firmly establishing it as a lieu de mémoire in the French mind. The photographs of Perec furnish the objectification needed for effective psychoanalysis: “La première [photo] [. . .] ma mère et moi, en gros plan. La mère et l’enfant donnent l’image d’un bonheur que les ombres du photographe exaltent. Je suis dans les bras de ma mère” (W 73–74).21 Describing the photo, Perec switches to the third person. Photography allows for a “mise à distance” or a strangeness between the self that is observing the photograph and the self photographed. In addition to conveying the author’s troubled sense of identity, the frequent oscillation from first to third person also provides the self-distancing needed to fulfil the work of mourning. The photographs are accompanied by “endnotes” as in a scientific or academic paper. These notes are fausses notes as they are no longer an accessory to the text placed at the bottom of the page or annexed to the chapter but integrated in the text (Colonna 1985: 96–100). They serve like a distancing “mise en perspective” thanks to which Perec can reflect on his relationship as an adult to these memoires (Ibid., 101). The notes reflect the general tendency of Perec’s narrative to highlight its own fictionality, and they point to the faultiness or fragility of memory.

Suspension and orphanhood A blank page with three suspension points between parentheses separates the first second parts of W ou le souvenir d’enfance. With respect to the alternating structure of the novel, they take the place of the first autobiographic chapter of the second part, after the child boards the train 86

CACHE-CACHE

to Villard-de-Lans and separates from his mother definitively. The suspension points reflect the child’s sense of incertitude and loss in the absence of his mother (Motte 2004a: 77). They represent the fracture and the original wound or trauma for the child (Ribaupierre 2001: 27). Alone and frightened, Perec is now left to fend for his own. The parenthesis with suspension points embody a childhood put on hold—interrupted. As psychoanalysts have pointed out, childhood is the single most formative period in a person’s identity. It is the point of departure, where all memories, values, ideologies, and behaviours find their anchor. It is the “cordonnées à partir desquelles les axes de [sa] vie pourront trouver leur sens” (Perec 1975: 25–26). 22 The life of an orphan, on the other hand, is marked by loneliness, non-belonging and absence: “Ce qui caractérise cette époque c’est avant tout son absence de repères” (Perec 1975: 97–98).23 Perec is passed around from aunt to aunt (“une fois, c’était une tante, et la fois après c’était une autre tante. Ou bien une grand-mère” (Perec 1975: 98)24), shuffling homes frequently (“on changeait de lieu, on allait dans une autre pension ou dans une autre famille” (Perec 1975: 98).25 The events are narrated in the detached third person pronoun “on”, as Perec recounts the events of a life he no longer recognized as his own. No link joins the memories; like his text, they lack coherence. Early stages of subject development require the existence of a stable family unit. The disruption caused by the death of a parent at such a young age, is irreparable. This is especially true for the loss of the mother, as psychoanalysts insist on the primacy of the child-mother bond before entry into the symbolic order of the Father, due to the child’s biological needs (i.e., breastfeeding). Although mostly unreliable and passed down, pseudomemories of Perec’s mother feature dominantly in the autobiographical chapters, whereas of Perec’s father, on the other hand, we know very little. Perec refers to his father’s death only one time, compared to three times his mother’s. He mentions only one photo of his father, but describes the five of his mother at length. They reflect the way in which Perec the child, unable to face the traumatic reality at the time, had to put his painful experience aside in order to survive. Psychoanalysts say that a latency period is part of the trauma structure where remembering typically comes after years of willed forgetfulness (Suleiman 1994: 211). Emotions associated with trauma are not typically experienced in real time but years later (Kaufman 1998: 46). Patients of trauma are said to repress or block memories of the traumatic event only to have them resurface many years later. This parenthetical nature of trauma applies to the collective as well. In Le Syndrome de Vichy, where Rousso first tackles the “amnésie collective” of Gaullist France, the words mourning, neurosis, forgetfulness, trauma are used systematically to describe France’s introspective trial with history (Scullion 1998: 110, 128). France as a nation had to put the memory of 87

N ancy A li

Vichy between parenthesis in order to move on after the war and heal the nation. It was not until thirty years later that the memory of the Shoah was revisited, owing to the outpouring of testimonies in the public arena and the mediatization of the Shoah in France and elsewhere, along with the triumph of ideologies centred on human rights since the 1970s which placed memory at the heart of society and history. Parachute jumps, which Perec undertook as part of his military service in 1958, are a repeated leitmotif across Perec’s oeuvre, W ou le souvenir d’enfance included. In the latter he describes the sentiments he felt while taking the leap: “je fus précipité dans le vide; tous les fils furent rompus; je tombai, seul et sans soutien” (Perec 1975: 81).26 Falling suspended in the air, with no sense of where one is going, describes the feelings of loss and abandonment that characterize orphanhood. Jumping into the unknown, alone, and with no support, reflects a sense of uneasiness in both the physical and metaphysical sense (Kaufman 1998: 44). The parachute, however, is also a symbol for life. The jump signifies thus both death (being thrown into misfortune) and life (being saved). Writing through trauma Adult survivors often take to writing to come to terms with their traumatic childhood, because writing fulfils the work of mourning. Children’s literature of atrocity is a confrontational writing space, making it the perfect setting for psychoanalysis, where the adult writer can work through childhood trauma. Holcoaust writing, in general, is underpinned with a therapeutic ethos that has helped fuel its culture (Kidd 2005: 121). Writing furnishes a healing space, where the writer can confront and work through deeply traumatic events: “J’écris pour vivre et je vis pour écrire” (Perec 1990: 71).27 The rootedness of writing compensates for Perec’s uprooting. Writing is a substitution for loss, an anchoring of traces. To archive, memorialize, and commemorate, to observe, to note, document and preserve the traces, this is the struggle of memory against forgetting, life against death. Perhaps the reason why Perec’s mother is more central to the narrative than his father is that while Perec’s father had a tomb, his mother, who was gassed in Auschwitz, “n’a pas de tombe” (Perec 1975: 61–62).28 Burial is a fundamental part of the mourning process, as evidence by the central role they occupy in all religions across time. Without a tomb for his mother, there is no closure (Magné 1998: 12), something that Perec tries to achieve through writing. From the fragments of memoires, the adult writer attempts to reassemble a coherent self. Writing is at once the therapy Perec needs to work through the trauma, and a means of commemorating those who are no longer with him. 88

CACHE-CACHE

Conclusion Historians and literary have shown growing interest in children’s voices, as witnesses of war. Children’s testimonies have elevated the child to the rank of a reliable witness and even expert interpreter (See Sarah Henry Children as Witnesses to History). As a result, children’s literature is ironically emerging as the most appropriate platform across which we can observe trauma (Kidd 2005: 120). Short sentences, bare facts, this is an unnarrativized trauma that rejects any neat resolution or coherence. The surge in autobiographical writings saw the ordinary man take up the pen to write his story—making way for the “democratization” of the actors of history—children included. Although they are typically disjointed, oblique, and tunnel-visioned, testimonies of children on war are invaluable due to their attention to detail and unassuming objectivity. They represent the holocaust brutally bare and honest. Perec’s novel on childhood trauma reminds us of the limitations of narrative and language. Self reflexive, discontinuous, and unembellished, his novel highlights the unreadability of trauma when transcribed to writing. The writing produced by adult survivors on childhood trauma represent striking similarities on the level of technique, and although they tell of different personal stories—hiding in occupied land, escape from war, life in the camps—together they point the systematic way by which historical trauma alters our modes of representation.

Notes 1 The 1970s marked the end of what historians refer to as the Gaullist myth of resistantialisme and unanimisme (Nora 4711) of the 1950s and 60s, which, for the sake of national solidarity, put forward the narrative that France was a nation of the resistance united against the Nazis. This rewriting of the war years’ history brushed over of the significant complicities of Vichy France, which with its different institutes as well as parts of the population, helped deport more than 75,000 Jews by 1942 (Scullion 109). After a long period of memoire refoulée (Rousso) or memory repression or amnesie coupable (Burgelin) with regards to the dark chapter of Vichy in France, the memory of the Shoah experienced a significant boom, a hyerpmeneise or even obsession from which many autobiographies, memoires, documentaries, and films on the traumatic experience of he Jews and others in the war began to surface. 2 “The struggle for life here is the law” (my translation). 3 “To a certain extent, if not the story than a story of my childhood” (my translation). 4 “I do not have any childhood memories. . . . History dispensed me from them: another story, the big one, History with its capital H/big axe, answered in my place: the war, the camps” (my translation). 5 “With this work I seek to find the way in which this childhood is given back to me” (my translation). 6 See Halbwachs Les cadres sociaux. 7 “Fiction based on events and facts that are strictly real” (my translation).

89

N ancy A li

8 “Me, I would have liked to help my mom clean up after dinner. On the table, there would be tablecloth with blue small squares. . . . I would then go fetch my school bag, take out my book, notebooks and utensil wood, place them on the table and do my homework. It is like this that it was described in my school books” (my translation). 9 “She was interned in Drancy on the 23rd of January 1943, then deported to Auschwitz the 11th of February” (my translation). 10 “quasi statistical information” (my translation). 11 “For long I believed Hitler had entered Poland on 7 March 1936. But I was wrong, about the date or the country, but this is of no real importance” (my translation). 12 “Arrival at camp: Descent from train hope, relief. Blood on the snow. I eat the snow. A wagon full of dead bodies passes by us. I lost my shoe in the train” (my translation). 13 “I do not know what my dad would have done if he had lived. What is most curious is that his death, and that of my mother, appear to me as obviously inevitable. It has entered into the order of things” (my translation). 14 All references to the primary text W ou le souvenir d’enfance by Perec have been referred to as W in this chapter. 15 See Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel, for a thorough definition of the kafkaesque. 16 “My dream is a reality. Now we are free! No more hide-and-seek, no more lies. No more false papers. Nothing to eat away at my heart” (my translation). 17 For a more detailed discussion on the relationship between experimentation and writings of adult survivors who were children during the war, look at Crisis of Memory Chapter 8, “The Edge of Memory: Experimental Writing and the 1.5 Generation”. 18 “Once again, the traps of writing were set in place. Once again, I was like a child playing hide-and-seek who des not know what he fears or wants more: to hide or to be found” (my translation). 19 See Philippe Lejeune, La mémoire et l’oblique for an in-depth analysis of Perec’s innovative narrative. 20 Perec underwent psychoanalysis at three different times in his life: first with Françoise Dolto during his childhood, and then with Michel de Muszan during the year 1956, and finally with Jean-Baptiste Lefevre-Pontalis in the 1970s (“Work of Mourning” 57). 21 “The first photo [. . .] a close up of my mother and I. The mother and child give the impression of happiness that the shadow of the photography accentuates. I am in the arms of my mother” (my translation). 22 “Coordinates from which the axes of [his] life can find their meaning” (my translation). 23 “Now the memories exist, fleeting or tenacious, futile or pressing, but nothing holds them together. They are like this writing discontinuous [. . .] What characterizes this period above all is the absence of landmarks [. . .] There is no beginning or end. There is no past, and for a very long time, there was no future either: time simply passed” (my translation). 24 “Once it was an Aunt, then the next time it was another aunt. Or maybe a grandmother” (my translation). 25 “One moved from place to place, one went to another boarding school or to another family” (my translation). 26 “I jumped into nothingness; all the threads were severed; I fell alone and without support” (my translation).

90

CACHE-CACHE

27 “I write to live and I live to write, and I don’t think I am far to assume that writing and living are so intertwined” (my translation). 28 “My mother has no tomb” (my translation). See Magné “Les descriptions de photographies dans W ou le souvenir d’enfance”.

References Adorno, Theodor W. 1982. Prisms. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press. Astro, Alan. 1987. ‘Allegory in Georges Perec’s W ou le souvenir d’enfance’. Modern Language Notes 102(4): 867–876. Ball, Karyn. 2008. Disciplining the Holocaust. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Beaumatin, Eric. 1985. ‘L’autobibliographie: notes préliminaires à l’étude d’un corpus et d’un genre’. In Cahiers Georges Perec I, Colloque de Cerisy (Juillet 1984), 281–287. Paris: P.O.L. Beggar, Awatif. 2000. ‘W ou le souvenir d’enfance: une autobiographie sous contrainte’. In L’oeuvre de Georges Perec, réception et mythisation, Actes du colloque de Rabat, Université Mohamed V. Série Colloques et séminaires n° 101, 129–133. Rabat. Textes réunis par Jean Luc Joly. Bernstein, Michael André. 1998. ‘Victims-in-Waiting: Back-shadowing and the Representation of European Jewry’. New Literary History 29(4): 625–651. Brunel, Pierre. 2001. Glissements du roman français au XXe siècle. Paris: Klincksieck. Burgelin, Claude. 1988. Georges Perec. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Colonna, Vincent. 1985. ‘Fausses Notes’. In Cahiers Georges Perec 1, Colloque de Cerisy (Juillet 1984), 96–109. Paris: P.O.L. Doubrovsky, Serge. 1977. Fils. Paris: Éditions Galilée. Gensburger, Sarah (dir.). 2012. C’étaient des enfants, Déportation et sauvetage des enfants juifs à Paris (Exposition “C’étaient des enfants”, Hôtel de Ville, 26 juin‑27 octobre 2012). Paris: ESFP. Heck, Maryline. 2007. ‘La Fabrique du souvenir: Mémoire réelle et mémoire fictive dans "W ou le souvenir d’enfance" de Georges Perec et "Dora Bruder" de Patrick Modiano’. In L’Autobiographique 2, edited by Brian T. Fitch, Julie Leblanc, and Andrew Oliver, 123–149. Paris: Les Editions Trintexte. Hutcheon, Linda. 1989. The Politics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge. Kaufman, Eleanor. 1998. ‘Falling from the Sky: Trauma in Perec’s W and Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience’. Diacritics 28(4): 44–53. Kidd, Kenneth B. 2005. ‘ “A” Is for Auschwitz: Psychoanalysis, Trauma Theory, and the Children’s Literature of Atrocity’. Children’s Literature 33(1): 120–149. Kristeva, Julia. 2005. La haine et le pardon, Pouvoirs et limites de la psychanalyse III. Paris: Fayard. LaCapra, Dominick. 1999. ‘Trauma, Absence, Loss’. Critical Inquiry 25(4): 696–727. LaCapra, Dominick. 2014. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press. Lejeune, Philippe. 1991. La mémoire et l’oblique. Paris: P.O.L. Magné, Bernard. 1998. ‘Les descriptions de photographies dans W ou le souvenir d’enfance’. In Perec et l’image. Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail.

91

N ancy A li

Motte Jr., Warren F. 1984. The Poetics of Experiment, a Study of the Work of Georges Perec. Lexington, KY: French Forum Publishers. Motte Jr., Warren F. 2004a. ‘Contrainte et catastrophe’. Cahiers Georges Perec 8. Motte Jr., Warren F. 2004b. ‘The Work of Mourning’. Yale French Studies 105: 56–71. Perec, Georges. 1975. W ou le souvenir d’enfance. Paris: Denoel. Perec, Georges. 1990. Je suis né. Paris: Editons du Seuil. Ribaupierre, Claire de. 2001. Le roman généalogique: Claude Simon et Georges Perec. Brussels: Part de l’oeil. Ricoeur, Paul. 1983. Temps et récit 1: L’intrigue et le récit historique. Paris: Seuil. Sagnol, Marc. 2006. ‘Georges Perec, littérature du déracinement’. In Georges Perec, Inventivité, postérité, 227–239. Cluj-Napoca: Casa Cărții de Ştință. Scullion, Rosemarie. 1998. ‘Georges Perec, W, and the Memory of Vichy France’. SubStance 27(3): 107–129. Sirvent, Michel. 2007. Georges Perec ou le Dialogue des genres. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. Suleiman, Susan Rubin. 1994. Risking Who One Is: Encounters With Contemporary Art and Literature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Suleiman, Susan Rubin. 2006. Crisis of Memory and the Second World War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Terr, Lenore C. 1991. ‘Childhood Traumas: An Outline and Overview’. Focus Pyschiatry 148(13): 32210–33420. Van der Hart, Onno, and Rutger Horst. 1989. ‘The Dissociation Theory of Pierre Janet’. Journal of Traumatic Stress 2(4): 397–412. Vice, Sue. 2004. Children Writing the Holocaust. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Waintrater, Régine. 2006. ‘Témoignage et reconstruction identitaire’. In Enfants Cachés, Analyses et Débats, edited by Danielle Bailly. Paris: L’Harmattan.

92

7 NEGOTIATING TRAUMA The child protagonist and state violence in Midnight’s Children and Cracking India Someshwar Sati and Chinmaya Lal Thakur the new traumatic event [9/11] merged with the childhood events, so that history and memory, time and space collapsed into one present time of terror; 9/11 produced a new subjectivity. —–E. Ann Kaplan, Trauma Culture NEGOTIATING TRAUMA

SOMESHWAR SATI AND CHINMAYA LAL THAKUR

It is difficult to delineate exactly what constitutes a traumatic experience and to what extent such experiences impact the process of constitution of the individual self. E. Ann Kaplan in Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature critically explores these questions. Speaking of her own experience of trauma triggered by the attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York on 11 September 2001, she argues that the trauma caused by the incident shattered the world of innocence associated with her childhood as well as the memories of her pre-traumatic existence. 9/11 made Kaplan respond to the world differently and respond to it in ways that unambiguously reflected her experience of the event. In fact, she suggests that the terrorist attack violently subsumed within itself the historical and spatial coordinates of her identity post 9/11 and even her present retrospective perception of her pre-traumatic self (Kaplan 2005: 4). Though for Kaplan 9/11 may have resulted in a traumatic experience, she experienced trauma as a long drawn out process that produced an awareness of an altogether new subjectivity—one that is markedly influenced by the historical event to the point that the subject’s methods of engagement with the world seem to be unilaterally defined by the event. Drawing from the noted psychoanalyst and theorist Julia Kristeva’s critical study of the representation of melancholia in literature, philosophy, and history called Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (1992), Kaplan argues that such a change in the individual subject’s perception and behaviour is caused because the traumatic experience becomes the central reference point for his or her engagement with the world. The subject’s memories predating the onset of trauma, for instance, come to collapse in the post-traumatic “now” 93

S omeshwar S ati and C hinmaya L al T hakur

so that the traumatic experience comes to occupy the centre stage in his or her mindscape. In the light of the complex negotiations that take place between an individual’s subjectivity and his or her experience of trauma as underlined by Kaplan, the present paper seeks to focus on the politics of the representation of such negotiations in literary texts. It seeks to examine the relationship between subjectivity and trauma through Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) and Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India (1991) as both these novels feature children protagonists who undergo traumatic experiences of great historical import. Saleem Sinai, the narrator and protagonist of Rushdie’s novel, is shown experiencing painful torture leading to his castration during the national Emergency1 imposed by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1975 while Lenny, the physically disabled protagonist of Sidhwa’s text, suffers greatly during the Partition of British India in 1947 which led to the creation of the modern nations of India and Pakistan. The current paper demonstrates that in these novels, the child-subject undergoes trauma in such a way that his or her traumatic experience is accompanied by the aching process of socio-sexual realization on his or her part. This psychic maturity also comes to reveal an awareness on the part of Saleem Sinai and Lenny that they occupy liminal positions in the postcolonial nation with their disabilities serving as the synecdoche of their positions. Predictably, the postcolonial nation state is also thus configured in the narratives of both these novels as one that has not been able to live up to the expectations and aspirations of those who participated in the anti-colonial struggle with the aim of developing a (postcolonial) Indian or Pakistani nation state governed by the values of fairness, equality, and justice. How does trauma impact the child-protagonist? Why do these novels present the process of the childprotagonist attaining sexual, cultural, and emotional maturity and the experience of trauma caused by the State systems to him or her in ways that are parallel to each other? By addressing questions such as these through critical readings of Midnight’s Children and Cracking India, the paper develops a nuanced understanding of the ways in which trauma and childhood are ideologically interlaced in the narrative of the postcolonial nation state. The critical discourse around Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children always seeks to understand the novel as the representation of the paradigmatic case of the failure of the postcolonial Indian nation state to live up to the hopes and aspirations of those who struggled against the colonial rule in the country. Jawaharlal Nehru, who became independent India’s first Prime Minister, was the figure around whom such hopes of establishing a culturally diverse and yet an all-inclusive postcolonial Indian nation state were galvanized. Pratap Bhanu Mehta, writing on the occasion of the 125th birth anniversary of Nehru, highlights the vital role that the latter actually did go on to play in bringing together the large Indian populace under the umbrella of the then newly draught Constitution of India which granted 94

N egotiating trauma

equality before law to all citizens of the country and espoused unity in diversity. He writes, It required an extraordinary ability to earn the trust of millions in a way no one could rival, and then manoeuvre their conflicts and contradictions, their virtues and vices, fears and hopes, into an enduring republic. We so take for granted the Republic whose values we cherish and freedoms we enjoy, that we often forget what a singular and fragile achievement it is. Nehru is one of those handful of legislators who truly is amongst the founders of a republic that will endure beyond its individual triumphs and failures. (Mehta 2014: 2) If one were to carefully consider the said emergence of Nehru as the most important representative of postcolonial India’s polity and as the trusted custodian of colonial India’s expectations from its postcolonial future, it is hardly surprising to note that Rushdie makes the protagonist of Midnight’s Children, Saleem Sinai, receive a congratulatory letter from Nehru himself at the time of the former’s birth that coincides with the birth of postcolonial India—the concluding hour of the night of 14 August 1947. In fact, Rushdie’s novel works through the deliberate construction and consolidation of the parallel between postcolonial India and Saleem. It is Nehru, again, who is made to seal this parallel by declaiming in his letter, “Your life, which will be in a sense, the mirror of our own” (Rushdie 2010: 330). In the context of the relationship between the life of Saleem Sinai and that of postcolonial India, it must be remembered that the former comes to give way and cede almost total control to the latter. Sinai’s bare life, as it were, comes to be controlled by the state machinery that is ostensibly aimed at making postcolonial India walk on the path of progress and development. Camilla Karlsson thus rightly argues that “there is a connection between the violence done to Saleem’s body and the violence in the country” (Karlsson 2007: 24). To illustrate her claim, she refers to at least three instances when real, historical acts of violence get textually configured in Rushdie’s novel. When communal riots erupt in Calcutta and Dhaka, Saleem’s teacher tears the hair of his head. When the Indo-Pak war of 1965 breaks out, Saleem is hit on his head with silver spittoons and ends up losing his memory. Ultimately, along with the other children of midnight, i.e., those who were also born at the midnight hour of the 14 August 1947, he is castrated when Nehru’s daughter and Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declare the state of national Emergency in India. A careful consideration of Karlsson’s examples would reveal that Midnight’s Children lends itself, and rightly so, to allegorical readings in which Saleem’s story is read as an allegory of the story of postcolonial India and the violence perpetrated on Saleem mirrors the embodied and localized social violence that manifests widely in India. 95

S omeshwar S ati and C hinmaya L al T hakur

Significantly, however, she does not highlight the role of the postcolonial state as the direct agent of this violence. Her reading of Rushdie’s novel suggests that both the state and the individuals such as Saleem Sinai are functions in the larger historical narrative of the development of postcolonial societies and represent, at best, localized landmarks in the said process of development. However, as Clare Barker’s detailed study of Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children included in her recently published volume Postcolonial Fiction and Disability: Exceptional Children, Metaphor, and Materiality demonstrates, an allegorical reading of the novel is not the best method to engage with the text. Allegorical criticism, by definition, is a formalist method of critical analysis that deliberately elides questions of history, polity, and society in its reading of texts. Instead, Barker rightly suggests that Midnight’s Children is best read as a critical engagement with the relationship between the individual subject of the postcolonial Indian state and the mighty Indian nation state itself. Unlike Karlsson, Barker thus believes that the postcolonial Indian subjects have been deliberately treated with great disfavour, mistrust, and gross violence by the state and made to suffer the painful experience of trauma. To her, the traumatic effect of the Emergency on Saleem Sinai and the other children of midnight is a case in point. While Karlsson would like Sinai’s castration and the “social disturbance” caused by the Emergency to be placed together, Barker categorically identifies the Emergency as state violence inflicted upon the bodies of individual citizens.2 She argues, “. . . the Emergency is depicted in the novel [Midnight’s Children] as a state of exception in which [Indira] Gandhi (or ‘the Widow’, as Saleem characterizes her) exercises supreme sovereignty over Indian citizens’ lives and bodies, dictating who will live or die and what functions their bodies will be permitted to perform” (Barker 2012: 147). The Indian state’s declaration of the Emergency and the events that followed became a traumatic experience for many. The representation of this pain and trauma does signal the way in which Rushdie’s novel construes the relationship between a citizen and the postcolonial state. The Midnight Children’s Conference organized by Saleem along with the other children of midnight in the novel, as Barker recognizes, is the inclusive, secular, and Nehruvian counterpart to the authoritarian face of the state as reflected in the Emergency (Barker 2012: 137–140). The 550 odd children with their special and unique magical abilities assembled telepathically for the Conference is a microcosmic representation of the Nehruvian ideal of the perfect democratic space—a space that allows for the fearless expression of differences in opinion. The postcolonial state that imposes Emergency is a sharp break from this inclusive ideal as it seeks to homogenize those that it rules over. Barker locates this impulse to homogenize in the act of castration forced on Saleem and others during the Emergency itself—an act that seeks to create a forced commonality among diverse individuals. Surgical 96

N egotiating trauma

“ectomies” and castration rob the children of their magical capabilities and render them ordinary and “normal”. Thus, Nehru’s secular and democratic idealism ultimately proves to be a mirage as a unitary, regulated, and exclusivist conception of Indian-ness is promoted by the state. This shift that has come about in the manner in which the postcolonial nation state deals with its own citizen-subjects makes the children of midnight, along with Sinai, want to go back in time to their childhood—as if undoing a socio-political change in real terms were possible. In words marked by the terribly sad irony of disenchantment and disappointment with the contemporary postcolonial state, faced as these subjects are by state-sponsored trauma, Sinai states, “If there is a third principle [that does not divide boundaries], its name is childhood. But it dies; or, rather it is murdered” (Cited in Barker 2012: 149). This is of course a statement of resentment against the postcolonial Indian nation state but it is also simultaneously a realization of the fact that the Emergency has also brought about emotional and political maturity for the children of midnight as they have come to realize the real face of their relationship with the state. Much like Kaplan who, as outlined in the epigraph to this essay, recognizes the sheer emotional and psychic impact of 9/11 on herself that renders her pre-9/11 identity totally subsumed under the terrible influence of the catastrophic event, they come to understand that instead of recognizing their varied unique skills, the state seeks to violently get rid of them to promote a selective narrative of belongingness in/to India. Like Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India makes a critical intervention in the context of the examination of the relationship between the child subject, the experience of trauma, and the political strategies of the postcolonial nation state. However, unlike the former text, the dominant tone in the evocation of the relationship between the citizen-subject and the postcolonial Pakistani nation state in Sidhwa’s novel is not one of disenchantment and disillusionment caused by the failure of the foundational and Constitutional ideals of inclusiveness and meaningful democracy, but of a sense of loss in the face of the Partition of the Indian subcontinent along religious lines. This sense of loss is principally felt by Lenny, the protagonist of the novel and a young girl in a rich upper-class Parsee household in pre-Independence Lahore (present day Pakistan). Critics such as Kamran Rastegar and Clare Barker have argued that Sidhwa’s novel Cracking India deals with two intersecting themes. The maturity that the eight-year-old Lenny attains as the novel’s narrative reaches its end is both sexual and social—she comes to understand her position as a gendered female subject as well as one belonging to a religious minority identity with actual socio-political power residing in the hands of the warring Hindus and Muslims. Her identity as a disabled subject, her foot being afflicted with polio, negotiates between her identities of being a young woman and being a Parsee in (post)colonial Pakistan. Rastegar rightly suggests that 97

S omeshwar S ati and C hinmaya L al T hakur

underlying the novel’s foregrounding of Lenny as the central character (in the second half of the novel, Lenny’s Hindu nurse Ayah takes centre stage) who critiques increasing social tensions between the Hindus and the Muslims as British India gets closer to Partition as well as the gendering of young women into conventional sexual norms is the perspective of psychosocial “innocence” that it grants to her (Rastegar 2006: 26). He highlights two incidents from the novel that expose the vacuity of the political imagination that justified the demands for the division of British India into Pakistan and India. The Ice-Candy Man, one of the young Muslim men in the locality, asks Ayah one day why she wears the sari and not the Punjabi shalwar-kamize. The latter has a simple answer to this. She argues that wearing a sari is way more economical than the Punjabi shalwar-kamize. At that moment, it strikes Lenny that she herself has become so accustomed to see Ayah in a sari that she does not even want to know why the latter did not wear the shalwar-kamize. She says to herself, “Though it has never struck me as strange before—I am so accustomed to Ayah only in a sari—I see the logic of this question and wonder about it” (Cited in Rastegar 2006: 28). The Ice-Candy Man’s ideological and rhetorical combining of partisan and reactionary politics with nationalist mytho-poesis irks Lenny as she starts feeling the pressures of the social into a world that she had hitherto known as entirely personal, “innocent” and domestic. She states, “Mother, Father and their friends are always saying: Gandhi said this, Nehru said that. Gandhi did this. Jinnah did that. What’s the point of talking so much about people we don’t know” (Cited in Rastegar: 28)? Needless to state that she herself finds it important to make such remarks because she begins to realize that the comments and views of these “unknown” men are increasingly having a great impact on her relationships with her family members and servants. It must be pointed out however that unlike Ayah who is raped and the young Muslim boy Ranna who loses his parents, Lenny remains largely protected from undergoing any direct traumatic experience relating to the Partition on account of her privileged class and economic background. It is only in her conversations with Ranna and her unwitting help to those who were seeking the location of Ayah in order to violate the latter that Lenny is ultimately completely exposed to the socio-political significance of the Partition.3 Underlying Lenny’s psycho-sexual development into a young Parsee woman from being an eight-year old girl in Lahore is the synecdoche of the polio affliction that she suffers in her foot. Clare Barker in a symbolic reading of this incident of severing rightly suggests that Lenny’s foot serves the function of the Indian subcontinent being partitioned in 1947. The experience is as painful to Lenny as it has been for those who suffered on both sides of the border (Barker 2012: 117). Consequently, Lenny limps in one foot and depends on the other for proper balance and posture. Barker 98

N egotiating trauma

suggests that the weak limb represents Pakistan, the nation state that historically has not been able to maintain a rigorous and healthy democratic tradition in its polity. The second foot gives strength to Lenny much in the same way as Ayah has taken care of her. Thus, Lenny slowly realizes the politics of the several contours of her traumatized and painful existence. As Kaplan recognizes, as underlined in the epigraph to this essay, that her life post 9/11 will never be the same as before the event, Lenny comes to understand what it means to be a minority Parsee in Pakistan, to be affluent so that she escapes the suffering that Ranna and Ayah had to go through, and to be a disabled subject who is very conscious of the manner in which she moves from one place to another. Much like Saleem Sinai in Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, she realizes the liminal and ordinary position she occupies in the postcolonial Pakistani nation state on account of her being a disabled Parsee woman. However, unlike Sinai, Lenny’s story cannot be told just in terms of consequent and natural disappointment and disillusionment. Both Clare Barker and Sangeeta Ray have highlighted the fact that Cracking India concludes with Lenny becoming acutely conscious of the socio-political position she occupies in terms of both privileges and disadvantages. This consciousness allows her to negotiate her own situation as well as that of those around her. In this connection, Ray rightly reads a particular scene from the novel as that of “self-flagellation”—Lenny deliberately bruises her tongue while brushing her teeth one day- i.e., as Lenny’s acknowledgement of her own complicity in an unfortunate incident (Ray 2000: 137). In a similar vein, Barker reads her successful attempt at rehabilitating Ayah after the latter has been raped and forced to live with the Ice-Candy Man as an exercise of her subjective agency. By speaking with the God-mother, she lets Ayah return to Amritsar, away from the Ice-Candy Man (Barker: 124). Clearly, unlike Sinai and the other children of Midnight, Lenny is acutely aware of the socio-political position that she occupies in postcolonial Lahore and she tries her best to reconcile it with the many painful fissures around her. In conclusion, it can thus be argued that both Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India represent stories of Saleem Sinai and Lenny, respectively, as stories of those individual subjects who face traumatic experiences during their adolescence. The experiences of the Emergency and the Partition of India, respectively, bring pain and suffering also to those around them as these experiences have the capability to completely rewrite people’s social, psychic, and political worldviews. Their trauma is thus a combination of nationalist appropriation of their subjectivity through instrumental governmentality exercised by the postcolonial nation state, exposure to direct and subtle physical violence, and their disability. Saleem and Lenny’s engagement with the postcolonial nation states of India and Pakistan, respectively, therefore makes them realize the marginalized socio-political position that they occupy in the nationalist imaginations 99

S omeshwar S ati and C hinmaya L al T hakur

of the two countries. Sinai in Midnight’s Children, however, is disappointed and disillusioned while Lenny in Cracking India tries her best to adjust to the changing and changed socio-political circumstances of her life as well as of those around her.

Notes 1 India was under Emergency for a period of twenty-one months from June 1975 to March 1977. The Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was authorised by President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed to rule by decree. Civil rights and the conduct of elections were suspended during the period. 2 Barker’s understanding of the state of exception is drawn from Giorgio Agamben’s work State of Exception (2005). In this sequel to his celebrated account Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998), Agamben details the manner in which sovereignty transcends the rule of law not in exceptional and unusual circumstances but as a norm in the practise of governmentality. 3 With regard to the role of Ranna in the narrative of Cracking India, Pin-chia Feng rightly points out that ‘Ranna’s Story’ in the novel is narrated to the reader in the third person. This marks a two-fold attempt on the author Sidhwa’s part. One, to suggest to the reader that this narrative is not available for Lenny to become a witness to it on account of her stable social position and two, to present some kind of a testimony of thousands of those missing children who voices were silenced forever during the violence of the Partition. (Feng 2011: 233) The suggestion here seems to be that Ranna’s account of the Partition-related killings of his family in his village ‘Pir Pindo’ and large-scale rioting in Amritsar can serve as the alternate entry point into a discussion of childhood and Partition in Sidhwa’s novel. This paper, however, does not take this up in detail because of its sustained attention to the character of Lenny.

References Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller- Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Agamben, Giorgio. 2005. State of Exception. Trans. Kevin Attell. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Barker, Clare. 2012. Postcolonial Fiction and Disability: Exceptional Children, Metaphor and Materiality. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Feng, Pin-chia. 2011. ‘Birth of Nations: Representing the Partition of India in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India’. Chang Gung Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences 4(2): 225–240. Kaplan, E. Ann. 2005. Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Karlsson, Camilla. 2007. ‘Cracks, Fragments and Disintegration’. In Midnight’s Children, edited by Salman Rushdie, 1. Lulea: Lulea University of Technology. Kristeva, Julia. 1992. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Mehta, Pratap Bhanu. 2014. ‘Bigger Than the Sum of His Contradictions’. Open 14 November: 1–12. www.openthemagazine.com/article/voices/bigger-than-the-sumof-his-imperfections (accessed on 16 November 2015).

100

N egotiating trauma

Rastegar, Kamran. 2006. ‘Trauma and Maturation in Women’s War Narratives: The Eye of the Mirror and Cracking India’. Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 2(3): 22–47. Ray, Sangeeta. 2000. En-Gendering India: Woman and Nation in Colonial and Postcolonial Narratives. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rushdie, Salman. 2010. Midnight’s Children. London: Random House. First published in 1981. Sidhwa, Bapsi. 1991. Cracking India. Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions.

101

8 QUEST INTO THE PAST Heroic quest and narrative of trauma in Jane Yolen’s Briar Rose Vandana Saxena The theme of trauma sits uneasily next to the genre of young adult literature. Young adult fiction is meant to smooth away the psychological obstacles in the path of growth and hence make way for socialization and acculturation of the child (McCallum 1999: 7). Hence even when delving into history, it is a genre of hope and future, and trauma seems antithetical to the role, function and, indeed the very purpose of children’s and young adult fiction which focuses on the promise for the future embodied by the young protagonist as well as the assumed reader. However, in the twenty-first century world living under the constant shadow of war and terror, the confrontation between trauma and hope has become inevitable. The events of the last century forcefully brought to fore the fact that terror and violence do not discriminate in terms of age. Personal and collective trauma resurfaces repeatedly in the narratives of childhood of the last few decades contesting the essential optimism, future orientation, and the project of “correct” psychical and social growth that Children’s literature is meant to effect. How do the writers of children’s and young adult literature readers reconcile this dilemma that sits at the heart of the genre? How does one narrate trauma without transferring its cognitive effects to the young readers, and at the same time resist the urge to simplify and sentimentalize the narrative to suit the young readers? Critics like Kenneth Kidd (2005), Hamida Bosmajian (2002), and Adrienne Kertzer (2002) have discussed the problems and limitations of Children’s literature when confronted with the theme of trauma. Discussing Holocaust narrative for young adults, Lydia Kokkola (2003) asserts that “Holocaust literature for children can be conceived as having a greater moral obligation to be historically accurate than historical fiction dealing with less catastrophic events” (p. 3). Indeed, the impulse behind the Holocaust literature meant for children and young adult writers lies in the ethical obligation to future generations to remember the past. “Hence in the United States, Holocaust education has found wide support QUEST INTO THE PAST

102

VANDANA SAXENA

Q uest into the past

and endorsement in the institutes of higher learning (Lasner and Cohen 2014). Literature features as a prominent resource material and the last two decades have seen a rise in the young adult novels telling the readers about the Nazi genocide of European Jews during the Second World War. However, scholars like B.J. Epstein have cautioned educators and writers against the potential dangers of exposing the young readers to psychological stress that they might not be ready to deal with (Epstein, Andrews, Gray and Maws 2013). In order to resolve the dilemma, the authors of young adult fictions have reconfigured the tropes of the genre to integrate the themes of historical trauma and terror as well as the accompanying ethical obligation to remember. Donald Hasse (2000) has pointed out how the genres of Children’s literature like the fairy tales offer a space to reinterpret a child’s experience of the traumatic environments. In his analysis of the element of role play and fantasy in Jane Yolen’s The Devil’s Arithmetic, Daniel Feldman (2015) argues that by using fantasy to ensure the survival of the protagonist, Yolen uses the structure of fantasy “to shelter preteen and adolescent readers from completely confronting the legacy of the horrific past” (p. 86). Similarly, I have elsewhere have explored the fictional figure of a storyteller who assumes the fairy tale character—a Mother Hubbard or Mother Goose like figure—to establish intergenerational contact and, at the same time, maintain the crucial distance between the victim and the listener (Saxena 2014). This paper explores another prominent narrative of children’s and young adult literature—the story of the heroic quest and its ability to narrate trauma. The familiar narrative of the hero’s exile and quest through the perilous realm becomes a journey into the past, into memory and history. It offers a space to review and reinterpret the present. The heroic quest, hence, becomes a way to make sense of how the trauma of the past shapes the present, especially for the generation that has not lived and experienced the events in all their horrific immediacy. In her 1992 novel Briar Rose, Jane Yolen frames the narrative of Holocaust and traumatic memory in one of the prominent stories of Children’s fiction—the fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty. The fairy tale that acquires ominous overtones as it is told and retold in the course of the book, leads Becca, the young protagonist to go in search of her grandmother’s past. Hence, the narratives of trauma and heroic quest overlap. As Becca traverses Poland and visits the extermination camp where her grandmother was incarcerated during the war, her quest becomes an injunction to remember the forgotten trauma and create a space for it in her personal and collective memory. It echoes the ethical obligation of the listener to remember. Inga Clendinnen (1999) insists on the moral imperative that lies behind Holocaust literature, that “these things were done—some survived to tell what had been done. We, to whom such things have not been done, have an obligation to be attentive” (54–55). Through multiple layers 103

V andana S axena

of storytelling that the quest narrative opens itself up to, the text negotiates the distance—temporal as well as spatial—between the trauma and horrors of the past and the security and confidence of the younger generation.

Narratives of trauma In Claude Lanzmann’s epic film “Shoah”, Simon Srebnik, one of the two survivors of Chelmno death camp, on his later visit to the site, encounters the impossibility of the experience: “No one can describe it. No one can recreate what happened here. Impossible. And no one can understand it. Even I here, now”. The complete impossibility and incomprehensibility of the past is so numbing that the response precludes simple understanding or remembering. This constitutes, what Cathy Caruth (1995) calls, the enigmatic core of trauma: “Central to the very immediacy of this experience, that is, is a gap that carries the force of the event and does so precisely at the expense of simple knowledge and memory. The force of this experience would appear to arise precisely, in other words, in the collapse of understanding” (1995: 7). Hence, trauma is an extraordinary experience that confounds the ordinary forms of understanding. On an individual level, the understanding continues to elude the “I”, “here, now” who inhabits a world of safety which makes the death camp seem impossible, distant, and unreal. Yet the memories constantly revisit the site and the experience of trauma that is beyond language or any other form of representation. The response holds together contradictory elements: “One is the traumatic event, registered rather than experienced. It seems to have bypassed perception and consciousness and falls directly into the psyche. The other is a kind of memory of the event, in the form of a perpetual troping of it by the bypassed or severely split (dissociated) psyche” (Hartman 1995: 537). In Briar Rose, Yolen deals with the unrepresentability of trauma by constant repetition of the story of Briar Rose or Sleeping Beauty in the Woods. Gemma, Becca’s grandmother takes on a new name, a new identity as she creates a new life for herself in America. Yet her frequent retelling of the story of Sleeping Beauty hints of another within the self—the other distanced by time, space, and trauma that continually need to be suppressed in order to live. The unrepresentablity and incomprehensibility make trauma and the traumatic memories the “symptoms of history” that problematize the linear narratives of history. It is an experience that lies outside the bounds of expression or comprehension, resisting the frameworks of language or a realistic narrative. Hence the survivors carry the impossibilities or the silences of history “where we begin to recognize the possibility of a history which is no longer straightforwardly referential (that is, no longer based on simple models of experience and reference)” (Caruth 1996: 182). The breach between experience and reference, between event and understanding 104

Q uest into the past

leads to a response that is delayed and repetitive. They manifest in dreams, hallucinations, and stories that attempt to convey the horror when human understanding and search for meaning encounters insurmountable past; ‘The traumatized, we might say, carry an impossible history within them, or they become themselves the symptom of a history that they cannot entirely possess” (Caruth 1995: 5). The traumatic experiences create an unmeasurable breach—between the victim and the listener as the victims become the “ambassadors of an exceptional realm, bearers of a higher (albeit more terrible) knowledge than is available to the rest of us” (Belau 2001: 1). Scholars like Dori Laub (1992) and Dominick LaCapra (2001) insist that this distance between the victim and the listener is crucial for Holocaust testimony: The listener has to feel the victim’s victories, defeats and silences, know them from within, so that they can assume the form of testimony. The listener, however, is also a separate human being and will experience hazards and struggles of his own while carrying out his function of a witness to the trauma witness. While overlapping to a degree, with the experience of the victim, he nonetheless does not become the victim—he preservers his own separate place, position and perspective; a battleground for forces raging in himself, to which he has to pay attention and respect if he is to properly carry out his task. (LaCapra 2001: 58) How does one tell such impossible narratives to a group of readers and yet enable the listener to feel the “victim’s victories, defeats, and silences”? And more importantly how does one evade the danger of identifying with the victim and hence be subject to the same psychological trauma instead of preserving the radical distance between the victim and listener? The young adult authors have used the structure of the heroic quest to resolve this dilemma. Instead of the victim, the quest narrative centres on the young protagonist who has to bear witness and come to terms with the past. Often removed in terms of time and space, the journey of young protagonist is different from that of the victim. It is a journey towards intersubjectivity, empathy, and ethical responsibility.

The heroic quest Heroic quest seems to be an unlikely mode for narrating trauma. The quest, as scholars like Joseph Campbell (1949) and Northrop Frye (1957) point out, is about stabilizing ego. The Oedipal drama that frames the quest, the initiation and other stages in the hero’s life cycle relate to an adolescent as 105

V andana S axena

he/she finds his/her place in the world. The hero is brave; his story is meant to inspire the young readers; above all, despite his rebellion, he is firmly situated within a communal network. Used in the Young Adult fiction, the hero monomyth ensures a belief in coherent and knowable selfhood. Hence the structure of the heroic quest is one of prominent modes of storytelling in fantasy fiction and fairy tales. It echoes with the central task of Children’s and Young Adult narrative, that of instruction and socialization. Childhood and adolescence itself become an obstacle that is overcome by the hero as s/ he moves towards the state of maturity and adulthood. Thus, the underlying romantic ideologies that drive the narrative of a heroic quest cannot be easily placed alongside a trauma narrative—a narrative that questions the foundational ideals of humanism. Considering the impact of the Holocaust literature on romantic heritage, Lawrence Langer (1995) points out how uncomfortably the two themes sit next to each other: “infinitude of spirit dwindles to the defeat of the body, physical despair; the inviolable self ebbs into the violated self, defenceless against the fury of power; the idea of the future as a dream of unbounded possibility and automatic progress subsides into a nightmare of violence and annihilation, an abrupt end to everything we consider human” (1995: 4). However, on a closer look one can draw parallels between the hero monomyth and the structure of the rites of passage in primitive societies. Arnold VanGennep (1960) identified three distinct phases that constituted the ritesof-passage in various communities. The first phase is characterized by the separation of an individual from her social and cultural world. It is followed by the “liminal” phase where the individual is “betwixt and between” the structures of her community. This transitory or liminal phase is riddled with dangers since the protagonist has shed the security and familiarity offered by the known and entered an unknown world. In the final phase of the rite of passage, the protagonist would re-enter the society as a qualitatively different person—an adult. In the young adult fiction narrative of heroic quest—separation of the young protagonist from the safety and security of the home, the adventures during the journey and finally the return to the familiar—culminates with the reintegration of the individual as an adult member of the community. Hence, in the quest narrative “adolescence becomes a series of obstacles which the young adult protagonist overcomes on his/her way to adulthood” (Saxena 2012: 26–27). Delving deeper into the structure of the rites of passage, Victor Turner (1969) foregrounds the liminal phase as central to the rite. This phase is marked by extreme ambiguity and humility: “Liminal entities . . . may be represented as possessing nothing. They may be disguised as monsters, wear only a strip of clothing, or even go naked, to demonstrate that as liminal beings they have no status, property, insignia, secular clothing indicating rank or role, position in a kinship system. . . . It is as though they are being reduced or ground down to a uniform condition to be fashioned anew and 106

Q uest into the past

endowed with additional powers to enable them to cope with their new station in life (Turner 1969: 95). In a similar fashion, the hero in the perilous realm faces dangers and obstacles, entering “the belly of the whale” where “The hero, instead of conquering or conciliating the power of the threshold, is swallowed into the unknown, and would appear to have died . . . here, instead of passing outward, beyond the confines of the visible world, the hero goes inward, to be born again” (Campbell 1949: 83). In the context of the theme of trauma in the Holocaust literature, the liminal phase of the rite of passage or the perilous quest of the hero coincides with the journey of the young protagonist (and through him of the young reader) to discover the past, come to terms with the horror, and integrate it with present. Memory and trauma studies emphasize the role of postmemory and second-generation witness—the witness who did not experience the event first-hand but inherited the narratives of the victims, like Gemma’s granddaughters and the numerous other children of the survivors. The subsequent generations bear the mark of events that they did not experience. According to McGlothlin (2006), the engagement of these generations with the past “seeks to artistically restore some of the holes that riddle the memory of the catastrophe, to imagine an event of which one cannot be epistemologically certain, to tell the story to remember what the survivors themselves have forgotten” (10). The heroic quest of Becca, the granddaughter of the survivor reclaims and re-articulates the narrative of trauma and places it alongside the story of growth and maturation for the future generations.

Briar Rose As Yolen’s Briar Rose uses the structure of the heroic quest to revisit the past, the stages of the quest become a part of the process to know and situate the present with respect to the past. The heroic quest, in its initial stages, is closely linked to the idea of a breach—at the social as well as personal level. The quest begins with a call for adventure—a call that disrupts the ordinary, mundane life of the hero; a call that sounds from beyond the zones of familiarity and comfort that characterize the present. Gemma’s story of Sleeping Beauty arouses discomfort and unease. At the same time, it holds the listeners in a thrall. The story haunts her three granddaughters in their childhood. Thus, like an Old Wives’ tale passed from women to women, the story is Gemma’s legacy to her granddaughter. Instead of the Oedipal impulse that traditionally frames the quest of the hero, Becca’s quest is to reclaim the inheritance of her grandmother by retelling her story. Yolen uses the fairy tale archetype of three brothers of whom only the youngest one proves to be worthy of undertaking the quest. While the older granddaughters grow too old for the fairy story, Becca, the youngest and closest to Gemma believes in Gemma’s insistence on her death bed that she is Briar Rose. 107

V andana S axena

Hence like the guardian of the threshold, Gemma and her story hold within it the secrets suppressed and forgotten in the march of time. None of the family members know Gemma’s past, indeed even her name, as if her identity as Gemma (a childish mispronunciation of the word “grandmother”) came into being only as she reared her family in America. In the everyday relationship between an affectionate grandmother and her granddaughters the past seems too buried accept when it resurfaces during the sessions of storytelling. While Gemma’s version of the Sleeping Beauty disturbs and scares Becca’s friends, Becca insists on hearing the story repeatedly. Like Freud’s uncanny, Gemma’s “Sleeping Beauty of the Woods” is a traumatic expression of the fearsome experience that is estranged, alienated, or buried in the structures of “reality” as a strategy of survival. At the same time, it is an uncanny expression of estrangement, “unreality”, and fragility of the present with its illusions of contentment and safety. The recurrence of barbed wires, the mist1 that consumed all her family and citizens, the castle of death—these horrific motifs displace the fairy story that children are familiar with, the story which Freudian psychologists like Bruno Bettelheim have interpreted as a case history of latent female sexuality and passive socialization of girls. Like the wooden box with a carved rose, containing photographs, forms, and documents that the family cannot locate in the known past, the story emerges as a symptom of family history. It is a history that has been forgotten, probably wilfully, not probed because of the fear of pain. It is the story that haunts Gemma on her death bed, the broken, fractured tale that she leaves behind for her family. “I was the princess”! she cried again. “In the castle. The prince kissed me”. “Yes, Gemma”. “That castle is yours. It is all I have to leave you. You must find The castle in the sleeping woods. Promise me”. She tried again to sit up, despite the posie, her face now spotty with agitation. “I promise, Gemma”. “Promise me you will find the castle. Promise me you will find the prince. Promise me you will find the maker of the spells”.” “I said I promise, Gemma”. Becca couldn’t believe the strength in her grandmother’s hand. (Yolen 1992: 25) The promise to remember and retell Gemma’s story leads Becca into the past, into the memories so painful that they had to be hidden from the self in order to live. They resurface, insistently and mysteriously, compelling the hero to cross the threshold and visit the past. Becca promises to bring the story for the readers of her “alternative” newspaper—a story that challenges 108

Q uest into the past

the facts and figures of the official discourses. The records serve to obscure rather than throw light on Gemma’s past. It begins with the family speculation over her name—from Gemma to Gitl to Genevive to Dawna to Briar Rose. Like the memory that is remembered by being wilfully forgotten, the place of origin, the erstwhile home, is scratched off the form. The journey through to Chelmno is a journey into the perilous realm; through the belly of the whale where “The hero, instead of conquering or conciliating the power of the threshold, is swallowed into the unknown”. Various aides and mentors reconstruct the past variously. For Magda, Becca’s guide and the hero’s aide, history of Poland is the history of martyrs. The terror of Holocaust has to be subsumed under the narrative of martyrdom and sacrifice to keep alive the optimism in the present and for the future: “In the not-so-past history are many tragedies. Every family can recite them. The blood of so many martyrs are still wet on our soil” (Yolen 1992: 106). Yet this narrative of sacrifice and heroism is debunked by the other stories. The priest of the Church at Chelmno is not only the spiritual keeper but also a keeper of its darker memories. The people hold these memories and horror at bay by a forced insistence that “nothing” happened. The records of more than 300,000 people who were murdered in Chelmno are insistently and violently denied. The event and the accompanying sense of guilt are forcefully buried till it resurfaces in the moments of crisis—told to the priest in confession boxes and death beds. Josef Potocki’s story questions and modifies the tropes of quest at several levels. Like the journey to the land of the dead where hero’s self is annihilated to be resurrected later, life and death intertwine in Potocki’s narrative. It is the story of the war and its victims who lost control over their lives as they were thrust into the horrific flow of history and events beyond their control. It is a story of fear, hunger, and death. As the others are hunted out by the Nazis, Potocki tells about his younger self who lived in denial until the misfortune strikes him. The experience at Sachenhausen labour camp destroys other sense of identity accept being a homosexual, the “crime” for which he is arrested: If you had asked Josef Potocki to describe himself before he entered Sachenhausen, he would have said: “I am a Pole educated in Cambridge, a poet and playwright, a member of the minor aristocracy, a man of literate tastes, master of five languages (Polish, German, English, French, and Italian), and a gourmet cook”. He would never have mentioned sexual preferences. That was no one’s business but his own. Besides, he was quite aware of family honor which demanded an heir, an abstract concept he was prepared to deal with in the future. After Sachenhausen he would have said, “I am a fag. Not gay— there was nothing gay about being a homosexual in that place. 109

V andana S axena

Nothing sexual either. Like the other men, he lost all desire for anything but staying alive”. (Yolen 1992: 141–142) Hence, Potocki, a partisan fighter is not a warrior hero, neither romantic, nor brave or heroic: “These (partisans) were the flotsam and jetsam of the world, driftwood like Josef, whose victories were sometimes catastrophes, whose defeats were the stuff of legends” his narrative insists (Yolen 1992: 153). Yet along with other partisan fighters they accomplish a single act of heroism: that of saving one girl among thousands who died at Chelmno— an act that is their single greatest success in the face of the millions being murdered. The narrative challenges the reader by preserving and at the same time, constantly modifying the trajectory one comes to expect from a quest narrative. Gemma, the Sleeping Beauty, gassed at Chelmno death camp, is rescued from the mass grave, from a heap of bodies of others who did not survive. The prince who resuscitates her with a life-giving kiss is a homosexual, in love with Aron, Becca’s grandfather. When she does not remember her past, Potocki names her Briar Rose. Though her marriage to Aron seems to affirm life and resilience in face of death and terror (like a fairy tale), it is immediately followed by Aron’s death. Though Gemma escapes to America, Aron’s death modifies the expectations of a happy end. The memory of Potocki’s resuscitating kiss haunts the conventional “happy end” of Becca’s heterosexual romance with Stan. While the expectations of hope and happy end are fulfilled in the romantic subplot, the message contained within the text insists that “Truth is never tidy. Only fairy tales are” (196). So, even as the text adheres to the narrative of hope and happiness, Yolen insists that history is not a fairy tale. If America is assumed to be a haven for the refugees fleeing the traumatic events of the Second World War, the notion happy ending in America is challenged even before Becca undertakes the journey. Harvey Goldman, the refugee at the Fort Oswego camp remembers the camp for its miserable conditions. Fort Oswego camp reminds the victims of the hell that they thought they had escaped; “I was sure we had all that way just to be killed in America” reminisces Goldman (Yolen 1992: 74). Randolph, the school teacher mentions the vague image of a woman who kissed the ground when she arrived (as a story gleaned from official accounts like the newspaper report); Goldman, on the other hand, remembers the mother who lost her child on the way to America and wept for sorrow as they crossed the Statue of Liberty. While the other members of Fort Oswego insist on the happy ending, Goldman’s memories of the Holocaust as well as immigrant experience in America contest these narratives. As the others insist that Nazis were all dead, Goldman, with the number tattooed on his hand insists that “For you they are dead”, he said. “Not for me” (Yolen 1992: 75). 110

Q uest into the past

For Goldman, there is no end to the horror; as a victim of Holocaust trauma, there is no possibility to forget the horror and relegate it neatly into the past. Langer in Admitting the Holocaust discusses the stumbling block that a traumatic experience like Holocaust poses in an attempt to know and understand the past: “we live it backward in time, and once we arrive there, we find ourselves mired in its atrocities, a kind of historical quicksand that hinders our bid to bring it forward again into a meaningful future” (1996: 6). In the “Author’s Note” Yolen insists “Happy ever-after is a fairy tale notion, not history” (1992: 202). Kertzer points out that “the lesson that emerges in this sophisticated interplay between text and peritext is not the consoling lesson of spiritual triumph but a much harder one about the reality of historical facts and the difficulty such facts pose for representing this particular history for young people” (2002: 67).2 In Becca’s quest, the reward is historical awareness, the courage to encounter and remember. Roberta Trites (1998), citing the distinguishing feature of adolescent literature insists an adolescent “protagonist must learn about the social forces that have made them what they are” (3). Young adult Literature, with its thrust on understanding larger social and cultural attitudes interweaves the narrative of hope with darker and complicated questions raised by traumatic past. The focus on unreality and fragmentation contests not only the official records but also the linear narrative of growth and selfhood. It installs a dialogic narrative in its place where hope co-exists with evil and trauma. Magda questions to Becca at the end sums up the attitude succinctly: “Let sleeping princesses lie? Magda laughed. We are all sleeping princesses some time. But it is better to be fully awake, don’t you think?” (Yolen 1992: 197). Becca’s journey is not about knowing, representing, or understanding; it is an insight into what can be known, grasping the way in which the orientation towards the future need not erase past; it is a resistance against such erasure, an insistence to remember the traumatic past which cannot be bound by fact and records. Laub, citing her experience of being a witness to the Holocaust testimony insists that “it was through my listening to her that I in turn came to understand not merely her subjective truth, but the very historicity of the event, in an entirely new dimension” (1992: 61). Though in the grandmother’s escape to America and the subsequent birth of her daughter and granddaughters, the story gives in to the popular taste for happy endings, it is belied by Yolen’s comment in the “Author’s Note” at the end of the book: “I know of no woman who escaped from Chelmno alive” (Yolen 1992: 202). However, as the narrative progresses, historical accuracy takes a backseat. Gemma’s retelling enacts her resistance to efforts of silencing and extermination. It is the story told outside the framework of the camp itself bent on extermination and secrecy. On the other hand, Becca’s quest performs a dual move: it records the personal and historical trauma caused by the Holocaust and, at the same time, it attempts to bring about a measure of rehabilitation through imagination, through a creative 111

V andana S axena

repair of fractured, incomprehensible moment of the past. The narrative told for the adolescent readers thus becomes a bridge between the victims and survivors who directly experienced trauma, and collectivity for whom the troubled past is distant and resolved. The memories of the past are integrated within the process of coming-of-age in terms of social, political, and ethical responsibility. Rather than a narrative of indomitable spirit and humanism, the heroic quest situated in a Holocaust narrative transforms into the moral and ethical obligation to remember the past and also an injunction to the future generations that never again should it happen. It reconfigures the goal of the quest as the coming-of-age themes come to coincide with the responsibility towards the past.

Notes 1 When Becca asks the meaning of mist, Gemma seems to flounder at revival of the memory and the meaning. The mist, for Gemma is not a weather phenomenon. She explains it as “A fog. A exhaust” (Yolen 1992: 43). 2 Peritext refers to the “peripheral” features of a text such as the cover, title page, table of contents, chapter names, preface, epigraphs, glossary, and illustrations. Focusing his attention on these elements which are normally considered marginal to a text, Gerard Genette insists that these are the thresholds “between the inside and the outside . . . a zone not just of transition but of transaction: the privileged site of . . . a better reception of a text and a more pertinent reading” (261–262). In Yolen’s text, the “Author’s note” situates the text—Becca’s quest of the past against the bleakness of real accounts of horror. By pointing out its own narrative devices of fantasy and fairy tale, the “Author’s Note” signals the mechanisms it has used by the text to distance the young reader which actually veils the trauma and suffering.

References Belau, Linda. 2001. ‘Trauma and the Material Signifier’. Postmodern Culture 11(2). http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/text-only/issue.101/11.2belau.txt (accessed on 11 May 2017). Bosmajian, Hamida. 2002. Sparing the Child: Grief and the Unspeakable in Youth Literature About Nazism and the Holocaust. London: Routledge. Campbell, Joseph. 1973. [1949]. The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Caruth, Cathy. 1995. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press. Caruth, Cathy. 1996. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press. Clendinnen, Inga. 1999. Reading the Holocaust. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Epstein, B.J., Kay Andrews, Michael Gray, and Alex Maws. 2013. ‘Discussion Forum Inflicting Trauma: The Ethics of Writing and Teaching the Holocaust for Children’. Holocaust Studies 19(1): 101–120.

112

Q uest into the past

Feldman, Daniel. 2015. ‘Playing With the Past in Jane Yolen’s “The Devil’s Arithmetic” ’. Children’s Literature 43: 84–107. Frye, Northrop. 1973. [1957]. The Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Genette, Gerard. 1991. ‘Introduction to the Paratext’. Trans. Marie Maclean. New Literary History 22: 262–272. Hartman, Geoffrey H. 1995. ‘On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies’. New Literary History 26(3): 537–563. Hasse, Donald. 2000. ‘Children, War, and the Imaginative Space of Fairy Tales’. The Lion and the Unicorn 24(3): 360–377. Kertzer, Adrienne. 2002. My Mother’s Voice: Children, Literature, and the Holocaust. Peterborough: Broadview Press. Kidd, Kenneth B. 2005. ‘ “A” Is for Auschwitz: Psychoanalysis, Trauma Theory, and the “Children’s Literautre of Atrocity” ’. Children’s Literature 33: 120–149. Kokkola, Lydia. 2003. Representing the Holocaust in Children’s Literature. London: Routledge. LaCapra, Dominick. 2001. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Langer, Lawrence L. 1995. Art from Ashes: A Holocaust Anthology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Langer, Lawrence L. 1996. Admitting the Holocaust: Collected Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lasner, Phyllis, and Danny M. Cohen. 2014. ‘Magical Transports and Transformations: The Lessons of Children’s Holocaust Fiction’. Studies in American Jewish Literature 33(2): 167–185. Laub, Dori. 1992. ‘Bearing Witness or the Vicissitudes of Listening’. In Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History, edited by Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, 57–62. London: Routledge. McCallum, Robyn. 1999. Ideologies of Identity in Adolescent Fiction. New York and London: Garland Publishing. McGlothlin, Erin Heather. 2006. Second-Generation Holocaust Literature: Legacies of Survival and Perpetration. Rochester, NY: Camden House. Saxena, Vandana. 2012. The Subversive Harry Potter. Chicago, IL: McFarland. Saxena, Vandana. 2014. ‘Mother Goose Tales: Intergenerational Storytelling and the Holocaust in Jane Yolen’s “Briar Rose” and Peter Rushforth’s “Kindergarten” ’. In Fantastic Modalities in Holocaust Literature and Film (Series: Critical Explorations in Science Fiction and Fantasy), edited by John Edgar Browning, 122–137. Chicago, IL: McFarland. Trites, Roberta. 1998. Disturbing the Universe: Power and Repression in Adolescent Literature. Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press. Turner, Victor. 1969. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-structure. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. VanGennep, Arnold. 1960. The Rites of Passage. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Yolen, Jane. 1992. Briar Rose: The Fairy Tale Series. New York, NY: Tom Doherty.

113

9 ET TU, BRUTE? The child soldier and the child victim in Shobasakthi’s Traitor Usha Mudiganti Children get traumatized and victimized in multifarious ways in conflict zones. They become silent sufferers of relocation necessitated by wars; they could be maimed for life owing to injury, or could suffer sustained malnourishment owing to the crumbling economic situations of strife-ridden societies; they could even become civilian casualties during attacks. While the emotional and physical abuse suffered by children gets reported in the media, the sexual abuse of children emerging from the disintegration of the human psyche owing to the violence of war hardly ever becomes central to a literary text. Shobasakthi makes it the fulcrum of the narrative in Traitor to raise pertinent questions on the distortions of the human psyche when it is radically altered by the experience of war. Through a close reading of the text, I hope to establish that the purported “purity” of the abused child, Nirami becomes the reason for the radically violated and brutalized Nesakumaran to abuse her. Shobasakthi’s Traitor was first published in Tamil in 2004 with the title Mm, an equivalent of the phatic sound1 “Hmm” used quite often as a non-committal response to a story by listeners of oral tales in large parts of South Asia. The Tamil title sets the framework of a narrator narrating the tale to listeners who are participating in the narration by prompting the narrator to go on telling the tale by giving a phatic response but staying clear of any committed reaction to the tale. However, the English translation, published in 2010, was given the title Traitor by the translator Anushiya Ramaswamy. This difference in the titles adds to the complexity of the tale and the telling of it. The tale is being told by an ex-child-soldier of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) as a form of expiation and to get his people to see his position. The narrator-cum-protagonist, Nesakumaran, had joined the LTTE as a teenager who had newly left his small town to study in a college. Nesakumaran’s past echoes that of the writer J. Antonythasan whose nom de plume is Shobasakthi. A former child-soldier of the LTTE, Antonythasan now lives in exile in France. He is ET TU, BRUTE?

USHA MUDIGANTI

114

E t tu , brute ?

perceived to be the foremost writer among the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora (Sivanarayanan 2008: 51). His first book Gorilla too is about the civil war in Sri Lanka and is a “memoir-of-sorts of a child-soldier with the Tamil militants and now a refugee in France” (50). Further, Sivanarayanan states that she decided to translate it immediately because “[w]hat had been for years the stories and experiences shared only with other Sri Lankan Tamils was finally in print, presented with such exquisite tenderness and lack of sentimentality . . .” [50]. Similar to the story in Traitor, in Gorilla too the child-soldier is trying to come to terms with a violent past to live life anew in a strange land, among people who do not have a deep understanding of the contexts of his past. The civil war in Sri Lanka broke out in 1983 but was brewing from colonial times. Chitra Sivakumar argues that, “the genesis of the Eelam movement lay in a radical shift in the balance of power from the Sri Lankan Tamils to the Sinhalas” (135). The conflict started with political representation in the Legislative Council and deepened after independence with a tussle over the national language, after the passing of a bill which made only Sinhala the national language. A few years later the Sri Lankan government enacted the Tamil Language (Special Provisions) Act of 1958 to appease the Tamil people. In 1961, Chelavanayagam led a campaign for the implementation of the 1958 act. Thousands of Tamil people took part in it. Sivakumar states that the “consequent repression unleashed by the military was so excessive that the government was later forced to set up an official enquiry” (126). The political conflict between the majority Sinhala government and the powerful minority Tamils continued for a few decades. Sivakumar argues that this tussle meant a gradual loss of jobs in government for the Tamils and a lack of opportunity for higher education of Tamil youth in Sri Lanka due to a policy named “standardization policy”, which was passed in 1970. She further mentions that a Sinhala scholar C.R. de Silva observed that, “the “standardization policy” had been a major force in mobilizing the disenchanted Tamil youth of Jaffna to influence the Tamil United Front leadership to overtly opt for the goal of a separate Tamil state” (131). Moreover, “the disruption of the World Tamil Congress in 1974 by the Sri Lankan security forces left an indelible impression on the minds of the Tamil youth” (131). She goes on to state: when the Sri Lankan police went on a rampage and burnt the Jaffna Public Library containing 90,000 volumes, they realised with a rude shock that they had no future within the ambit of the Sri Lankan State. As one of them pointed out; “Eelam was not a product of our imagination. We recognised Eelam ourselves only when the Sri Lankan Government had completed the act of separating us from Sri Lanka. (132) 115

U sha M udiganti

Many militant groups were formed between 1975 and 1982. The violence escalated to such an extent in 1983 that the year is considered to be the beginning of the civil war in Sri Lanka. In 2009 Pinnawala Sangasumana recorded the numbers of people from all three ethnic groups—Tamils, Sinhala, and Muslim—who were killed in the civil war to be 70,000 and he states that around two million people were displaced (130). He goes on to study the traumatic affect of displacement and the lives of internally displaced children in Sri Lanka. Neil Devotta states that, “[a]t its apogee between the mid-1990s and 2006, the LLTE controlled nearly one-quarter of Sri Lanka’s territory; comprised an army of over 20,000 with redoubtable conventional capabilities, commanded a navy with speedboats and nearly a dozen ships for ferrying weapons and supplies, as well as rudimentary submarine and an experienced sea cadre; and operated a nascent air force whose bombing raids embarrassed the government and caused the island widespread angst” (2009: 1023). He goes on to argue that The quest for Tamil eelam (a separate state) was understandable— unrequited repression, especially against a territorialized ethnic minority, is uncommon. But the LTTE in turn quashed all dissent, conscripted children forcibly, assassinated opponents, murdered numerous innocent civilians, and taxed and exorted—all of which guaranteed it eventual pariah status among the international community and even many Tamils. (1023) Daya Somasundaram (2002) lists deprivation, brutalization, traumatization, institutionalized violence, and social-cultural factors as the reasons for the entry of child-soldiers into these militant groups. He also says that there is societal complicity to the recruitment of children. He goes on to state his observation of the child-soldiers who needed treatment: In children who came to our unit for treatment, we found a whole range of conditions from neurotic conditions like somatisation, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder to more severe reactive psychosis and what has been termed as malignant post-traumatic stress disorder. This leaves children as complete psychological and social wrecks. (1270). The narrator of Shobasakthi’s Traitor is a former child-soldier who has sought asylum in a European nation. When the narrative begins, he is serving time in prison after being convicted for impregnating his fourteen-yearold daughter, Nirami. The protagonist and narrator of most of the narrative, Nesakumaran, is writing a “confessional” narrative, albeit one in which the 116

E t tu , brute ?

confessor is not quite convinced that his narrative is a confession and is a reflection upon a crime. He ostensibly sets himself the task of jotting down his reflections to make sense of the violence he has committed on one of the people he loves and cherishes most in his life. An exile from his native land, Nesakumaran is in Europe in an attempt to rebuild his life after serving as a child-soldier in the civil war in Sri Lanka. Until he finds himself imprisoned for paedophilia, Nesakumaran does not deliberately reflect on the ways in which his experiences as a child and young adult participant in the war in Sri Lanka influenced his life as a political exile in a strange land. Even as he jots down his memories Nesakumaran is conscious that he is writing a novel, in a clear indication to the reader that the first-person narrator is telling a story which need not necessarily be a confession of truth. A radical denial of guilt, even in his thoughts and reflections, is Nesakumaran’s first reaction to being informed by his wife that their teenage daughter is pregnant. Then, he begins indicating that his action should not be construed as a criminal offence. While referring to the person who was responsible for impregnating his daughter, Nesakumaran suggests that the person would be a paedophile only in legal terms. This seeming insistence on the person being a paedophile only in legal terms opens the text up for explorations on the ways in which the sexual violence committed by him may not have seemed an act of violence to him. With the suggestion that Nesakumaran’s action is a crime only under a legal framework, the narrative makes space for an exposition on the brutalizing of a person thickly involved in a violent struggle. The narrative takes a reflective turn only after Nesakumaran is isolated from his family and is attempting to explain his actions while serving time in a State prison. Through the act of recollecting, Nesakumaran possibly attempts to purge himself of the affect of being brutalized as a young adult of a minority community which is in the midst of a violent and heavily fragmented struggle against the State. He recounts many soul-chilling tales and each tale by Nesakumaran ends with the response of “Hmm . . .” (12), a phatic sound made by his purported listener(s). The sound, “Hmm”, is an empty signifier (Barthes 2009: 136) which can be construed to be a phatic sound which would lubricate the wheels of communication (Jakobson 1960: 355) but would not necessarily be a sign of approval or disapproval. In its being a non-judgmental response it does not escape the suggestion of indifference. The response of “Hmm” to Nesakumaran’s soul-chilling tales is shocking to readers who do not share the experience of people who have survived the violence in Sri Lanka from the early 1980s onwards. However, Shobasakthi not only declared that “[t]his book is for my people who say ‘Hmm. . . ’ and keep on listening”, he also used that sound as the title of the book. While the dedication and the title could be read as the author’s acknowledgement of his people who are prepared to listen to tales of violence without getting judgemental and thereby participating in an act of 117

U sha M udiganti

catharsis, it could also be interpreted as an accusation of passivity in the face of grave violence. It is the translator from Tamil to English, Anushiya Ramaswamy, who gave her translation the title Traitor. Ramaswamy’s interpretation of the narrative is evident in her identifying a traitor. While Shobasakthi suggests the presence of multiple traitors in the story—the narrator, the protagonist, the divisive leaders of the Tamil people, the Government of Sri Lanka, the international community, and the Othering gaze of the First World—Ramaswamy’s use of a singular noun as the title indicates that she interprets Nesakumaran to be the traitor who has betrayed his daughter’s trust. Through this interpretation, Ramaswamy is speaking for the victim of Nesakumaran’s violence and seems to empower Nirami by giving voice to the vulnerable and powerless victim of incest (Bose 2002: 259). However, this reading also forecloses the possibility of perceiving Nesakumaran too as a victim of violence. Nirami’s silence on the identity of the person responsible for her pregnancy does make the narrative a tale of abuse; albeit one which can be read as that of double abuse where the victim as well as the perpetrator of violence are sufferers of different kinds of violent abuse. Nesakumaran’s inability to think that he committed a crime by recurrent sexual violation of his fourteen-year-old daughter, until the legal system of the country of his exile tells him that he is a criminal, is indicative of the brutalization of his psyche. Nesakumaran’s journey into adulthood began with his being sent at the age of seventeen to a seminary to fulfil his pious Roman Catholic family’s hope that he would train to become a priest. During his student days, Nesakumaran attends a few political meetings and starts believing in the struggle for a separate Tamil Eelam in Sri Lanka. The description of one of these meetings attended by him not only shows the evocative ways in which the youth were led to believe that they should dedicate their lives for the cause of the Tamil Eelam, but also reveals the notions of masculinity which would be celebrated by the leaders of the struggle. While the leaders made speeches about the sufferings of the Tamil people and promised that the separate homeland would alleviate all suffering, they led the young people to believe that the Eelam is possible only when the young sacrifice their blood for it. The “signature statement” (18) of one of the main leaders of the struggle, Appapillai Amirthalingam, was, “[g]ive me a thousand young men, and I shall win Tamil Eelam for you” (18). This declaration by Amirthalingam was turned into a slogan for propaganda and was to be seen on posters in all public spaces across the Tamil dominated areas of Sri Lanka. In one of the first meetings attended by Nesakumaran, there is a spectacle of bloodletting in which each young man who was signing up for the cause cut himself to make a mark on the forehead of the leader with one’s blood. Many young men with whom Nesakumaran had gone to the meeting, including the leader of the group, aggressively participated in this “rite of passage”. It is also pointed out that most of these young men were not novices at this act 118

E t tu , brute ?

of masculinity and were eager performers. And they are clearly encouraged by the leaders and their peers as is evident in the following lines: Amirthalingam, his eyes widening with delight, smiled at the young men, for he knew very well why they had rushed to the stage. The first one in line was Temper Rasan, ready to place the mark of victory upon the leader’s forehead with his own blood. This was his eleventh time with Amirthalingam—he had done it nine times for Kasi Anandan and thrice for Savekacheri Navarathnam. (23–24) As a first-time participant in this spectacle, Nesakumaran “kept staring at his finger, angling the blade in various directions” (24); he is clearly resisting hurting himself while feeling the need to join in with the others. Finally, “with his eyes tightly shut, Nesakumaran placed his forefinger on the centre of Amirthalingam’s forehead” (24) just when the leader’s wife, Mangayatkarasi, “began to coo at the young men. ‘Aiyo enough, enough, my lions, you have cut yourselves enough, my lions’ ” (24). Nesakumaran’s reluctance towards being violent is off-set by the adulation of the young men by the leader’s wife. The use of the verb “to coo”, to describe the way in which Mangayatkarasi reacts to the violent actions of the young men and the metaphor she uses to describe the young men are significant. They indicate the perpetuation of traditionally approved gender roles even in the struggle for Tamil Eelam—while the men are to be courageously violent, the women are to appreciate them for displays of strength and violence. The presence of women in the ranks of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) seemingly contradicts the clear demarcation of gender roles among Tamils in Sri Lanka. However, in her analysis of the women warriors of the LTTE, “Female Warriors, Martyrs, and Suicide Attackers: Women in the LTTE”, Dagmar Hellmann-Rajanayagam posits that these women were deified and are therefore “outside of a social structure handed down for centuries and thus, cannot be role models” (2008: 20). For seventeen-year-old Nesakumaran, the public meeting at which he draws his own blood to pledge his allegiance with the Movement becomes not just a rite to passage into a political life but also into adult masculinity. From that point onwards, Nesakumaran is part of a series of violent acts—in the roles of victim or witness or perpetrator. Soon enough, he is considered a separatist and is being hunted by the police for activities such as setting fire to a school run by Buddhists, provoking a revolt among exploited agricultural workers, and participating in a local agitation by rival castes for power in the running of the church in their town. Most of these activities cannot be directly linked to the struggle for Tamil Eelam but the policeman who catches Nesakumaran during the riot at the church event places his boot on Nesakumaran’s bloody forehead and announces, “I am bigger Tiger than 119

U sha M udiganti

you” (46). After that declaration, the very same policeman, Inspector Jayakumar, tries to sexually humiliate him in public. He rips off Nesakumaran’s shirt and pants and as he pulls down Nesakumaran’s underpants the boy, “looked at the inspector with tears in his eyes, and whimpered, ‘Please, Sir’ ” (46). The narrator, then, states: When on the Feast Day of St. Anthony, he was made to stand with his underwear stripped off by the police for the villagers to see his nakedness, Nesakumaran began to lose all hopes from life. Nesakumaran was brought to the Urathurai police station in an open police jeep, naked and manacled to the back seat. Inside the police station, Jayakumar laid Nesakumaran flat on a table and placed a poisoned knife upon the sole of his foot. Nesakumaran flinched and said, “Please, Sir”, in a soft voice. Jayakumar removed the knife from Nesakumaran’s body. Then he grabbed the hair at the back of Nesakumaran’s head, stared into his eyes and nodded his head slowly. “I believe that you will speak” Nesakumaran began to speak. Hmm. . . . (47) The inspector manages to undermine Nesakumaran’s budding sense of adulthood in multiple ways. He shows Nesakumaran that not only is he capable of more violence than Nesakumaran had displayed as a fledgling militant but also holds a position which he can use to sexually humiliate the young man. Further, by making him “confess”, Jayakumar turns Nesakumaran into a traitor who betrays his cause to save his skin. For Nesakumaran, who had gone through a bloody rite of passage where he learnt that glory lies in silently enduring pain, caving in at the threat of torture is a radical failure in performing his ideal of masculinity. In her “Afterword” to Traitor, Anushiya Ramaswamy remarks, “[a] grammar of pornography underlies the public exposure of Nesakumaran (for stripping is a foundational gesture of pornography). It is as if Inspector Jayakumar had taken notes from Marquis de Sade’s One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom or Justine” (203), and she explains Nesakumaran’s various betrayals by suggesting that he, “acts according to the script provided by the torturer” (207). She elaborates, “[l]ike Scheherazade, and like Sade’s four prostitutes whom the aristocrats take with them to the Castle of Silling in One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom, who keep themselves alive with their ability to narrate a compelling sexual fantasy, Nesakumaran speaks and lives another day” (205). Ramaswamy further argues, “[a] novel like Shobasakthi’s Traitor, which is an extended mediation on the rhetoric of torture, pulls at the seams of its circular argument to show that torture has always been an interrogative and disciplinary tool in a severely 120

E t tu , brute ?

class-bound culture like that of Sri Lanka” (210), and draws a comparison between Nesakumaran and Cholly Breedlove in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye to state, “Nesakumaran too, comes across as pathologically damaged by a violent history that is as much familial as national” (211). With her reference to a familial history of violence while explaining Nesakumaran’s act of incest, Ramaswamy foregrounds the violence displayed by Nesakumaran’s father towards the family and the entire family’s violent behaviour towards Rajendran, a boy who was brought from a village to their household to work as a severely underpaid and exploited domestic help. Rajendran escapes the violence meted out to him by joining the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) only to meet the rather violent end of biting into his cyanide capsule to escape arrest. Rajendran’s story, of an under-privileged child joining the ranks of child-soldiers of LTTE, brings in another loop of violence that intersects at various points with the heavily tangled story of violence narrated by Nesakumaran. When Nesakumaran is released from the State prison in Sri Lanka, he finds himself held by the LTTE, which mirrors the methods of torture in State prisons to get him to speak about his faction of the separatist movement, and his father uses his “guardianship” of Rajendran and the “martyrdom” attained by Rajendran for the Tamil cause to get his son released from the LTTE’s clutches. Through that act, the father not only exploits Rajendran one more time but also redefines the notions of guardianship. He indicates that he could claim the privileges of having been a guardian to a “martyr” while he had never performed any of the duties of a guardian towards his ward. The recollection of Rajendran’s story by the narrator suggests that Nesakumaran has not just benefitted from his father’s unethical claim of guardianship of a dead child-soldier of the LTTE but also learnt from his father that selfish abuse of one’s ward could be done by a guardian. While Nesakumaran disappoints his family by getting into militancy rather than into the Church, his family does not abandon him. Their continuing support during his imprisonment and his father’s efforts during his abduction are similar to the support displayed by families towards individuals who get into trouble in negotiating their careers. Nesakumaran is supported despite taking to militancy and Rajendran is appreciated by the family only due to his death as a child-soldier of the LTTE. Neither Nesakumaran nor any of his associates such as Kalaichelvan, Dattu, China, and Pakkiri meet the general perception of a terrorist as a hyper-masculine, aggressive, and fearless person. The lone woman “terorrist” in the narrative, Srikanthamalar, is shown to be braver in the face of arrest and torture than all these men. This inversion could be deliberate to counter the generalizations around the term “terrorist”. Ramaswamy states, “[t]he term terrorist, like other classically defined terms such as king, child, man, or woman, evokes an idealized, collective signifier that is a conglomeration of attributes. In the case of the terrorist, he is the quintessential other, the oriental from colonial discourses; 121

U sha M udiganti

descriptions that were once applied uncritically to non-European bodies— dark, inscrutable, sly, brutal, excessive in sexual desires—are back in circulation in the globalized torture discourse” (202). Ramaswamy picks up the leads of various threads of the tangled narrative presented by Nesakumaran to argue that the pornography of violence lead to the brutalization of the protagonist as well as that of the passive listeners with the following persuasive argument: In pornography, the pain of the other does not move the voyeur to sorrow. Those who accept the world view of the pornographer/ torturer are likewise unmoved. This is what torture/pornography effects in culture. We refuse to identify with the bound and beaten body. The purpose of the pornographer/torturer is to make that body an illustration of all that is weak, powerless, and uselessly emotional. The body is reduced to its essential femaleness, becoming a sieve of orifices for the phallus, begging for mercy. The tortured body communicates the State’s action: it means that the government is taking steps against those who would disturb the peace, or threaten you or your property in any way. (210) Simultaneously, Ramaswamy also points out that Shobasakthi’s presentation of his characters as complicated beings ensures that their suffering is not confused with character flaws and suggests that Shobasakthi’s readers would not be in a position to treat the characters as “simply victims of an indifferent history” (215). However, one cannot overlook the reaction to each of the narrator’s tales—a phatic sound of “Hmm. . . .” As pointed out earlier, while a phatic sound would help in eliciting more tales through its non-judgemental stance, it is also a passive form of consumption of a tale without getting implicated in it. If the listener or reader of a tale reacts to the tale, the reaction would stem from an interpretation which would mean that the person had engaged with the tale. Listening to a tale with hardly any engagement with the tale is also a form of voyeurism, for the tale of pain is not moving the listener to sorrow and the listener is not identifying either with the powerful perpetrator of torture or with the powerless victim. Shobasakthi’s readers and the narrator’s listeners of the tale, therefore, are in the position of voyeurs. By dedicating the book to these very same passive listeners, whom Shobasakthi calls his people, he is probably trying to hold a mirror up to his people. For, Ramaswamy does point out that, “he has been accused of being a traitor to his people” (231), and she quotes his statement in an interview: “[m]y identity as a militant, the minute I left the country, became that of a refugee. When I began to write, my identity became that of a traitor” (231). Shobasakthi’s act of writing records the brutalization of a people who were active participants in a spectacle 122

E t tu , brute ?

of violence and became passive consumers of tales of horrific violence. Through the act of listening, they remain connected with the violent tale but are not immersed in the violence. Each tale reassures them that they are survivors, for they have lived through horrors. However, the victims of violence in these tales are made invisible through the metaphorical disassociation with the tortured body of the victim. Rather than giving a voice to the weak, these tales are further silencing the victims in these tales into the frigidity of objects of violence. Nirami is not the only silent victim in this tale of violence. She shares her position with her violator, Nesakumaran and his fellow sufferers such as, Rajendran, Pakkiri, and China. However, she is the only victim of child sexual abuse, and that too incestuous abuse, in the entire narrative. Nesakumaran’s sister, Maria, is raped by the marines and it is rumoured that Srikanthamalar is raped in the prison. While Srikanthamalar’s imprisonment occurs owing to an act of betrayal by Nesakumaran and he can be only indirectly implicated for the rape of Maria—the sister of a known militant— by agents of the State, Nesakumaran’s violation of his teenage daughter is a betrayal of trust and a failure in performing his role of a father. Through the confession of his failure in the form of the narrative, Nesakumaran betrays himself and reveals the fragmented psyche of the victim who can feel powerful only by switching positions with the perpetrator of violence. The name Nesakumaran chose for his daughter, Nirami, reveals the way he would like to perceive his child. The word “nirami” means pure or the spotless one. The narrator states, “[h]er name is Nirami, which means, ‘a woman without colour’ ” (4). The name reveals that Nesakumaran thinks of his child as the pure one. Nesakumaran regarding his daughter as pure is quite similar to the idea of the Romantic child who was considered a pure being. The narrative does not suggest that Nesakumaran was attempting to mar the “purity” of his daughter. It could be read as an attempt at purifying oneself through union with an embodiment of purity. The narrator’s reiteration of noticing “the purest love” in his daughter’s eyes comes across as an attempt to exonerate himself of any guilt. The suggestion is that his action was an expression of love and was received in the same spirit by his daughter whereas socio-cultural mores misconstrue it as a criminal offence. However, Nesakumaran’s interaction with the Tamil youth who beat him up for impregnating his daughter belies the suggestion of expiation. His interaction with the Tamil youth is as follows: “Anna, we are asking because we don’t know. When you stripped the baby girl that you had brought into this world and taken care of as an infant, was your heart dead”? I tried to silently move my broken fingers. “We cannot understand the psychology behind having a sexual relationship with one’s own child”. 123

U sha M udiganti

I did not understand it either. I thrust my bleeding ankles onto the ground and stood up. “There is no use asking him anything. To have sex with children is a kind of mental disease”. I wanted to say that one cannot punish the mentally ill. But there was a thick skin all over my lips. They surrounded me and discussed what kind of punishment to mete out to me. (Emphasis added, 193) By stating that he does not have a rational explanation for his action, Nesakumaran is undercutting his insistent refrain of love for his daughter and is tightening the web of the narrative in such a manner that it would become difficult for anyone to call him anything but a traitor who betrayed his daughter’s trust in him. He stops himself from clutching onto the proverbial straw and escaping violence by using the excuse of being mentally ill and decides to “brave” the “punishment” meted out to him. This is the only instance in the entire narrative where Nesakumaran does not give in to escape violence. Neither the narrator nor the purported listener(s) of the tale mark the difference in Nesakumaran’s actions in the face of violence. His listener(s), within the narrative, react with the habitual “Hmm. . . .” (193) while the narrator makes a matter-of-fact statement: “With the next paragraph, this novel ends” (193). Rather than building up to a grand climax of an Aristotelian tragedy which occurs owing to character flaws, Shobasakthi’s narrator reveals tale after tale which puts together the story of a man whose sense of the norm gets so radically distorted that his only explanation, in the language of his adopted country, to the daughter he has violated is a long quotation from the Book of Genesis. The part of the Bible he quotes is the one which records the creation of Eve from one of Adam’s ribs. Adam’s comment about this act was to declare that having been taken out of Man she would be called Woman. While Nesakumaran ends his explanation merely with that quotation, there is no doubt that Nirami, if she reads the explanation, would be able to understand the accusation he is making of her being analogous to Eve who was created from Adam’s flesh and bones, became his partner, and eventually lead him into eating the Forbidden Fruit and disobeying their creator. Nesakumaran’s explanation to his daughter is actually an accusation that she was an enticing woman and he acted as a man. And one of the angry outbursts of his wife—“[i]n the sixteen years that I lived with you, in what way did I not fulfil your needs? What did I do wrong? Tell me if I did something wrong” (190) – plays out a heteronormative fantasy of a man by purporting the sexual rivalry of two women for one man. This also resonates with the narrator introducing Nirami in the narrative as the, “[t]he fourth young woman, one could, I suppose, call her a child, looked about fourteen or fifteen” (3). There is a clear resistance in acknowledging that Nirami, indeed, is a child and there is some hedging 124

E t tu , brute ?

in revealing her age. Ramaswamy indicates that Nesakumaran mimics his torturer(s), specifically Inspector Jayakumar, in wearing the garb of being, “hyper-masculine, insisting on his heterosexuality as the only appropriate construction for the maintenance of a powerful masculinity. In Shobasakthi’s Traitor he is also the father in the daughter’s bedroom” (206). While it is true that Nesakumaran’s choice of passage from the Bible, indicating that his flesh and blood was formed into a woman for his use, suggests a distorted form of hyper-masculinity, his action is a departure from the duty of the patriarchal father of protecting his daughter’s virginity and chastity. Nesakumaran’s acts of confusing the role of the daughter in his life and giving her a name which means “woman without color” have underpinnings of a colonial legacy. Large parts of Sri Lanka, which was invaded and colonized by the Portuguese and the Dutch during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, was won by the British from the Dutch in the late eighteenth century and it became a colony of the British Empire in 1815. A sizeable population of Sri Lankans were influenced by European mores during the 400 years of colonization by various European kingdoms, which culminated in more than a century of British rule and influence in the islands. During the nineteenth century in Britain, the figure of the child who was considered pure and thought capable of teaching purity to adults by William Wordsworth transformed into a chrysalis which needed to be tenderly civilized into adulthood. With the renewed focus on childhood, the child not only gained an important position in the middle-class British household, but was also expected to play an important part in creating the ideal family. In The Victorian Girl and the Feminine Ideal, Deborah Gorham succinctly describes the role children played in this particular project in the Victorian family: The idealised Victorian home . . . did not consist of husband and wife alone, but of husband, wife and children, and just as the parental role was suffused with intense emotional significance, so also was the role of children. Both male and female children were of importance in idealisation of family life, but daughters had a special significance. Sons would help to determine the middle-class family’s place in the world, but daughters could offer the family a particular sort of tenderness and spirituality. (1982: 5) Paintings depicting scenes of happy families where the pater familias is attended to or entertained by his wife and children were very popular at that time. Literature was written encouraging the strengthening of familial ties. A clear demarcation sharply distinguished between the public lives and the private lives of the British in the nineteenth century. They kept their 125

U sha M udiganti

homes completely sheltered from the strains of continuous change in the public domain. Their families became for the men the most important source of emotional sustenance. Consequently, women and children became emotional anchors for men. The continuous perception of the family, especially the women, as an emotional anchor for a Victorian man led to the confinement of women and girls to that role. By and by it became the duty of Victorian women and girls to prepare themselves single-mindedly for this role. Even books written for children took up the task of educating girls to accept their future role. Charlotte Yonge, Elizabeth Sewell, Susan Cummings, Susan Warner (alias Elizabeth Wetherell), Sara Smith (alias Hesba Stretton), and Mrs. Molesworth wrote books which elucidated, advertized, and extolled the virtues of “the angel in the house”.2 In The Victorian Girl and the Feminine Ideal (1982), Deborah Gorham quotes Mrs. Roe who wrote A Woman’s Thoughts on the Education of Girls in 1886. Mrs. Roe depicts the ideal Victorian girl in the following way: My beau-ideal of a young lady is one who is equally in her place in the parlour and in the kitchen; who can converse pleasantly and rationally with her friends, make her voice and her fingers discourse most eloquent music, use her needle skillfully for the adornment of her own person or in household matters, or go into the kitchen, and prepare a dinner. (50) This and similar descriptions started a spate of domesticated, innocent, meek, and docile “little women” as girl-protagonists in books written for girls. Things came to such a pass that most of the time they were considered incapable of doing any work other than the tasks expected of them as members of the private sphere of a Victorian man’s life. They were seen as ignorant of the ways of the big bad world outside, guileless and therefore incapable of tackling people in the public sphere. They were also considered or were supposed to be totally innocent about sexual matters. Along with this the Christian idea of Eve’s “sin” is also hinted at in the kind of deliberate suppression of female sexuality seen in the young girls in the fiction of the time. In The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar delineate “a clear line of literary descent from divine Virgin to domestic angel, passing through (among many others) Dante, Milton, and Goethe” (20, parentheses by Gilbert and Gubar). There were, by and large, variations of the two basic images of the “good daughter” and the “bad daughter”. Deborah Gorham gives a precise description of these two terms: “the good daughter was gentle, loving, self-sacrificing and innocent: the bad daughter was vulgar, self-seeking, lazy, and sexually impure” (1982: 50). Thus girlhood, for these writers, was a point from which future womanhood could be viewed. 126

E t tu , brute ?

Since girls were considered “little women”, they were trained into accepting this role in advance of attaining womanhood. Moreover, given the fact that it was easier to perceive her as sexually passive, a girl could be a more convincing “angel in the house” than a full-grown woman. In The Victorian Girl and the Feminine Ideal (1982) Deborah Gorham remarks: Much more successfully than her mother, a young girl could represent the quintessential angel in the house. Unlike an adult woman, a girl could be perceived as a wholly unambiguous model of feminine dependence, childlike simplicity and sexual purity. While it might be believed that an adult woman should retain a childlike simplicity, clearly a real child could be conceived of as more childlike than could an adult woman. (7) While women were considered sexually passive, children were considered totally ignorant of their sexuality. In Women in England: 1870–1950, Jane Lewis mentions that “the rape of a girl child was considered to be of much less importance than the same crime against an adult” (126). By the midVictorian period advice given in conduct books had become thoroughly established in society and rules of etiquette prescribed in these books had become the code of conduct. The image of “the angel in the house” had gained such popularity in the growing lower to upper middle-class Victorian society that every girl was expected to be one. Women and girls were no longer allowed to have merely human failings. There were serious consequences of the prevalent attitude. A very important consequence of being considered “angelic” and therefore ethereal was that it became difficult for girls themselves and for others to accept that they had bodies which functioned according to biological and physiological needs and not according to social norms. While society would have liked to believe that they were completely asexual their bodies “betrayed” them. In such a context, femininity was seen almost as a secret pollution. In The Female Hero in American and British Literature (1981) Carol Pearson and Katherine Pope present the situation: For the traditional woman . . . women’s conventional roles seem unalterable, so that the mother may feel that it is an evidence of love to repress her daughter enough that she is not likely to deviate from the expected role. If the daughter automatically polices herself, the logic goes she will not be punished for deviation. If she is so repressed that she does not know her life is limited, she will not suffer from unfulfilled yearnings for a more adventurous life. . . . Mothers who feel victimized often blame their martyrdom on sexuality and emotions. They discourage their daughters from trusting 127

U sha M udiganti

their own feelings. . . . They counsel, not revolution, but chastity or frigidity, because sexuality for women leads to ruin or domination. (106) The image of “the angel in the house” had become such a powerful stereotype that even through rapid and drastic changes in society, the expectations from the girl was to behave like the quintessential “angel”. Sue Sharpe observes that as late as in 1976 “it is seen as particularly important that girls develop and believe in the female role and in preserving the established order, because they are the major agents in transmitting this ideology to their children” (1976: 56–57). The constant refrain in a girl’s life right from the Victorian age to the present day is to “be good”—a refrain which carries the sense of purity and asexuality. Although Nesakumaran and Premini’s daughter belongs to the South Asian diaspora in Europe and has to carry the legacy of the violent past of the parents, by the very act of naming her as the “woman with no color” Nesakumaran indicates that she is to fulfil his fantasy of fathering a woman who is not burdened with the colours of a bloody past. In the naming of the daughter, Nesakumaran’s fantasy seems very close to that of being a father of an “angel in the house”. However, he destroys his own fantasy by violating the “angel” of his fantasies. His past cannot but affect his future. By leaving the Movement and his homeland, Nesakumaran attempts to break away from his past but he carries it within. In initiating a repetition of the cycle of violence, conviction, and punishment by serial sexual violation of his minor daughter, which is a criminal offence. With this act, he ensures that he re-enacts the destruction of his childhood and youth. He had spent his late adolescence and early youth in acts of subversion which led him into a life of institutionalized torture and brutalization. He seems to choose the torturous cycle of violence once again by committing a crime that is sure to lead him back into being institutionalized as a threat to the social order. Through his act of violence, Nesakumaran betrays not only his daughter but also himself, for he fails to break out of the cycle of violence and also initiates his daughter into the life of a victim of violence. Shobasakthi, as mentioned earlier, had talked about himself as a traitor for the act of writing the fictive history of his people. This narrative points towards multiple betrayers, including the narrator who sets out to confess but concludes with confusions about the original violator who set off a series of violent violations. While Anushiya Ramaswamy suggests that Inspector Jayakumar is the metaphor for the perpetrator of violence, Shobasakthi uses many techniques—such as the untrustworthy first-person narrator, the dedication to people whose reactions to tales of violence is a non-judgemental response which might lead to catharsis and a protagonist who radically fails to break free from violence by becoming a violator—to implicate multiple people and institutions in the violation of a people and their children. 128

E t tu , brute ?

Notes 1 The phatic function of language was explicated by Roman Jakobson in the closing remarks at a conference in 1960. Jakobson took up Malinowski’s term to postulate that the utterances which are made to prolong communication are phatic utterances. 2 A phrase which gained currency owing to a long poem with that title written by Coventry Patmore, published in 1854, in which he idealizes his wife as an angel and suggests that she is worthy of emulation by all women.

Bibliography Alvis, Malathi de. 2002. ‘The Changing Role of Women in Sri Lankan Society’. Social Research: An International Quarterly 69(3) Fall: 675–691. Amarasingam, Amarnath. 2008. ‘Religion and Ethnicity Among Sri Lankan Tamil Youth in Ontario’. Canadian Ethnic Studies 40(2): 149–169. Balaji, Murali. 2013. ‘Competing South Asian Mas(k)ulinities: Bollywood Icons Versus “Tech-N-Talk” ’. In Communicating Marginalized Masculinities: Identity Politics in TV, Film, and New Media, edited by Ronald L. Jackson II and Jamie E. Moshin, 49–64. New York, NY: Routledge. Barrell, John. 2004. ‘Close Reading’. In Literature in the Modern World: Critical Essays and Documents, edited by Dennis Walder, 146–152. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Barthes, Roland. 1974. [1970]. S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. New York, NY: Noonday Press. Barthes, Roland. 2009. [1957]. Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. 1972. London: Vintage. Bhasin, Kamala. 2004. Exploring Masculinity. New Delhi: Women Unlimited. Bose, Brinda. 2002. ‘ “The Most Intimate Act” The Politics of Gender, Culture and Translation’. In Translating Desire: The Politics of Gender and Culture in India, edited by Brinda Bose, 256–281. Delhi: Katha. Bulger, Peggy A. 1988. ‘The Princess of Power: Socializing Our Daughters Through TV, Toys, and Tradition’. The Lion and the Unicorn 12(2) December: 178–192. Collmer, Sabine. 2004. ‘Child Soldiers: An Integral Element in New, Irregular Wars?’ Connections 3(3) September: 1–12. DeVotta, Neil. 2009. ‘The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and the Lost Quest for Separatism in Sri Lanka’. Asian Survey 49(6) November–December: 1021–1051. Foucault, Michel. 1990. [1976]. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Vol. 1. Trans. Robert Hurley. 1978. New York, NY: Vintage. Freud, Sigmund. 1977. [1905]. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Trans. James Strachey. On Sexuality. PFL 7. London: Penguin. Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar. 1979. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Glover, David, and Cora Kaplan. 2007. Genders. London: Routledge. Gorham, Deborah. 1982. The Victorian Girl and the Feminine Ideal. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Grob, Alan. 1965. ‘Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode and the Search for Identity’. ELH 32(1) March: 32–61.

129

U sha M udiganti

Grylls, David. 1978. Guardians and Angels – Parents and Children in Nineteenth Century Literature. London: Faber and Faber. Guha, Ramachandra. 2003–2004. ‘Tigers in the Alps’. World Policy Journal 20(4) Winter: 63–73. Higonnet, Margaret R. 2007. ‘War Toys: Breaking and Remaking in Great War Narrative’. The Lion and the Unicorn 31(2) April: 116–131. Jackson II, Ronald L., and Jamie E. Moshin. 2013. ‘Communicating Marginalized Masculinities’. Communicating Marginalized Masculinities: Identity Politics in TV, Film, and New Media, edited by Ronald L. Jackson II and Jamie E. Moshin, 49–64. New York, NY: Routledge. Jakobson, Roman. 1960. ‘Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics’. In Style in Language, edited by Thomas A. Sebeok, 350–377. New York, NY: John Wiley. Kleinfeld, Margo. 2005. ‘Destabilizing the Identity-Territory Nexus: Rights-Based Discourse in Sri Lanka’s New Political Geography’. GeoJournal: Territorial Conflict 64(2): 287–295. Levine, Richard A. 1967. Backgrounds to Victorian Literature. Ed. and Intro. Richard Levine. San Francisco, CA: Chandler Publishing Company. Lewis, Jane. 1984. Women in England: 1870–1950. Sussex: Wheatsheaf Books. Lovell, Terry. 1987. Consuming Fiction. London: Verso. Matthews, S. Leigh. 2000. ‘ “The Bright Bone of a Dream”: Drama, Performativity, Ritual and Continuity in Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family’. Biography 23(2) Spring: 352–371. McGregor, Lorna. 2006. ‘Beyond the Time and Space of Peace Talks: Re-Appropriating the Peace Process in Sri Lanka’. International Journal of Peace Studies 11(1) Spring‑Summer: 39–57. Megis, Cornelia et al. 1953. A Critical History of Children’s Literature. New York, NY: Macmillan Company. Olsen, Stein Haugom. 1978. The Structure of Literary Understanding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pearson, Carol, and Katherine Pope. 1981. The Female Hero in American and British Literature. New York, NY: R. R. Bowker Company. Perumal, C.A., and R. Thandavan. 1989. ‘Ethnic Violence in Sri Lanka: Causes and Consequences’. The Indian Journal of Political Science 50(1) January–March: 1–17. Rajanayagam, Dagmar–Hellman. 2008. ‘Female Warriors, Martyrs and Suicide Attackers: Women in LTTE’. International Review of Modern Sociology 34(1) Spring: 1–25. Ramaswamy, Anushiya. 2010. ‘Afterword’. In Traitor, edited by Shobasakthi, 196– 231. New Delhi: Penguin Viking. Roy, Rahul. 2007. A Little Book on Men. Illustrations by Anupama Chatterjee and Sherna Dastur. New Delhi: Yoda Press. Said, Edward W. 2001. [1978]. Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. New Delhi: Penguin. Sangasumana, Pinnawala. 2009. ‘Conflict and Displacement: A Leading Social Problem in Sri Lanka ‑ A Study of Two Communities in Anuradhapura District’. In Ethnic Minorities and Regional Development in Asia, edited by Huhua Chao, 129–148. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

130

E t tu , brute ?

Sharpe, Sue. 1976. Just Like a Girl: How Girls Learn to Be Women. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Shobasakthi. 2004. Traitor. Trans. Anushiya Ramaswamy. 2010. New Delhi: Penguin Viking. Showalter, Elaine. 1997. Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Sivakumar, Chitra. 1989. ‘Social Origins of the Sri Lankan Tamil’s Militant Movement’. Sociological Bulletin: Special Number on Indians Abroad 38(1) March: 119–139. Sivanarayanan, Anushiya. Nov-Dec 2008. ‘From Militant to Writer: Sri Lankan Tamil Writer Shobasakthi’. World Literature Today 82(6): 49–52. Somasundaram, Daya. 2002. ‘Child Soldiers: Understanding the Context’. British Medical Journal 324(7348) May 25: 1268–1271. Virani, Pinki. 2000. Bitter Chocolate: Child Sexual Abuse in India. New Delhi: Penguin. Wayland, Sarah. 2004. ‘Ethnonationalist Networks and Transnational Opportunities: The Sri Lankan Tamil Diaspora’. Review of International Studies 30(3) July: 405–426. Weems, Lisa. 2014. ‘Refuting “Refugee Chic”: Transnational Girl(hood)s and the Guerilla Pedagogy of M. I. A’. Feminist Formations 26(1) Spring: 115–142.

131

10 CHILDREN AT WAR Child(hood) trauma in popular Japanese animation Benjamin Nickl Japanese war fiction and animated war trauma There has been a boom in the reception of the traumatized child figure in contemporary mass entertainment. The fate of fictional child characters like Harry Potter in the Harry Potter series captured the imagination of millions, as did more recently Katniss Everdeen in the Hunger Games trilogy. Audiences worldwide consumed these fictions, which thematize the loss of parents, siblings, and friends during times of war or rebel resistance. Yet, the critical contribution of animated narratives to comprehend traumatic, large-scale events remains insufficiently addressed in academic debate. It is surprising that the intricate depiction of war-related trauma in Japanese animations’ child figures has not yet resulted in more ongoing, collaborative projects.1 Contemporary war fictions in Japanese animation represent traumas in cognitive, affective, and ethical terms. The texts are also characterized by affect-charged forms and images of extreme violence, psychological, and physical damage, as well as ideological contradictions. The dominant modes of narrative delivery are theatrical with internal monologues and long-sequenced introspections. These aspects characterize all the relevant fictions in this essay. References to Naruto (2002–2007), Dragon Ball (1986–1989), Attack on Titan (2009-now), Fairy Tail (2006-now), and Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995–1997) complement discussion of the series World Trigger as the primary focus of inquiry.2 A brief survey of the Japanese genre of war fictions with child figures suggests according to David Stahl and Mark Williams that the “efforts are to represent, work over, work through, and come to terms with Japan’s historical ‘trauma’ and victimization during WWII” (Stahl and Williams 2010: 2). It is through the constitution of impermanent feelings of loss and experiences of disaster, Stahl and Williams go on to claim, that these war fictions can complement historical facts about the trauma of Hiroshima or the loss of Japan’s standing in the world. Much of importance about these facts has been “systematically suppressed, ignored, denied, distorted, avoided, CHILDREN AT WAR

132

BENJAMIN NICKL

C hildren at war

naturalized, neutralized, silenced, and rendered ‘taboo’ in public, national, and international [war trauma] discourse” (Stahl and Williams 2010: 2). To consult mass entertainment texts can thus be helpful in countering such imbalance. As Daisuke Miyao points out, the anger and collective trauma of the Japanese people during and after World War II are fathomed in the children of modern Japanese war fictions (Miyao 2002: 192). The three child protagonists in the animated war fiction series, World Trigger, illustrate this point in each of the series’ twenty-three-minute long episodes. Yuuma, Osamo, and Chika exemplify the typical child character in Japanese war fiction as they ponder questions about war and its effect on them. War and immediate post-war trauma works its way into their lives, both individually and communally, as described subsequently.

Real traumas in fantastical children The first episode of World Trigger introduces one of the series’ three main characters as a 13-year-old boy named Yuuma Kuga.3 He is an alien child soldier from another dimension, which the series reveals only several episodes later. That Yuuma is not human is telling, because all the Japanese war fictions discussed in this essay rely on fantastical elements in their child figures. Elements of the fantastical or science fiction are purposeful in different ways. According to Peter Burkholder and David Rosen, non-human or supernatural characteristics of animated child figures enable the audience to “consume the children and their trauma at a safe distance” (Burkholder and Rosen 2017: 176), due to a reduced level of realism. In the case of trauma depictions, however, one could also argue that fantastical elements point to an unimaginably painful experience to heighten the audience’s empathy for the traumatized victim. In Yuuma’s case, later episodes narrate the backstory of his physical death as a nine-year-old child combatant on another planet. Yuma’s father killed the enemy solider who attacked his son and turned himself into an alien high-tech device called black trigger. The dead body of Yuuma was then enclosed in this piece of futuristic technology, while his mind resides in a nearly indestructible replacement body. Similarly, the titular ninja hero of the Naruto franchise, Naruto Uzomaki, hosts in his body a dangerous beast.4 The supernatural creature devastated the village of his parents only hours before Naruto was born. It even killed his father during the last great war of superhuman ninjas. Naruto becomes an outcast among the villagers for being host to terrible war memories, to which the child did not consent when he was just a traumatized baby. However, both Naruto and Yuuma accept their traumatic past and seek to channel the pain into something productive. The child figure of Naruto accepts the burden of his trauma years later by befriending the beast in his body. He realizes that he suffered for the greater good, as the childhood trauma motivated him to rise higher in the social order of the village. To do so, he 133

B enjamin N ickl

worked hard to gain superhuman abilities. Naruto ends the greatest war of his world once and for all as a legendary sage ninja. In World Trigger, too, Yuuma decides to do good with his immortal body. He travels to Earth and fights for the safekeeping of children faced with alien attackers like the one who killed his physical form. Animated Japanese war fictions turn on the idea that the trauma of war forces children to see the world with different eyes. Even more so in the case of traumatic recollection, the genre’s fantastical elements underscore a radically altered understanding of self in the survivors. Yuuma’s black-trigger body, for instance, illustrates this feature in a literal sense during a posttraumatic flashback scene. These scenes are commonplace in Japanese war fictions, for they allow past experiences to take on “new meanings in light of the present” (Stahl and Williams 2010: 9) after injuries are healed or a battle was won. Framed by slow-timed piano music and the sombre narration of Replica, who is the artificial intelligence interface of Yuuma’s black trigger, the viewer can see his father’s body crumbling away to dust after the sacrifice for the nine-year-old son. Four years after this incident at the age of 13, Yuuma is alive yet fully aware at what cost. His artificial body’s white hair and red eyes, as well as the fact that the trigger technology will not let him age physically or even sleep as an escape from reality, suggest that the future will only intensify his trauma. The real body of Yuuma cannot mature to adulthood and there is also the inevitable prospect of more death as the war continues on planet Earth. The implications of these war trauma scenarios are significant. Rachel Goldsmith and Michelle Satterlee articulate that recovery from trauma cannot be realized without reintegration of the traumatized self into the pretraumatic state (Goldsmith and Satterlee 2003: 35–39). However, Yuuma’s body is sealed away, hence making it impossible to return to his former self. To live on borrowed time creates an awful dilemma for Yuuma. It is heightened for the audience by the premise that it is possible to transform a parent’s love for their child into an actual body to sustain their future. One would expect Yuuma to act out in accordance with his young age. But what may trigger reactions such as denial, dissociation, and aggression turns in World Trigger instead in pro-social behaviour of the child figure. Yuuma refuses to surrender to his trauma and seeks reengagement with other individuals. In her consideration of how post-traumatic scenarios of survivor’s guilt play out in other forms of animated Japanese war fiction, Susan Napier writes that cinematic versions tend to target adult audiences with content rated mature or 18+. For instance, maimed corpses with gutted bellies, torn limbs and other graphic injuries are common images in the 1988 cyberpunk war fiction film Akira. Napier writes of the action thriller with an 11-million US dollar budget as the “inaugural piece of war fiction in Japanese animation” (Napier 2001: 3). In the film, the traumatized child stays within the violent trauma and endlessly re-enacts it on his environment. It is the 134

C hildren at war

direct opposite to Yuuma’s reaction, which Rayna Denison explains with the functional aestheticism of the genre. Denison argues that hyperrealistic depictions of trauma in Japanese war fictions usually omit a concomitant ability or willingness of the traumatized person to consciously reflect on the nature of the traumatic situation (Denison 2011: 226–227).5 World Trigger, as well as Naruto, rejects the idea that trauma necessarily arrests the individual’s development. Rather, the child figure can work through horrific trauma if he or she can feel empowered. The science fiction concept of the trigger technology is just such a means of empowerment. Less advanced forms of trigger technology allow humans to switch their bodies for temporary replacements, which operate on a source of energy termed trion. The child character of Osamu, for instance, uses this tool to actively reverse the negative after-effects of death and the feeling of bereavement. Osamu is the first friend Yuuma makes on Earth. He also works for the BORDER agency, who supply human children with the trigger technology to fight hostile aliens and defend earth from alien invasion. Osamu is plagued by survivor’s guilt just like Yuuma. His obsession with war against the alien intruders, the same Yuuma’s father was fighting, stems from the death of his best friend, Rinji. Rinji died in the first, large-scale invasion of the aliens, also referred to as neighbours. The attack took the residents of Osamu’s hometown, Mikado City, by surprise. Osamu swore to revenge Rinji and to carry on in his place the war against the neighbours. Moreover, he vowed to protect Rinji’s nine-year-old sister, Chika, whom the series introduces in episode six as the third major child character next to Yuuma and Osamu. That not only Osamu but also Yuuma and Chika reaffirm their subject position as proactive survivors who fight in trigger bodies suggests a rejection of self-victimization. The next section attends to this aspect in greater detail, as Japanese war fictions provide critical commentary on the social unsettlement of trauma victims.

Traumatic socialization World Trigger proposes that war trauma is a unique experience with specific consequences for those involved. War trauma shapes the socio-psychological and physical development of children like no other event can. When, for example, blood-related families dissolve because members die, the survivors can forge new connections through war. Yuuma, Osamu, and Chika are shown to do this over the course of several episodes. Another important message of the World Trigger series is that children need to grow up quickly and deal with the consequences of warfare in a productive or socially conducive way. Yuuma’s, Osamu’s, and Chika’s emotional and physical pain, for example, fosters a sense of empathy in them, which the actual children in high-tech, capitalist cultures are losing according to Paul Valent (Valent 1995: 82). Furthermore, I argue that their pain helps the child soldiers in 135

B enjamin N ickl

World Trigger to dream of a happy ending towards which most of the nondystopian versions of both Japanese and Western war fictions like Harry Potter gravitate. Bernard Beck points for related discussions about popular entertainment culture to “the popularity of adolescent fantasy movies about cosmic war and the enjoyment of military adventures that we find in World War II movies. [Their analysis] suggests the unique importance of war-themed culture in fostering solidarity in large, complex, and factionalized societies” (Beck 2015: 21). The horrors of war also motivate World Trigger’s child figures to bridge social gaps and stand united against the enemy. Class, age, gender, and even race thereby become secondary for individuals who are willing to sacrifice their bodies and mental health so that their friends and other members of society can live in peace. There is, however, the attending danger of communal or national isolationism. Beck warns about the notion of promoting racism or ethnic bias in war fictions. He writes that the fictional experience of war oftentimes offsets “the power of sub-cultural diversity movements by emphasizing the togetherness to be found in patriotic attachment to the whole society” (Beck 2015: 21). Beck’s assessment seems justified regarding BORDER’s continuous suspicion of Yuuma as “an alien neighbour who may look human but is not”. The director of BORDER, a ruthless general by the name of Masamume Kido, in fact advises his command staff in episode five that Yuuma shall be killed at the first sign of disloyalty to the people of Mikado City/ Japan. The flipside of internal unity can quickly turn into a form of gated nationalism in a country at war with other nations. It becomes clear in World Trigger that terms like neighbours, neighbourhood, BORDER, border agent, and alien visitors refer to a discourse on migration which centres on national territory and spatial boundaries. That the nation state should reinforce its borders against outsiders is usually what conservative voices demand during war, which has become obvious in the recent global refugee crisis of 2015 when Eastern Europe shut down its borders to millions of displaced Syrians. The nation of Japan, which of course is only fictionally represented in World Trigger, also has a long history of guarding itself against outsiders. Such similarities with actual reality should remind adults, according to Napier, that child viewers of Japanese war fictions might get the wrong message here: namely, that national unity is good whereas international cooperation and porous borders threaten the internal safety of countries (Napier 2001: 23). World Trigger is not the only animated Japanese war fiction series to discuss a sense of homogenous community in the context of war and war trauma. The aspect of societal compartmentalization and social hierarchies has become increasingly prominent in contemporary animated series such as Attack on Titan, where the young main character, Eren Yeager, is an underclass war orphan. Just like Yuuma with his outdated use of Japanese and his physical appearance, Eren arouses suspicion among the other members 136

C hildren at war

of Earth’s post-apocalyptic war society. He possesses superhuman strength and the ability to take the grotesque shape of an enemy Titan’s giant body. To prove that both Yuuma and Eren can be trusted despite their “low-class” or “outsider” status, they need to demonstrate their humanity. The marginalized outsiders must plead their cases in long and exceedingly emotional dialogues to other characters. They have to tell members of the core society about loss of family, friends, home, and memories, and their desire to recuperate love, warmth, safety, and belonging. Thus, side by side comparisons of contemporary Japanese war fiction series suggest to the viewer that wars order society. Wartime traumas are the pre-condition for trust and, even for children, validate the right to belong in the national community and mainstream culture.

Problematic war games Child figures who fight wars reflect both the problems and potential of society, a nation, or a community, to understand war as an issue of authenticity. Alexis Artaud de La Ferrière, for instance, points out that war narratives and especially those in the context of the American Civil War (1861–1865) and World War I (1914–1918) have a long history of being glorified as national founding myths. They are even recreated in war reenactments for “fun entertainment in countries like the US, Great Britain, and Australia” (de La Ferrière 2014: 106). In these imagined forms, the performance of war stories as leisurely games offers simplified versions of wartime societies with “complex divisions of labour and differentiated value systems” (Beck 2015: 21) where one side is clearly good while the other is bad. That this skewed re-narrativization of armed conflict does not accurately reflect historical truth, de La Ferrière argues, should not come as a surprise. It is a given, he writes, that every testimony of a person involved in a war changes on its way “into the public sphere—either in books, news items, in film, or as illustrations in policy documents” (de La Ferrière 2014: 106). And while this distortion is no different to the war testimonies told through the viewpoint of children, the wider public as well as elites and policy makers generally find wartime experiences of children more “authentic and morally convincing than those of adults” (de La Ferrière 2014: 107). It is common for animated Japanese war fictions to invoke an image of war as entertaining adventure. The traumatized young people in these adventures bond over their fights against the enemy. The younger the fighters are, though, the more game-like the wars become. The Dragon Ball franchise with its numerous television series instalments is a good example for wars dressed up as fantastical childhood adventures. In the first series, young Son Goku starts his journey as a seven-year-old boy. The series’ protagonist was orphaned in a war for seven magical orbs which can grant wishes if reunited. That Son Goku’s quest in fact prepares the main character for 137

B enjamin N ickl

countless, game-like war battles with alien races who want to conquer Earth and kill its people is only revealed later as the series gradually progresses. Similarly, Japanese anime series for younger audiences such as Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans, Digimon or more recently Fairy Tail, construct the fight of their protagonist child characters against evil villains and deadly enemies as game-like events and stylized battle-duel scenarios. The premise is always the same. War is an exciting game for which children are recruited and trained. Their mentors teach them alleged facts to discern good values, people, or countries from bad ones. That their war games require children to be resourceful, compassionate, clever, and above all young and impressionable, illustrates how the creators of Japanese war fictions present the socio-psychology of modern warfare. If popular Japanese culture and its global “consumption is [a] reflection of worldwide attitudes about war” (Napier 2001: 165), as Napier claims, then one can read it as a precarious youth activity. The war fictions reduce intricate geopolitics and the stratagems of socio-political and religious elites to an idealized fight for values like loyalty, friendship, and love. In World Trigger, too, the reduction of warfare to gameplay begs the question whether the audience is being trained to consume actual wars just like idealized children’s games with overly simple concepts of truth and violence, and to fight for the nation as a just cause. Indeed, Marc Yamada argues that Japanese war fictions tend to neglect the complexity of actual reality and authenticity when they depict war and historical violence in Japanese society as entertaining events (Yamada 2014: 154). Yamada’s discussion of two controversial works of popular Japanese manga, which appeared as serialized animations in the late 1990s and 2000s, Biriibaazu (translated as Believers, 1999) by Yamamoto Naoki and Nijuseiki Shonen (translated as Twentieth Century Boys, 1999–2006) by Urasawa Naoki, demonstrates this. Yet, he also points out that traumatic events like war crimes and large-scale destruction often remain unprocessed in the national imaginary of modern nations like Japan due to censorship. Other reasons for a lack of working through trauma as a nation are the collective will to forget atrocities and societal taboos (Yamada 2014: 153). The common choice of nations like Japan is, according to Yamada, to either forget wars and societal traumas or to represent them in a way which makes them suitable for consumption by a wide audience. It follows, according to Yamada, that one must ask if the popular war fictions assembled here present an unproblematic narrative of warfare. Another consideration is whether their re-insertion of war traumas into public entertainment discourse makes war and armed conflict appear more acceptable, morally justifiable, and socially appropriate (Yamada 2014: 156). The trigger replacement bodies in World Trigger exemplify the complex issue between representation and authenticity in Japanese war fictions. The 138

C hildren at war

artificial avatars allow the series’ child soldiers to lose arms, legs, and half of their torsos without consequence. A function called bail-out even enables higher-ranking BORDER agents to fly as an immaterial ball of light back to the safety of BORDER headquarters when a fighter’s loss of trion reaches critical levels during combat. That the artificial bodies can regenerate at the humans’ military base and be readied by lab technicians for future deployments is explained in detail in the series at the end of episode six. Trion also leaves no blood stains or gory injuries. Cut-off legs or arms simply evaporate. Like the concept of chakra energy in Naruto or the life force of mana in Evangelion, trion is a form of humanoid energy, which some people produce in a special gland in their bodies and possess naturally in high quantities. With trion to explain the lack of realistic physical harm, war in World Trigger thus supports the reductive depiction of armed conflicts as game as I have explained before. At the same time, though, the absence of authentic details about war injuries permits the child figure to focus on the psychology of their pre-traumatic self. Safeguarding of the body shifts attention to emotional pain, which in turn offers critical insights in the haunting spectre of war among children and their traumatized childhood(s). Yet, not all of World Trigger’s child characters remain physically unharmed during their war games. Yuuma’s real body is dead, and an enemy alien also adds significant injuries to Osamu’s actual body in episode 24. When Osamu has no other choice, he swaps his trigger body for his real form in a desperate bid to save Chika from alien abduction. That realistic war elements, like physical damage and life-threatening injuries, happen to children during war games or otherworldly experiences disrupts the notion of inconsequential simulation. Goldsmith and Satterlee point to this phenomenon as a case of “fictional trauma association” (Goldsmith and Satterlee 2003: 35) in which fictions about war connect fantasy with realistic physical damage to integrate trauma into one’s real life identity. They write: “fiction enhances clinical conceptualizations of traumatic emotion and memory by providing unique access into psychological states, including the effects of trauma on the individual’s sense of self and relation to the world” (Goldsmith and Satterlee 2003: 36). The war games of Japanese war fictions become real in rare yet significant moments. Like in the abovementioned examples from World Trigger, the genre sometimes situates childhood war trauma in distinctly believable contexts. This conflation allows the viewer to better grasp the complex nature of war fictions as an enhanced experience of traumatic emotions and memories. It includes fictional representations of trauma healing and trauma recovery as well as a variety of ways to deal with loss. Yuuma, for example, decides to dedicate his new life on Earth to making friends and to find a way to save his actual body from death. Osamu suffers from survivor’s guilt. To overcome the trauma, he resolves to protect Chika to atone for his cowardice when her brother was abducted and most likely killed by 139

B enjamin N ickl

the alien enemies. That Osamu is ready to sacrifice his actual body for the young girl seems to help him heal mentally, which in turn encourages Chika to train harder than any other child soldier so nobody else will suffer for her sake anymore. Yamada believes that conflicting attitudes about the trauma of children in war fictions stem from a blurred line between realistic depictions of war and its belittlement. There are also juvenile ideas about war as an adventure, and there is a post-modern nostalgia in Japanese culture for a simpler, post-war society (Yamada 2014: 162). These aspects add up to a reinforcement of Japan’s cultural myths and preferred modes of thinking. Patrick Drazen critiques their resurgence in a statement on the competing forces of war and anti-war messages in popular Japanese animation, for he sees a culture where childish, simplified, or one-sided ideas overshadow more complex questions about moral complicity, murder, and war crimes against humanity. Drazen writes: “By viewing the world of war through the eyes of children (including adolescents), the Japanese pop culture is able to sustain its currently predominant vision of war as a delusion” (Drazen 2014: 203). Yet, as the following section demonstrates, Japanese war fictions can deliver serious and intricate commentary on life in modern society, especially in the context of Western youth cultures obsessed with ignoring death and human mortality.

Death and mortality Scholars like Phylllis Silverman bemoan that there is too little focus in modern societies on the representation of the “complexity of death in a child’s life” (Silverman 2002: 9) in children’s fictions. Instead of addressing this traumatic experience, adults and adult characters will most frequently prompt child figures and children to simply carry on and not dwell on loss or what to productively make of it (Silverman 2002: 9). Kathy Charmaz also argues that ignorance of the fact and lack of explanation of what it means to die offers no adequate framework with which children can cope. Death and loss of loved ones means a sudden change in the lifeworld of children. Only few are equipped to deal with it, as it is rarely represented for them in adequate terms in age-appropriate literature and on screen (Charmaz 1994: 29). She agrees with Silverman that there are too few coping repertoires in modern societies regarding the concept of death. The media and Western public in general have come to shield children from death as a reality, insists Charmaz, to a point where open talk about traumatic bereavement and feelings of loss have “almost become social taboo topics” (Charmaz 1994: 30). I emphasize this aspect to make a final point here about animated Japanese war fictions like World Trigger. The series is a popular fiction but offers especially young viewers a critical perspective on the traumatic experience of death and a vocabulary to work through feelings of loss and sadness. 140

C hildren at war

It is uncommon for Western children’s fictions to thematize death with the same amount of socio-psychological introspection and critical ambiguity as Japanese war fictions and still be as popular. For instance, a great number of scholars have discussed the popular Hunger Games trilogy (The Hunger Games, 2008; Catching Fire, 2009; Mockingjay, 2010) because of its focus on violent deaths of innocent children. The young fighters aged 12 and up, have to kill each other as tributes in a war game to survive and to benefit their communities, or so-called districts, through murder. The only other Western literary example of the last decade with a similar complex perspective on death, war, and children was the seventh book in the Harry Potter series. In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (2007), a teenage boy needs to find the inner resolve to die for the greater good of society. Author J.K. Rowling said about the voluntary self-sacrifice of the main character, Harry Potter, who takes down warlord wizard Voldemort: “I wanted Harry to believe he was walking toward his death [when fighting Voldemort]”.6 In the instances of the Hunger Games and Harry Potter, the popular characters respond to death with a range of emotions and memories. Those reactions address the effects of death and traumatic experiences on them and the people around them. However, these popular fictions do differ significantly from World Trigger’s examination of human mortality. The attention to detail, variation, and frequency of childhood traumas caused by death in World Trigger is staggering. Most of the series’ child and pre-pubescent characters disclose in long monologues a range of common post-traumatic reactions to the demise of their loved ones or other people under their protection. Denial, anger, revenge, yet also solidarity with other survivors are the main themes. These occur in almost every of the series’ to-date 48 episodes. Still, though, new or more elaborate details emerge for the viewer in each episode. Yuuma, for instance, continuously talks about his father’s last moments. Hatred for the enemy motivates Osamu’s to take revenge for his best friend’s abduction. Chika realizes that many of BORDER’s agents get seriously injured, abducted, or even killed while protecting the wider public. She discloses her feelings of despair and anger over being helpless to her senior training officer at BORDER, Reiji. Conversely, Reiji tells Chika about the traumatic loss of his father when they train together or have post-training meals near BORDER headquarters. That World Trigger’s children have no choice other than to deal with death as part of their everyday life reflects an underlying traumatization of the animation’s cultural context. The unavoidability to confront bereavement and trauma raises the question about the perspective on life and mortality, which child figures in animated Japanese war fictions bring to audiences in Western, first-world countries. Vickey Lebeau insists that the figure of the child has historically occupied a central space on Western-culture screens as the emblem of an innocence which must be protected (Lebeau 2008: 7). In Japanese war fictions, though, the absence of the child’s assumed inability 141

B enjamin N ickl

to cope with adult issues holds larger implications. There is a functional component to it. World Trigger’s children are the “traumatized others” onto which the wider public, as Alexandra Lloyd and Ute Wölfel point out, can “transfer their crisis of identity” (Lloyd and Wölfel 2015: 228). According to Beck, this crisis stems from the fact that younger generations in Western countries have not been involved in more globally visible carnage, violence, disaster, and death (Beck 2013: 29). The promotion of death is an uneasy subject matter. Yet, the Japanese war fiction series assembled here touch upon the problematic construction of death as a societal non-topic. The death of children is an off-limits issue in many societies, particularly for younger audiences and their awareness of historical, global warfare. However, that adults shield their children from the reality of death and thereby recuperate a sense of their own lost innocence is only one way to read the discourse on death here. One could also see the presentation of death and trauma in Japanese war fictions as an alternative means of social cohesion, or the discursive embedding of an anti-war doctrine in mass entertainment culture.

Emotional scars and intergenerational repercussions I have addressed the constant exposure to traumatic deaths and the way in which trauma changes surviving children in the previous sections. The child ninja warriors in Naruto, for example, form a new village society in hope of a peaceful future after a great war destroys most of their lands. After the horrors of war are over, the children of Neon Evangelion too rebuild Earth’s post-war society as a peaceful collective. The traumatized child combatants keep records of the past. They partake in commemorative rituals to remember the dead and pledge themselves to pacifist ideals. I now turn here to how World Trigger dismantles, dissects, and explains death and childhood trauma as an intergenerational issue in that it transfers the responsibilities of operating society to the arriving generation. For instance, Yuuma, Osamu, and Chika, as well as their hundreds of comrades, accept that death is always a possibility. In fact, they bond over this awareness and even embrace aggression, fights, and dismemberment in violent war games as preparation for real-life warfare. The dedication to warfare, however, means that the children of war will also incorporate their wartime childhood experiences as a communal feature in the future society where those who have survived and learnt how to kill are in power. Of course, violence and a readiness to kill the enemy in trigger training simulations is different from actual fights. Nobody can die because of failsafe technologies inside the sparing facilities of BORDER headquarters. But mock war games still allow the child soldiers to hurt the bodies of their peers in training fights. The pain is meant to prepare them to take enemy lives without hesitation in real battles. Yuuma addresses this ambiguous aspect, 142

C hildren at war

which episode 11 of World Trigger bears out in a lengthy conversation about child-like innocence and lack of empathy between the young alien and his 16-year-old Earth mentor, Yūichi. Yūichi is an experienced fighter and tells Yuuma that war is necessary so that future generations can live on Earth in peace. Yuuma responds to this with a single phrase and a slight smirk: “You make up the nicest lies”. It is, as the viewer knows from previous episodes, a special talent of Yuuma’s trigger body to be able to tell when another person is dishonest. But Yuuma seems rather sad on this occasion, which his inner speech reveals as a commentary on the whole scene after Yūichi leaves: “Perhaps he [Yūichi] needs to believe this in order to go on”. Another point I have made before was that childhood trauma can create a sense of community while it reinforces hostility towards other groups. Such groups may even be part of the majority population and have lived through similar experiences. Indeed, the example of Yūichi demonstrates that the fighting mentality of today’s children could become a serious issue for later generations, who must deal with these issues long after war has ended. The burden of childhood traumas on future generations is almost certain. It suggests that the motif of death and childhood traumas in World Trigger entails both positive and negative messages regarding the issue of inter- and intra-communal conflict. Jennifer Friedrich points out that the role of trauma simulations, which one could argue the war games in Japanese war fictions are, is to encourage audiences to think about the active participants in vicious cycles of aggression. War also consistently marginalizes groups of people, putting the victors in positions of power (Friedrich 2008: 204–205). If the danger of childhood traumas is not addressed in real life, argues Friedrich, then “the phantom of their pain” (Friedrich 2008) will haunt real children just as much as those on screen and leave them isolated from society. It is hard to say which position World Trigger takes on the post-traumatic development of its main characters and future generations. Whether they turn into pacifists or remain obsessed with violence and combat is a question many fans ask in online fan forums on crunchyroll.com.7 There is only one comment in episode 47 on Chika’s inability to shoot other humans during the war games, which suggests that the youngest character of the series is unwilling to accept killing as a reality of wartime living. World Trigger is slated for at least another season. Therefore, an ending or conclusion is not available yet. Preliminary storylines suggest that Yuuma, Osamu, and Chika want to spare future generations the spectre of war, which emerged in their childhoods and ended their innocence prematurely. Chika, who is the youngest of the trio, has no interest in glorifying war or fetishizing it like an idol. “Nobody should ever have to live through this [our war]”, she tells Osamu while tears roll over her face in episode 10. Some scholars of popular Japanese fictions and animation culture are more sceptical with regards to anti-war messages in the cultural mainstream. 143

B enjamin N ickl

Matthey Penney, for example, points out that war has been presented as desirable for society in numerous Japanese films and for-television features since 2000. These films focus on Japan’s military forces, who gloriously re-fight World War II in alternative imaginations of the war. Ultimately in most of the productions, Penney writes, “the Japanese soldiers win against the Americans and other enemies to the Japanese nation” (Penney 2007: 35). Such views are revisionist. The examples of animated Japanese war fictions discussed next to World Trigger (Naruto, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Attack on Titan) reject them as neo-nationalist war fantasies in Japanese society. World Trigger instead advocates socio-ethnic diversity and cosmopolitan pluralism. But, as Penny notes, the popularity of what-if war films has increased steadily. Younger audiences become too removed from actual war and the stories of historical war children and their childhood traumas to appreciate peace in the modern nation of Japan (Penney 2007: 37). One may read the ambiguity of World Trigger in relation to death and war games as a response to this phenomenon.

Conflicting values and global children’s entertainment It is difficult to understand why animated Japanese war fictions have become popular all over the world over the past decade without fostering more discussion among Western scholars about their innovative discourse on war. One could argue, as Drazer does, that the genre shines more light on problematic and oftentimes contradictory contexts of modern warfare than Hollywood fictions or the “Disneyfied” war narratives in Western children’s entertainment. In fact, my focus on the theme of child(hood) trauma in popular Japanese animation culture shows that war fiction series tend to present a complex perspective on modern societies. It runs the gamut from nationalism, collective memory and trauma, ethnic bias, and a sense of belonging for marginalized individuals. As I have discussed specifically in the case of World Trigger and related anime productions, they can highlight certain aspects of war, which historical conventions and national elites or general society decided to conceal from view in the national consciousness. Japanese war fictions locate events and feelings and processes involved in the psychological wounds of vulnerable and innocent characters. The traumas of child figures reveal in this sense a larger reality behind the social and political circumstances of war. They prompt viewers to think on the links between the myriad of aspects which go hand in hand with armed conflict in and between societies, injury, loss, and frequently also death of the innocent. Animated Japanese war fictions challenge the possibility of envisioning a future where those traumatized by war as children will not carry over their physical and emotional scars into adulthood. The genre depicts the formation of communities and the reason for social cohesion in an in-depth manner with psychological introspection. I have discussed how identity conflicts 144

C hildren at war

and existential fears are the key themes in World Trigger and the other texts assembled in this essay. And with its popularity still far from waning and Western audiences growing up on Japanese war fictions, one can only hope that more discussions of the culture-specific themes and styles of the genre are going to find their way into globally-oriented scholarly debates on such complex cultural issues as the representation of child(hood) trauma and war.

Notes 1 There is no clear consensus when the genre of Japanese war fictions originated. Scholars broadly set the date around the early 1980s to mid-1990s although some researchers argue for much earlier timeframes around 1950 during the American occupation of Japan. Most discussions of the genre revolve around high-brow and low-brow culture. While some researchers exclude Japanese anime as fanciful entertainment from the genre of valid fictions to study war and its social effects, Daisuke Miyao insists that “illustrated mainstream visual storytelling has a long tradition in Japan yet remains under-researched as children’s programming” (Miyao 2002: 193). 2 The long-lasting popularity of Japanese animation in Western entertainment may explain why World Trigger ranks high in Japan’s televised anime charts and internationally is popular as a subtitled export. Anime cartoons from Japan have been part of the Western entertainment industry for decades. What put Japanese war fictions on the map for younger audiences and child entertainment programmes in the new century though was Naruto, which aired from 2002 to 2007 in many Western countries after its series premier in Japan. Naruto Shippuden followed as sequel to the original show and targeted adolescent and more adult audiences after Naruto’s official conclusion in 2007. Global audiences started to consume more current series such as World Trigger in the wake of the Naruto franchise’s success. The enduring circulation of the animated ninja warrior Naruto Uzokmaki practically established a market segment for Japanese war fictions in the mainstream entertainment culture of countries all over the world through syndication and internet streaming. 3 The Japanese title of the first episode is ‘Isekai kara no Raihousha’ (異世界から の訪問). 4 Naruto was a serialized manga magazine before the television adaption appeared in Japan. Studio Pierrot and Aniplex produced the series, which premiered on TV Tokyo on 3 October 2002. Ten films have appeared based on the print manga and television series. 5 Tessa Morris-Suzuki points to the difference between animated war fictions and historical war animation in Japanese culture. Animated war fiction films and series are exaggerated both in style and aesthetics and deal with fantastical worlds and imagined realities. In contrast, historical war animation represents actual wars in Japanese history with a realistic approach to visual styles and historical detail (Morris-Suzuki 2005: 40–46). Grave of the Fireflies (1988) is an example of historical representation of war through animation, specifically with the film’s theme of World War II. The war drama, Grave of the Fireflies, is widely known in Japan and centres on suffering of Japan’s children, of whom many suffered tragic losses of blood family and friends during the war. Historical war animations are usually dramas and rarely contain comedy elements or comic relief. They are also not intended for younger viewers, which sets them

145

B enjamin N ickl

apart by genre, stylistics, and intended audience from animated war fiction series like World Trigger. 6 www.beyondhogwarts.com/harry-potter/articles/jk-rowling-goes-beyond-theepilogue.html: J.K. (Joanne Kathleen) Rowling’s answer to a fan question on the ending of the last book in the Harry Potter franchise, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. 17-year-old Harry walks to certain death in a bid to save his friends and all of society from another wizarding war [accessed on 29 September 2016]. 7 Online sites like crunchyroll.com now offer free and unlimited streams of Japanese animation series and films, which means that the number of anime productions has skyrocketed, and a survey of the genre is complex if not impractical.

References Beck, Bernard. 2013. ‘Baby’s Gone A-Hunting: The Hunger Games, Bully, and Struggling to Grow up’. Multicultural Perspectives 15(1): 27–30. Beck, Bernard. 2015. ‘War Games: Ender’s Game, The Monuments Men, and Movies for Peace’. Multicultural Perspectives 17(1): 21–24. Burkholder, Peter, and David Rosen. 2017. ‘Child Soldiers in Medieval(esque) Cinema’. In War, Myths, and Fairy Tales, edited by Sara Buttsworth and Maartje Abbenhuis, 147–174. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan. Charmaz, Kathy. 1994. ‘Conceptual Approaches to the Study of Death’. In Death and Identity, edited by Robert Fulton and Robert Bendickson, 28–79. Bowle, MD: Charles Press. De la Ferrière, Alexis Artaud. 2014. ‘The Voice of the Innocent: Propaganda and Childhood Testimonies of War’. History of Education 43(1): 105–123. Denison, Rayna. 2011. ‘Transcultural Creativity in Anime: Hybrid Identities in the Production, Distribution, Texts and Fandom of Japanese Anime’. Creative Industries Journal 3(3): 221–235. Drazen, Patrick. 2014. Anime Explosion! The What? Why? and Wow! of Japanese Animation. Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press. Friedrich, Jennifer. 2008. ‘Children and Trauma: A Narrative-Based Playgroup’. Journal of Poetry Therapy 21(4): 203–217. Goldsmith, Rachel, and Michelle Satterlee. 2003. ‘Representations of Trauma in Clinical Psychology and Fiction’. Journal of Trauma and Dissociation 5(2): 35–59. Lebeau, Vicky. 2008. Childhood and the Cinema. London: Reaktion. Lloyd, Alexandra, and Ute Wölfel. 2015. ‘Introduction’. Oxford German Studies: Special Issue 44(3): 227–235. Miyao, Daisuke. 2002. ‘Before Anime: Animation and the Pure Film Movement in Pre-War Japan’. Japan Forum 14(2): 191–209. Morris-Suzuki, Tessa. 2005. The Past Within Us: Media, Memory, History. New York, NY: Verso. Napier, Susan. 2001. Anime: From Akira to Princess Mononoke. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Penney, Matthew. 2007. ‘ “War Fantasy” and Reality – “War as Entertainment” and Counter-Narratives in Japanese Popular Culture’. Japanese Studies 27(1): 35–52. Silverman, Phyllis. 2002. Never Too Young to Know: Death in Children’s Lives. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

146

C hildren at war

Stahl, David, and Mark Williams. 2010. Imag(in)ing the War in Japan: Representing and Responding to Trauma in Postwar Literature and Film. Leiden: Brill. Valent, Paul. 1995. ‘Documented Childhood Trauma (Holocaust): Its Sequelae and Applications to Other Traumas’. Psychiatry, Psychology and Law 2(1): 81–89. Yamada, Marc. 2014. ‘Trauma and Historical Referentiality in Post-Aum Manga’. Japanese Studies 34(2): 153–168.

147

11 RETURNING HORROR, RE-VISIONING REAL Children and trauma in Grave of the Fireflies Ritwick Bhattacharjee Setsuko: Seita. Have One. [Holds out rocks] Seita: Setsuko, what? Setsuko: Rice Balls. I made them for you. Here, have one. [Seita starts crying] Setsuko: You don’t want them? Seita: Setsuko [Cries] RETURNING HORROR, RE-VISIONING REAL

RITWICK BHATTACHARJEE

One of the most harrowing scenes in Studio Ghibli’s animated film Grave of Fireflies(original Japanese title Hotaru no Haka) is perhaps when the four-year-old Setsuko, on the verge of death because of malnutrition, holds out rocks to her 14-year-old brother Seita and, believing the rocks to be rice balls, asks the latter to eat them. What adds to the gravity of the scene is the fact that Seita, by this time, has already managed to acquire large quantities of actual food. The preceding sequences to the current one mentioned here shows Seita go through unimaginable lengths to obtain food for his dying sister—from stealing to emptying their deceased mother’s bank account. The acquisition of food allows the viewer to hope, alongside Seita, that maybe Setsuko will finally get something to eat: a hope for the possibility of a return to innocence and normalcy for the siblings. The rocks, however, shatter that hope. This breakdown, in turn, induces pure horror in the form of the knowledge that Setsuko will never get her life back. Her subsequent death from malnutrition, despite Seita’s best efforts, simply cements the existence of hopelessness against hope. This entire act—from Seita’s acquisition of food to Setsuko’s death—has been singled out, for it becomes symptomatic of what the entire film revolves around: childhood trauma and, flowing down from it, horror. Set in Japan during the final days of the Second World War, Grave of the Fireflies shows Seita and Setsuko’s struggle to survive after their home and rather comfortable lives in Kobe are 148

R eturning horror , re - visioning real

demolished by American B-29 Superfortress bombers. The siblings face one traumatic event after another to the end that both die one after the other, of hunger. To talk about the traumatic events as something that merely befalls Seita and Setsuko would, however, be unfair and reductive. These moments are not simple hurdles that the two have to cross in order to survive. These events, in fact, become initiators of change(s) that alter the Being of both these children at the most fundamental level and bring them face to face with unadulterated horror: horror that is not just fear but fear added with despair. This horror, as shown later, is nothing new but reminiscent of a much more essential horror that governs the human and its subsequent growth as a “human”. A traumatic event then doesn’t just induce horror but makes manifest a primal terror that every human shies away from. Grave of the Fireflies becomes important because it, in tune with this line of argument, shows that the aforementioned fundamental alteration is in fact a re-visioning of the Real-itself: a construction that is tasked with keeping the primal horror at an arm’s length. The current paper then, through an analysis of the film, intends to show how and why the Real becomes the way it is, how horror features into the real, how a traumatic event ends up re-visioning the real, how and why this change affects children more than adults, and how it becomes necessary, especially for children, for the real to change and not just shatter.

I. Horror, reality, and temporality Since horror and the real become rather central for an interrogation into the dynamics of childhood trauma, especially as they are represented and talked of in Grave of the Fireflies, it befits to begin the argument with the two seemingly disparate yet intricately tied entities. Concerning horror, the Webster dictionary defines it as a “painful and intense fear, dread, or dismay”. What are of interest here are the first two adjectives that the definition uses: painful and intense. The depiction of horror in Grave of the Fireflies, in fact, can be seen as exemplary towards the underscoring of this intense pain that accompanies horror. In the beginning of the narrative, as the alarm bells signalling the American bombarding ring, the siblings’ mother orders her son to take his sister and run to the shelter while she collects some of her heart medications and meets with them there. Seita, upon hearing his mother’s command, fashions a rudimentary sling in which he hangs his sister on his back and runs. The bombing, however, begins before Seita manages to reach the shelter. Everything around them, everything that Seita and Setsuko understood as their homes erupts in flames and there is chaos everywhere. All the residents of the town are running for their lives and trampling over each other in the panic. Somehow Seita, with Setsuko on his back, manages to dodge the bombs and the fire and run out of the city to find some form 149

R itwick B hattacharjee

of shelter in a storm drain. As they finally reach relative safety, Seita puts his sister down. The camera then focuses on Setsuko and shows how her blackened face contorts and distorts to reflect pure pain. Setsuko, in this moment, is not just afraid. Within a matter of minutes she has not only witnessed a complete breakdown of everything she holds dear but also made to face the prospect of death: a proposition that is terrifying in-itself. While, before running out of her house, the four-year-old seemingly cares only about her doll (which Seita has to rush back and pick up), by the time she reaches the storm drain, she has come face to face with her mortality. As the horror finally settles in, her facial features undergo a radical change: from innocence to unimagined terror. The distortion of Setsuko’s face signals the primal and intense pain that accompanies horror. Horror, in a sense then, affects both physiology and psychology. The question, however, that needs to be asked here is why the body and psyche reacts to horror in the manner that Setsuko’s does. Why is horror so painful? The answer lies in the human consciousness and the way horror finds a place in it. What, then, is the human consciousness? Or, more importantly, how does one know the being of consciousness? For one, consciousness manifests itself always as a consciousness of something else: the consciousness of sight, act, event, and so on. For another, if consciousness is always a consciousness of something, the only way it becomes possible to know consciousness is by the consciousness of consciousness. Such a proposition, on the face of it, seems cyclical and rather problematic as the object of consciousness here is itself. Jean-Paul Sartre, in the introduction of Being and Nothingness, facing a similar problem, tries to circumvent it by positing that “the first consciousness of consciousness is not positional . . . because it is one with the consciousness of which it is consciousness. At one stroke it determines itself as consciousness of perception and as perception” (1943: 10). In other words, for Sartre, since consciousness is a singularity it needs no other entity to perceive it than itself. Sartre’s exposition, however, does not really solve the problem for even if consciousness acts as both the entity that perceives and the one that is perceived, it still only perceives itself. As long as consciousness perceives something else, it proves the existence of the object which is perceived but (when read in the same vein) perceiving itself gets consciousness mired into a rather tautological argument where it exists because it exists. Notwithstanding this circularity,1 what becomes important for the current paper is this circularity itself: a circularity that demarcates a fundamental failure to go deeper into the human cogito to understand consciousness in itself. Sartre’s impasse is understandable for it becomes a symptom of a larger problem—that of the impossibility of knowing human consciousness. This impossibility can be better understood through another dimension of the consciousness. The manifestation of consciousness as the consciousness of something not only grants the object its existence but, in process, reveals 150

R eturning horror , re - visioning real

its own self as well. To see a colour not only proves the existence2 of that colour but also relates a knowing of the act of seeing that colour. It is this revealing of the existence of the perceiver alongside that of the perceived that initiates the aforementioned circularity in the first place. Nevertheless, what this knowing does is grant a secondary knowledge of being alive and, subsequently, its opposite: of being dead. Consciousness, in a sense then, grants the human (the owner of that consciousness) the knowledge of being alive and of dying one day. Thomas Ligotti, in his book The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, pointing to this secondary knowledge derived from consciousness writes that “[this] is the knowledge we ‘enjoy’ as the highest beings in the animated diorama known as nature” (Ligotti 2011: 14–15). In other words, the human consciousness sets it apart as the organism at the (relative) highest stage of evolution. But what is this knowledge? What does being alive or death mean? For Ligotti, the answers to these questions would, at best, be “a compound of flabby abstractions that coincide with no definite or uniform experience in life” (Ligotti 2011: 16) because there can be no qualifications or quantifications to either life or death. Is a newborn, for example, somehow “more” alive than a person about to die? Does being in happiness really relate more life than being in misery? The answers to these can only be found in, as Ligotti says, “abstractions”. Death, on the other hand, is a greater mystery. It is just an intuition; a complication that exists in-itself and inducing fear. Further, as Ligotti notes, neither can any mortal overcome the fear of death or know death with practise (Ligotti 2011: 16). What remains in the question concerning death, then, is nothing. The failure to answer this hoard of questions circles back once again to the impossibility of understanding what the consciousness is because it is impossible to know what the consciousness professes to. If, on one hand, the consciousness grants the human the knowledge of being alive and being dead, that knowledge itself, on the other, can never be reproduced. Inevitably then, the consciousness fails to make apparent the one thing that it professes to know. The failure of the consciousness to be something that it is supposed to be ultimately reveals a paradox within which the human being is shrouded. The best conceptualization of this paradox is perhaps in Julius Bahnsen’s coinage which postulates that man is a “self-conscious nothing” (in Ligotti 2011: 10). Self-consciousness-in-itself and nothingness-in-itself are understandably disparate entities because being self-conscious negates nothingness. On the other hand, an entity that is nothing can never be self-conscious. Bahnsen’s forceful yoking together of these two entities within and as a single body not only demarcates but also defines that singular body as paradoxical: a paradox which exists because of the aforementioned complicated nature of the consciousness for it gives rise to both self-consciousness and, owing to the impossibility of the presentation of its own self, nothingness. Due to this rather fundamental paradox, the human being, in turn, becomes 151

R itwick B hattacharjee

quite an unnatural thing. Ligotti, commenting on this aberrant nature of the human, in fact, declares them as “an unreal monstrosity, an existential chimera on the order of the ‘undead’ ” (Ligotti 2011: 11). The controlling word in this declaration is “unreal”. If the reality of the human is the paradox (especially since the consciousness makes the human as a human and distinguishes it from beasts), Ligotti’s proposition morphs that reality into the “unreal”; leaving the entire human race as literally nothing.3 But, sounding true to Bahnsen’s paradox, human beings do exist: caught up between that existence and a contemporaneous nonexistence of nothingness. Mired within such a situation, further, human beings become but puppets of the causality of nature. Causality is the only a priori force that governs everything: from the creation of the universe to any and every choice that any and every being makes, all are subject to only the infinite cause and effect relations weaving throughout the cosmos. Each cause gives rise to multiple effects, all of which in turn become causes for further multiple effects. The human race, in such a schema of the cosmos, already diminished by its very own defining feature (consciousness) is powerless to be or act out anything else. The only right that the human has then is “to seek the survival of our individual bodies, to create more bodies like our own, and to know that everybody’s body will perish through a process of corruption and mortal trauma” (Ligotti 2011: 17). This is, finally, the site of the aforementioned primal horror: horror at the knowledge of one’s own essential nothingness and the absolute defeat in the face of nature. This horrific knowledge of an individual’s fundamental unreality, nothingness, and minuteness, further, becomes painful both physically and psychologically because it accompanies complete helplessness. There is not only no control that one can exert over their own life as they are pushed around with the tidal wave of the universe but there isn’t an escape from this knowledge either. Consciousness, for whatever it is worth, forces this comprehension of nothingness onto each human, rendering them respite only in death: itself an unknown. Horror, in a sense then, hurts because it comes with a knowledge of fundamental nothingness, helplessness and, ultimately, mortality. The distortion of Setsuko’s face after reaching the storm drain, as already shown, relays this horror. The bombing of Kobe by the American planes becomes a manifestation of the fundamental helplessness that haunts Setsuko. She has no control over the planes. In fact, since Seita has to carry her around, she has no control over running away either. Setsuko realizes that the only thing that she can do is be carried around wherever her brother and the planes dictate. Further, while the bombing of her home is momentary,4 it becomes a signifier of the larger forces of nature that are always there and control every single action that she has to do. In a sense then, Setsuko’s horror is not just a response to the bombing she witnesses but, as will be shown later as well, a resettling (and a revalidation) of that primal horror which invades all human beings. Yet another episode in the film that shows 152

R eturning horror , re - visioning real

the manifestation of the knowledge of human nothingness is when Setsuko digs a grave for her fireflies. After the death of their mother, Seita takes Setsuko to their aunt so that they can await the return of their father there. The aunt, though, despises the two children because they mean a strain on her already dwindling resources because of the war. She constantly rebukes Seita for having done nothing to deserve the food that she cooks. Finally, tired of her constant admonishments, Seita decides to leave and take care of Setsuko on his own. They eventually find sanctuary in an abandoned bomb shelter and release fireflies inside for light. In the morning, however, the two wake up to find that all the fireflies have died. Setsuko, heartbroken at the death of the insects that gave her immense joy the night before, proceeds to dig a grave to bury the fireflies. Seita, looking at his sister burying the fireflies, asks her why she’s doing that. Setsuko replies that she has to bury them because their mother has been similarly buried. She then asks Setia why fireflies have to die so young. Both her response to her brother and the subsequent question reveals Setsuko’s knowledge of not only mortality, but her mortality. The death of the fireflies before their time becomes, for her, a parallel to the inevitability of her own death. The grave of the fireflies, in a sense then, signifies the manifestation of her horror that stems from the knowledge of her helplessness against nature and death. The grave is the only thing that matters and even the fireflies have to have one. Further, while the resettling of horror does not show on her body, the act of digging the grave betrays a psychological affect that inevitability, death, the knowledge of death, and the horror that stems from it has on Setsuko. It’s as if she is preparing her own grave. Much like in the earlier instance when Setsuko realizes that she has no control over either the bombers or her escape from them, the death of the fireflies makes her understand that she absolutely has no control over the end either. The title itself of the film—Grave of the Fireflies—then reveals an essential nothingness that haunts Setsuko and, by extension, all human kind. The question as to why this primal horror, along with all its attendant nothingness and helplessness sets in, however, remains. To answer this question, it becomes imperative to first delineate the nature of reality as it is experienced. If, owing to the paradox of consciousness, the reality of the human is veiled by nothingness, this reality, as already shown, radiates horror while simultaneously turning into unreality. The human being, however, cannot live in this unreality. For one, a state of perpetual painful horror leaves life as a terrible entity; to be gotten rid of as soon as possible. Ligotti, borrowing from Thomas Zapffe’s essay “On the Tragic”, proposes that the only way out of an existence defined by such horror is by stopping all reproduction and letting the race end: “It may not be a realistic solution for a stopgap world . . . but it is one that would end all human suffering, should we ever care to do so” (Ligotti 2011: 24). For another, the human kind has done and achieved “too much to content ourselves with merely surviving, 153

R itwick B hattacharjee

reproducing, dying-and nothing else” (Ligotti 2011: 17). The solution to this predicament then lies in the creation of a new reality: a reality that takes over the original reality that exudes nothingness. This reality is created by putting the self inside of time. Temporality, giving rise to a past, present, and future, allows the human to form a narrative within and against which they can define themselves. By the virtue of being in time, the human metamorphosizes into a some-body from a no-thing because suddenly the human not only is, but also was and will be. The word “being” itself, in fact, betrays this temporal nature of the human. It is present-continuous and always demarcates a process of existence. The continuity of presence, in a sense, allows the human to have temporal coordinates which can be highlighted either through memory or projection to prove the existence of an individual; and as long as the human is an “individual”, a “some-body”, it cannot be a nothing. It is this temporal narrative, then, that becomes the reality of the individual because the individual not only is able to exist within this reality but also effectively negate the primal horror that derives itself from nothingness. In such a schema of reality, memory becomes vital because memory allows an individual to prove its individuality. I am not someone else (or nothing) because x, y, and z has happened to me and I remember all these happening to me to the point that I have experienced them and have been affected by them. Memory, however, is fickle because it is subject to external entities. Depending upon situations it can change, modify itself, or even be erased. If memory becomes vital for the continuity of a temporal narrative and, by extension, the human reality, it then needs to be stored. Following a similar argument in “The Fantasy of Space: Constructions of Home in Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, I have shown how home and all the spaces associated with home become the pickle jar in which memory is stored. The temporal narrative, through memory, attaches itself to the materiality of a home via nostalgia and allows the human to access it whenever necessary and establish/re-establish their individuality. The destruction of the home, in such a scenario then, marks a simultaneous destruction of the constructed reality that displays the human as an individual and somebody. The demolishing of the constructed reality, in turn, allows the horror of nothingness to come back. It is this annihilation of the home then that becomes, at least in part, the reason for Setsuko’s return to horror. Two events in the film become central towards the explication of this idea. The first one is at the beginning when her home town is bombed and completely destroyed. It marks the beginning of the destruction of Setsuko’s constructed reality. No wonder then that she is horrified immediately after the event. It becomes an apt response to the slipping of her reality and her return to nothingness. The second event is when Seita, while emptying his mother’s bank account, comes to know of Japan’s defeat in the war and his father’s death. The last shred of a home in 154

R eturning horror , re - visioning real

the form of both his father and his nation disappears with that news. Seita himself is horrified as he tries to run away and stumbles down. With this ultimate destruction of everything that was home for them, it comes as no surprise that Setsuko and Seita both die soon after. There is no more reality anymore. In fact, Setsuko can’t even distinguish between a pile of rocks and rice balls. This is also the reason that the scene becomes so harrowing as the viewer realizes that Setsuko (and Seita) will never return to innocence. The destruction of everything that was home for them has destroyed their selves as well. There is no innocence to return back to; only spectres of fleeting memory as Seita lies against a wall dying. The horror to which both Setsuko and Seita return to—the horror that displays their nothingness and their helplessness against and with that nothingness—ultimately ends up taking the life of both the brother and the sister.

II. Childhood, trauma, and re-visioning the real It would be unfair to say that the destruction of the reality of the two children is solely because of the destruction of their home especially since there are other characters in the film who have gone through the same experience and horror. Yet they live. The janitor who comes to the abandoned railway station to clean up the bodies of the dead children as Seita lies dying there, for example, doesn’t seem to be horrified after the events of the war at all. In fact, when he throws away the jar of candies that he takes from Seita’s dead body, he is quite animated and callous. The siblings’ aunt as well, while troubled because of the war, continues to live her life. There are many such characters in the film who are shown laughing and living even as they get the news of Japan’s defeat in the war. What separates all these characters from the children however, are their ages. All of these people who continue living and laughing are adults while Seita and Setsuko are children. Setsuko, at four years of age is, in fact, very young during the events of the film. Age becomes important because, as the current paper argues, trauma affects adults and children differently vis-à-vis the very construction of reality. Firstly, it’s not just the destruction of a home that corresponds to a destruction of reality. Any traumatic event does the same. In fact, an event becomes traumatic because it disrupts reality. If reality is constructed to keep horror away, a traumatic event, by the very act of re-inscribing horror, discloses the created and consequently, the illusionary nature of that reality. This disclosure, in turn, exposes the lacks of that constructed reality and, by bringing back fundamental helplessness, allows the essential reality of the human to come back. Every event that Seita and Setsuko go through in the films is, after all, traumatic. Both Setsuko and Seita lose their reality not simply because of the destruction of their home (which, however, cannot be discounted) but also because each traumatic event brings back the essential horror of nothingness. No wonder then that by the end of their lives both 155

R itwick B hattacharjee

Setsuko and Seita give up on their lives as Setsuko refuses to eat and Seita, after his sister’s death, does the same despite having food. It seems that it is not possible for either to live with the knowledge of their nothingness and death seems a better option. Their deaths are, in a sense, not very far from Ligotti’s declaration of stopping all procreation. Secondly, since reality is constructed through temporality, age takes a central augmenter of that construction because children simply have not had enough time to solidify the construction. By the virtue of having lived more, adults have more pasts and more memories to strengthen the construction of their reality. Children, on the other hand, have, at least quantitatively, less pasts and memories to become the building blocks for their constructions. Further, a majority of the memories that children do have are obscure because of the developing stage of their brains. The binary between innocence and experience, for example, is built upon this very principle. Any traumatic event, in such a scenario then, becomes even more debilitating for children because the reality that is disrupted is more fragile for them. While the strength of their realities allows adults to at least live through if not surpass its fracture, for children this fracture causes a complete breakdown of that reality. What then remains for them is complete nothingness with no recourse to any entity that might alleviate that nothingness and the horror of that nothingness. This is the reason why, in Grave of the Fireflies, it is the two children who are shown to have completely broken down while the adults carry on. The traumatic events, along with the destruction of their home, mark a complete and unalterable destruction of the realities for Seita and Setsuko. This is why the horror that returns—the horror of nothingness— becomes implacably painful for the children, often manifesting on their bodies and their psychologies. This paradigm is clearly visible between the brother and sister. Seita, the more adult of the two, is able to hold on to his reality even after he witnesses not only the same destruction that Setsuko does but also the horrific death of his mother. The strength of his reality allows Seita to take care of his little sister, make a decision of leaving their aunt, steal, fetch food, and more. No wonder then that it is Setsuko who loses her life first. Her death before her brother’s reveals the fragility of her reality and, by extension, her individual being. But neither the film nor the story of Seita and Setsuko end with their death. Both come back as ghosts. It is this return that becomes quite interesting and central for the purposes of the current paper. Firstly, Seita and Setsuko’s return as ghosts is not delayed until the end of the film to provide some cosmetic comfort to quiet the viewer’s uneasiness after the narration of a rather sad story. It is shown right at the beginning of the film. The very first shot of the film, in fact, focuses on Seita’s face as he fades in from darkness and declares: “September 21, 1945. . . that was the night I died”. Secondly, it is Seita’s ghost that, beginning with the declaration mentioned above, narrates the story of the film. Effectively then, by positioning Seita’s 156

R eturning horror , re - visioning real

ghost at the centre of the frame in the beginning of the story and consequently making it into its narrator, Grave of the Fireflies not only gives away the deaths of the brother and sister but also, in a sense, delineates the importance of their return. This latter delineation is vivified in the subsequent scene. With the establishment of Seita’s ultimate death, the narrative doesn’t start at the beginning of the story of the two siblings but at the end of their lives and the beginning of their ghost-selves. The scene shows Seita, leaning against a pillar at Sannomiya Station, dying. Later, once he is dead, a janitor comes in to remove his body and finds a box of candy containing ashes and a few fragments of bone lying beside him which he throws into a field. From that box, fireflies fly out and materialize Setsuko’s spirit. The young girl, looking at her brother’s dead body starts to run towards him, when Seita’s ghost interrupts her, smiles at her, holds her hand and takes her back home. The first few minutes of the film, in this way, by being the beginning itself, ascertains the significance (if not the centrality) of Seita and Setsuko’s ghosts over their live-selves. The physicality of their living selves, in other words, becomes a memory for these ghosts. There major implication of the projection of the spirits of Seita and Setsuko as central within the schema of the film concerns memory and reality. By beginning the way it does, Grave of the Fireflies, defies linearity. The narrator-ghost is narrating from a position where everything has ended: everything that includes the trials and tribulations that Seita and Setsuko’s live-selves had to go through in order to survive after the destruction of their home in a war-torn Japan and their journey back to their home as ghosts. Neither of these strands, if one might call them so, further, is told in the order they occur. The two take place simultaneously. At many points during the film, for example, both the live-selves and the ghost-selves of Seita and Setsuko are shown to exist together and at parallel even if the former is not aware of the latter. But, on the other hand, the ghost-selves of Seita and Setsuko are always aware of their live-selves, even when the two are existing simultaneously, because the ghost-selves remember their live-selves. The narrator, then, remembers remembering a remembrance. This complicated placement of the live-selves of the siblings, in turn, grants it a certain “unreality” that is associated with memory; for the past is unreal insofar that it has already happened and depends solely on the present for its invocation.5 In a strange twist then, the ghosts of the siblings are the ones that are “real”. But, while within the schema of the film the ghost-selves become real, it is also simultaneously unfair to take away the reality of live-selves of the siblings. By the virtue of living, the two were. They did go through immense pain, trauma, and horror as they tried to survive. The fact that the majority of the film is about the live-selves of Seita and Setsuko, in fact, proves its reality. For the synthesis of the two parallel kinds of reality that are running through the film then, it becomes necessary to see Grave of the Fireflies as presenting two different kinds of reality: that of the live-selves of the siblings 157

R itwick B hattacharjee

and that of their ghost-selves. In such a schema, the current paper puts the latter up as an alternate reality. The reason for this alternate reality can be found in the nature of trauma. Three propositions, already delineated above, have to be taken into consideration here. Firstly, trauma disrupts and destroys the constructed real. Secondly, a traumatic event affects children more because their constructed reality doesn’t have enough pasts for its strengthening. Thirdly, and finally, the constructed real is vital to keep the primal horror of nothingness and paradox at bay. The continuance of the story of the film after Seita and Setsuko’s death, when seen against these three propositions, reveals that since a child’s reality is not strong enough to withstand the onslaught of a traumatic event and since this reality is crucial for survival, it changes in the wake of that event. In other words, after the destruction of a child’s reality by trauma, it does not stay destructed. Since it doesn’t have the strength to continue as it was before trauma by bypassing that trauma, it morphs into something new. The alternate reality that is the ghost-selves of the siblings present this alternate reality. After all the traumatic events that the live-selves of Seita and Setsuko go through, their reality gets broken. Their deaths become the marker of that breakage. Their return, however, shows a re-building or, rather, a re-visioning of the real which, by becoming the real, once again hinders the horror of nothingness from returning. No wonder then that both Seita and Setsuko are happy by the end of the film, even if in death. Death, and by extension mortality, on the other hand, also loses its finality. It isn’t something that would give rise to horror anymore. It is because of the creation of this alternate reality that Seita and Setsuko are able to return back to home and everything that home stands for. Talking about childhood trauma in such a way then, Grave of the Fireflies becomes an intense interrogation into the nature of reality, mortality, horror, nothingness, and a re-visioning. By showing the problems that Seita and Setsuko go through during the final days of the second world war to survive, their eventual deaths, and their ultimate return to an alternate reality and an alternate life, the film shows how trauma, for children, leads to the creation of an alternate reality. It would, however, be a stretch to say that this alternate reality is something good that comes out of trauma. In fact, this alternate reality is devastating. While Seita and Setsuko are shown to be happy by the end of the film, it is also important to keep in mind that, for all ends and purposes, they are dead. It is just the ghosts of their lived-selves that endure on. Even if there is a necessity to create an alternate reality, this reality is not a substitute for the one that trauma destroys. It is a re-visioning and simply put ephemera. The two siblings do not come back to life in the strictest sense of the word. They are just spectres of that life.

158

R eturning horror , re - visioning real

Notes 1 While Sartre refuses to call such an existence of consciousness a circularity, it still remains so. 2 This existence might not be “real” in the strictest terms of the words. Unreality, however, does not necessitate non-being. To be can take multiple forms of being. 3 For unreality becomes the polar opposite of reality and, with the same force, drags all existents of the real into non-existence. 4 Insofar as the bombing eventually ends. 5 Franz Brentano in his book Philosophical Investigations on Space, Time, and Continuum, shows how remembering the past is always subject to a presentness of the past because it is always from the present that one goes back. This present, further, becomes the central modulator of memory as it decided why and how memory works.

References Brentano, Franz. 1988. Philosophical Investigations on Space, Time, and the Continuum. Trans. Barry Smith. Oxon and Canada: Routledge. Hotaru No Haka.1993. Film. Dir. Isao Takahata. 1988. Japan: Studio Ghibli. DVD. Ligotti, Thomas. 2011. The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. New York, NY: Hippocampus Press. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1943. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. Trans. Hazel E. Barnes. Abingdon, OX: Routledge.

159

12 COPING WITH KILLING? Child soldier narratives and traces of trauma Sarah Minslow Hey, can you believe it? We won the war. We were so eager to grow up so we could fight in it, and it was us all the time. I mean, we’re kids, Ender. —Card 1977: 302 COPING WITH KILLING?

SARAH MINSLOW

In an essay about “the changing roles of children and perception of childhood in Ghana specifically and Africa in general,” Agya Boakye-Boaten, states, “Childhood embodies the cultural signifiers of identity, social order, and morality, which form the basis of the social fabric of all societies” (Boakye-Boaten 2010: 106). The socialization and educational institutions that most affect children have been devastated in many parts of Africa due to war. The majority of images of African children who are not malnourished and starving include images of children as soldiers. Child soldiers carrying AK-47s, pillaging villages, raping women, and hacking to death other humans disrupts completely the Romantic concept of children as innocent, passive, weak, and ignorant that has been dominant in Western society at least since the late 1700s. Phillipe Aries’s Centuries of Childhood traces the development of modern attitudes towards children as the centre of family life, needing coddling and then clear moral instruction. By the nineteenth century, social critics and researchers were invested heavily in the psychology of children and many authors in the English-speaking world wrote about the lasting effects of hardship on children. Charles Dickens used novels to critique social inequities in Victorian England by emphasizing the plight of many poor children, but by 1954, Mead and Wolfenstein report that “childhood was still something one took for granted, a figure of speech, a mythological subject rather than a subject of articulate scrutiny” (Mead and Wolfenstein 1954: 3). In his notable book, Children and Childhood in Western Society Since 1500, Hugh Cunningham argues that “War most dramatically highlighted the difficulty of preserving the territory of childhood” (186).

160

C oping with killing ?

Contemporary authors and filmmakers invite readers to examine childhood trauma associated with war within the realm of fictional stories. When analysing the portrayals of child soldiers in recent films and book series, it becomes evident that child soldiers, while conflicting with privileged images of the luxuries of childhood, reinforce the notion of children as weak victims of adult control who are traumatized by the circumstances in which most of them are made to kill or be killed. According to Marcus Bleasdale of Human Rights Watch: Thousands of children are serving as soldiers in armed conflicts around the world. These boys and girls, some as young as 8 years old, serve in government forces and armed opposition groups. They may fight on the front lines, participate in suicide missions, and act as spies, messengers, or lookouts. Girls may be forced into sexual slavery. Many are abducted or recruited by force, while others join out of desperation, believing that armed groups offer their best chance for survival. (Bleasdale 2013) Child soldiers are used globally despite the United Nation’s efforts to condemn and prosecute those who violate the Convention on the Rights of the Child or “the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflicts, [which] . . . bans the use of children under the age of eighteen in armed conflicts” (United Nations 2018). But there are numerous reasons why countries violate this Convention and why some, such as the United States, have refused to ratify it. In his book, Children at War, P.W. Singer states that “children fighting on the battlefield has become normal practise in current warfare”, and he highlights three main reasons why this is the case. Firstly, “social disruption and failures of development caused by globalization, war, and disease have led not only to greater global conflict and instability, but also to generational disconnections that create a new pool of potential recruits; (Singer 2006: 2) technological improvements in small arms now permit these child recruits to be effective participants in warfare; and (Singer 2006: 3) there has been a rise in a new type of conflict that is far more brutal and criminalized” (Singer 2006: 38). Singer also reports that “Unprecedented numbers of children around the world are uneducated, malnourished, marginalized, and disaffected . . . as many as 250 million children live on the street, 211 million children must work to feed themselves and their families, and 115 million children have never been to school” (Singer 2006: 39). The factors are intertwined and have created an environment in which, for many children, joining armed forces or even terrorist organizations is a choiceless choice that must be made for survival. This is the case for each of the child soldiers portrayed in the films and book series analysed in this chapter.

161

S arah M inslow

The subject of the child soldier represents a specific population who are more likely than other children to experience specific forms of trauma. The initial traumatic event in the lives of child soldiers is only the beginning of a prolonged, chronic, relentless traumatization, the effects of which are painfully heart-breaking to view or read about; however, child soldier narratives mostly offer a hopeful view of the rehabilitative power of narrative to resolve, or at least, integrate childhood trauma into a healthy, functioning psyche. In the July 2011 volume of Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Irene Visser explains the need for “a more comprehensive conceptualization of trauma . . . to theorize collective, prolonged, and cumulative experiences of traumatization”, arguing that “A further, more comprehensive configuration of trauma would enable culturally astute and politically and historically factual contextualization” of postcolonial narratives (Visser 2011: 280). Since then, postcolonial critics have worked to overcome some of the limitations of more traditional theories of trauma to allow for a more historicized and political reading of postcolonial narratives and their reception. Whereas trauma theories have been criticized for imposing restrictive formalist criteria on narratives, deflecting political understanding, and emphasizing melancholia, which “constitutes a crippling self-reflexivity” (Visser 2011: 278), in this chapter I will use more complex theories of trauma to analyse the ways childhood trauma is depicted in three films that portray fictional accounts of child soldiers, War Witch (2012, Kim Nguyen), Johnny Mad Dog (2011, Jean-Stephane Sauvaire), and Beasts of No Nation (2015, Cary Fukunaga). With supporting evidence from two memoirs of former child soldiers—A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah (2007) and War Child by Emmanual Jal (2005)—I argue that these narratives function to increase readers’ knowledge of ongoing traumatic events and “pose the need for political activism, social change, and individual healing” (Visser 2011: 278). In doing so, they move the application of trauma theory in literary and cultural studies beyond the impasse of the “unspeakability’ of trauma” (Visser 2011: 274) to a strategy for reading and teaching trauma narratives in their historical and political contexts to interrogate the neo-colonial forces of globalization and reveal the negative impact of these forces on children in contemporary society, specifically child soldiers, in an attempt to inspire readers to change society and prevent the recurrence of such trauma for future generations of children. Where some of them fail, however, is by “deflecting political understanding” (Visser 2011: 278). Framing a reading of child soldier narratives with tenets of trauma theory provides an avenue for readers or viewers to better understand the lasting impact of individual and collective trauma. While all three films portray the individual trauma of the focalizing characters, Agu, Johnny, and Komona, they also reinforce the collective trauma of a globalized society that allows children to continue fighting wars waged by adults. This particular chapter focuses on the continent of Africa, where child soldiers are used in battle 162

C oping with killing ?

regularly and where childhood, as conceived in the Western world, is transformed by conflict. In a case study of childhood “in Ghana specifically and Africa, more generally”, Agya Boakye-Boaten writes that Particularly in Africa, exogenous disruptions have accounted for most of the socio-cultural and political evolutions that have taken place. Severely affected were social institutions which inherently possessed the coded prescriptions for human interaction and development. Institutions governing human interactions are the most essential component of the cultural makeup of all human societies. The existence of these institutions is the foundation upon which the survival of the society rests. Thus, any serious disruptions could endanger the very existence of the people. In Africa, one of the most severely affected is the socialization/education institution. Intertwined with socialization/education institution is the concept of childhood and child rearing practices. (Boakye-Boaten 2010: 105) During this crucial stage of identity formation, childhood, the protagonists experience the initial traumatic event, but their traumatic experiences are prolonged, uncontrollable, and persistent. The common habits of childhood—eat, school, eat, play, eat, sleep—are lost to children in conflict zones, and thus, the meaning of what it is to be a child must be redefined as it is reconstructed within the realities of being a child soldier. For most child soldiers, their willingness to be part of armed conflict stems from their abduction or loss of family. Without the safety of their parents, even if only perceived, children become more vulnerable to joining armed groups. Issues with using trauma theory to analyse postcolonial texts identified by Visser include the emphasis on postmodern narrative techniques to convey trauma, the supposed paralyzing melancholia resulting from the reception of trauma narratives, and the inability to decolonize trauma theory. My analysis reinforces the ability of theorists to employ concepts of trauma theory that account for history, distinguish between the trauma victim and the reader or viewer, and allow for “a very broad category of readers’ and viewers’ emotional responses” thus expanding Felman and Laub’s formulations of transmissibility of trauma (Visser 2011: 275). Further, these analyses exemplify “a postcolonial reconfiguration of trauma theory” in which “history is a crucial aspect” (Visser 2011: 274) while also “acknowledge[ing] the possibility of the recuperative and empowering qualities of narrative of traumatic events” (Visser 2011: 274). In the three films analysed, history is not made explicit, but it is alluded to so that viewers understand that there is an inextricable link to the past in the present being portrayed and to the future for the child characters. Audiences are told enough to sense that the ongoing conflicts in which the child characters are involved generated in 163

S arah M inslow

the destabilisation of decolonization married with the geopolitical capitalism of Western countries’ desires for Africa’s natural resources at the expense of African people. The tenets of a postcolonial reconfiguration of trauma theory that inform my analysis here include the rejection of restrictive formalist techniques such as “non-linearity and disrupted causality” (Visser 2011: 278) and reinforcement of Geoffrey Harman’s assertion that trauma theory offers “a change of perspective” because it provides “exegesis in the service of insights about human functioning” when reading trauma narratives (Hartmann 1995: 544). Viewers see the humanity within the child soldier while simultaneously struggling to witness a child kill others and realize the role we all play in allowing the use of children as weapons of war to persist. Trauma theorists debate whether trauma is an event or the aftermath of a traumatic event. Cathy Caruth defines trauma “as a wound inflicted not upon the body but upon the mind” (Caruth 1996: 3). For child soldiers, their mental trauma is often accompanied by physical trauma. Caruth also argues that one cannot experience trauma while a traumatic event is unfolding, but in the case of our child protagonists, it is clear that they are experiencing trauma as the events unfold. However, Caruth’s assertion that trauma “is an experience that is not fully assimilated as it occurs” is evident in the text (Caruth 1996: 5). The protagonists’ abilities to react to their traumatic experiences is deferred, seemingly indefinitely at times. The initial site of childhood trauma is obvious in two of the three films analysed, and all three films are chronological narratives that offer insights into the causation of trauma and its direct effects. The manifestations of the effects of trauma occur throughout the narratives but are more visible and more strongly experienced by the protagonists in particular circumstances, such as the death of a close friend or after sexual abuse. This allows us to reconsider trauma as the event and its later manifestations and to see some of the triggers that may jar former child soldiers into traumatic spasms of memory and self-doubt. Their existence in the stories rest in “the oscillation between a crisis of death and the correlative crisis of life” (Caruth 1996: 7). What kind of life is available to them even if they survive? This is the question viewers are left with at the end of each of the films. For mature readers who want to increase their understanding of the real impact of trauma on child soldiers, three recent, critically-acclaimed films are realistic in their portrayal of the trauma of being a child soldier, though none of them grapples extensively with the aftermath—War Witch, Beasts of No Nation, and Johnny Mad Dog. While Visser argues that PTSD is too broadly defined to be useful for understanding how trauma is portrayed in literature, focusing on specific patterns of behaviour in an array of postcolonial trauma narratives can provide insights into how humans process and survive traumatic events and how the individual’s response impacts his or her identity. Bayer, Klasen, and Adam report that “In 2004, Derluyn et al4 evaluated clinically significant symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder 164

C oping with killing ?

(PTSD) in former Ugandan child soldiers, using the Impact of Event Scale – Revised.5 The authors reported that nearly all children (97%) showed posttraumatic stress reactions of clinical importance” (Bayer, Klasen and Adam 2007: 555). In their study in 2007 assessing 169 former child soldiers from Africa’s Great Lakes region, Bayer, Klasen, and Adam concluded that “PTSD symptoms are associated with less openness to reconciliation and more feelings of revenge among former Ugandan and Congolese child soldiers. The effect of psychological trauma should be considered when these children are rehabilitated and reintegrated into civilian society” (Bayer, Klasen and Adam 2007: 555). There are certain responses to trauma that repeat in the literature and films that include child soldiers, but the nuances of how Agu, Johnny, and Komona survive are noteworthy and account for the diverse characteristics that may constitute PTSD in children. For readers (and pedagogical purposes) reading postcolonial trauma narratives positions readers to recognize and reflect on their own role in social trauma and to consider how our pasts and presents are linked due to forces of colonization, decolonization, and globalization. For instance, the use of child soldiers has increased since the invention and increase demand for small arms. Capitalist economies that value oil profits, cheap drugs, and diamonds over human lives in places that are mostly invisible sustain the greed that underlies many ongoing conflicts all over the world. If there was no demand for the products of certain conflicts, there would be less effort to force children to provide the supplies. Some of these links are made explicit in the films, but more so, they focus on the impact of the trauma of being a child soldier on a specific child, thus allowing for a broad portrayal of the impact of trauma and responses from the audiences. While there are specific traumatic events in the lives of the protagonists, it is the repetitive memories and chronic emotional numbness that is required for their survival that most notably communicates their individual trauma and highlights the resulting fragmented identities of child soldiers. From A Long Way Gone and War Child, readers realise that the identities as former child soldiers adopted by Ishmael Beah and Emmanuel Jal in their memoirs support the assertion that self-identity is “subject to a kind of permanent revolution” (Luckharst 2013: 20). Beah’s memoir begins with some people at his university in America asking him if he has ever seen a dead body before since he is from Sierra Leone. He has reached a place where he recalls what he has been through without reverting into psychological despair, but his rehabilitation was difficult and gradual. Further, Beah and Jal have worked through their trauma by sharing their stories with others and becoming activists dedicated to fighting the abuse of children in conflict zones. The difficulty of rehabilitating child soldiers stems in part from the effective ways armed group leaders contort their identities. Certain types of identity transformations are common in these narratives. The impact on the child soldier’s identity is most evident in Beasts of No Nation. This 165

S arah M inslow

film opens with scenes of Agu being a typically happy child in an African village. He interacts with guards, plays with friends, and wrestles with his older brother. His family has dinner together, and Agu is a cheeky, likeable character. Viewers are positioned early to like and care about Agu. It is not until this relationship has been established between viewer and character that Agu’s village is attacked, his mother and younger siblings flee with a smuggler, and he witnesses the murder of his older brother and father. Agu is alone in the jungle when he is snatched by a group of armed children and led to the Commander who says “A boy is very, very dangerous”. In this scene, a close up of Agu shows that his shirt is torn, he is breathing heavily and looks frightened, and the Commander says he has “hands like a baby”. His initiation into the group involves dehumanization techniques. He is stripped of his name, given a costume, forcibly drugged, and taught that his gun is his family now. The point of the initiation is to destroy a child’s identity and establish a new one as a hard, tough killing machine. For many, their new soldier identity—though not one they would have chosen in other circumstances—is empowering and comforting. The Commander reminds Agu and his comrades that they are not “going to wait to inherit . . . for them to come and give it to us. We are going to take it. Seize it . . . All of you who have seen your families killed, you now have something that stands for you”. They are allowed the protection of knowing their basic needs will be met, and many find some sense of safety, security, and belonging by being part of an armed group. Getting the child addicted to drugs is part of the trickery to prolong their trauma. If they need the drugs, they will not flee from the armed group. Seeing Agu as a typical child interacting with his family and friends in his community juxtaposed to his becoming a child soldier encourages viewers to recognize the fragility of childhood in conflict areas and the transformation of his identity inspired by the conniving adults around him. Prior to his initiation and identity transformation, the only hint of malice in Agu is seen when he tries to sell a broken tv to an armed guard at the border of his village in jest. Similar to both Ishmael and Komona, Agu joins an armed rebel group to survive. Agu is made to kill a man with a machete as the man, who is a medical student—a potential life saver, begs him not to. The small child murdering the man, who is on his knees, symbolizes the way the armed group uses the thrill of power to lure and keep child soldiers with their comrades. The Commander tells Agu after the murder that he is a man now. Agu is sexually abused by his Commander, played by Idris Elba, and realizes after the first instance of abuse that this is why his best friend, Strika, does not speak. Strika’s abuse and exploitation has led him to become a selective mute, one coping mechanism often used in literature about childhood trauma and one which Agu himself uses when he reaches the rehabilitation facility. Agu becomes shamed and emotionally numb. He begins using more drugs, drinking alcohol, and running wildly into villages with his gun firing 166

C oping with killing ?

as quickly as possible at anyone moving. One evocative scene is when Agu breaks away from his soldier identity when he thinks a woman in one of the villages is his mother. He falls at her feet, hugs her, and calls her mother, but she pushes him away and screams for him and his thug friends to get out. When one of his comrades begins to rape the woman, Agu, out of an unwillingness to see his “mother’ suffer, shoots the woman in the head as his face hardens into that of a soldier once more. Agu is rescued from the armed group after his Commander is betrayed by those in power and gives up his efforts as a rebel and switches sides. This is the ultimate betrayal as it suggests everything the Commander has said to the children previously was a lie; everything he made them believe was false idolatry. Agu is at a rehabilitation facility at the end of the film. The film ends with Agu thinking to himself that if he told the counsellor the things he has done, she will think he is “a beast”. There is a camera shot of his drawings, doodles full of blood and violence. He has flashbacks and imagines the “sounds of people screaming and the smell of dead bodies”. He admits to missing the brown-brown and the jungle. He doesn’t like it when the therapist looks him in his eyes. After a shot of boys playing soccer on a beach and running along a dirt road fully clothed, Agu’s voiceover says, “She thinks that my no speaking is because I can’t be explaining myself like baby, but I am not like baby. I am like old man. And she is like small girl because I am fighting in war and she not even knowing what war is”. Agu’s symptoms of PTSD linger, and he states, “I am thinking about my future”. When his therapist asks him to talk about how he feels and what he has been through, he says he doesn’t want to talk because if he talks “it will make me sad. And it will make you sad . . . and I only want to be happy in this life. If I am telling this to you, you would think that I am some sort of beast or devil. I am all of these things, but I also have a mother, father, brother, and sister. Once, they loved me”. Viewers see that Agu will have a difficult time forgiving himself and reconciling what he has done to become happy again, but he still holds on to his humanity in the memory of his once loving family. After this session, he is shown going to play in the ocean with other rescued former child soldiers. This leaves viewers wondering what will become of them once the credits role. They are not beasts or devils; they are children. In contrast, War Witch begins with a traumatic event. Komona’s village is under attack in the opening scene, and viewers witness her being forced to kill her parents by shooting them at point blank range. Viewers see that Komona, aged twelve, is forced to make a choiceless choice; if she doesn’t shoot her parents, the Commander will torture them and kill them in front of her. Her parents tell her to shoot them, and she does. No longer is she a daughter with a loving mother and father and home, which she alludes in her narrative, she is alone and has nowhere to go. The trauma of killing her own parents and being powerless to stop their execution further damages her identity in that she has committed the most atrocious act already. She is 167

S arah M inslow

haunted by images of their ghosts who beg her to return home to bury them properly. The filmmaker shows the ghosts appearing as if covered in ashes and staring directly into the camera, forcing viewers to see them as Komona does. The film includes a non-Western belief system where mystical powers are bestowed upon Komona and believed by her superiors. She can see the enemy coming before they approach, so her group is always prepared for attacks. While these powers provide her with a special status in the armed group, this is the first in a series of traumatic events she experiences. No longer is she a daughter or a child; she is an orphan and a soldier. The films masterfully reveal the initiation rituals of armed groups who exploit children and the impact it has on a child’s identity. Drugging, beating, branding, and training are part of the initiation rituals for child soldiers. War Witch raises awareness to the fact that up to 40% of child soldiers are female. It is not set in a specific country, so the politics of the conflict fade while the humanity of those affected is in the forefront. This film engages audiences emotionally so that they care deeply about the child characters by showing a young romance budding between two characters in the midst of life-altering trauma. The film has a first-person narrative voice over, and Komona invites intimacy from the viewer when she says “So I have to tell you how I became a soldier”. Due to their magical powers, Komona and Magician, the boy who will become her husband, are given some freedom and respect that is not afforded to the other child soldiers under the rebel group’s command. Also, the film portrays the use of “magic milk” by the rebel group to keep the child soldiers drugged up and dependent enough so that they will not flee, though even if she could, Komona knows she has no home or family to return to. The effects of the trauma of killing her parents shows up in the repeated visions she has of her parents’ ghosts. They haunt her and ask her to return home to bury them properly. As they fall in love, Komona and Magician imagine a different life for themselves, where they can be a family and not soldiers. They finally flee and find their way to his uncle’s house where they feel some sense of safety and resume their “childlike” romance, holding hands, riding a bicycle together, and eventually experiencing two major rites of passage, marrying and losing their virginity.  In War Witch, audiences are not positioned to see Komona as a violent perpetrator because her motives are not evil. She is a good child who is forced to do a bad thing. The interruption of their childhood is most evident with the juxtaposing of their time after they escape when they are playing and flirting to the brutal murder of Magician in the jungle when they are found by the rebel group leaders. The group has killed her mother, father, and husband, then they kidnap Komona and force her to be a sex slave to the commander. Komona swiftly goes from a smiling, flirtatious girl to a stone-faced, haggard-looking woman who is emotionally numb. Komona, however, realizes she is pregnant, and the child inside her gives her motivation to attempt to escape from her traumatic circumstances a second time. 168

C oping with killing ?

Finally, Komona inserts a piece of fruit holding a razor blade into her vagina and hides a machete under her mattress. She then kills the rebel leader when he next attempts to rape her. She flees and gives birth alone in the woods; viewers realize that the “you” Komona is talking to is her new-born child. Komona walks with her baby back to her parents’ house where she buries the few remaining shards of her home that represent their lives there together. This burial ritual is symbolic of Komona’s healing process. She is working through her trauma by fulfilling her promise to bury her parents and by telling her story to her newborn baby. As she and her baby join a group of travellers in the back of a truck, viewers are left with a fragile sense of hope that Komona and her new baby will survive. The birth of the new child represents a call to action for viewers to stop the crisis of child soldiers before this baby is forced to endure the same tragic, traumatic interruptions of childhood that Komona and Magician have.      Johnny Mad Dog is, for me, the most difficult film to watch. Viewers never see his home life or Johnny as a child; the film opens with him leading a group of armed children pillaging a village and raping a woman. Johnny’s humanity is highlighted, however, in brief instances when he lets a young girl go free, has consensual sex with his wife, and when he cries over her body when she is murdered shortly after their wedding. Johnny is at once a really bad guy and a really good one, but viewers are much more often positioned to see him as a bad guy without the context for what led him to this life. Viewers learn that he has been lied to by his leaders who forsake him by switching sides in the middle of a civil war. When Johnny asks angrily, “What are we supposed to do now”? His commander simply says he doesn’t know. Johnny no longer has the sense of belonging that humans crave and that often motivates children to join armed groups in the first place. The film encourages viewers to connect Johnny’s situation to globalization when it portrays Johnny with his group of armed child soldiers walking by a huge cemetery while Martin Luther King’s voice echoes, the Negro is still not free, for “he lives on a lonely island of poverty in an ocean of prosperity”. This allusion to King’s letter written from Birmingham jail represents the reality that those most impoverished and vulnerable are still children of colour and unless we all change, life for them will not. We never see Johnny’s family; we only see a 14-year-old boy who has known nothing but war and death as long as we can tell. Like War Witch the ending is ambiguous, leaving Johnny with a gun pointed to his head and viewers wondering if he will escape, although most understand that even if he does escape this instance, his life will not have a happy ending most likely. Agu, Komona, and Johnny represent the worst of our humanity because they show not only how adults fail children, but how adults exploit and abuse children for greedy, selfish, political reasons. They are often made to rape or kill someone, even their own family members or friends. The first rape or kill moves a child beyond the tipping point on their moral compass, 169

S arah M inslow

and for most of them, once they have killed one person, it becomes easier to kill others. In A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah, who is a former child soldier from Sierra Leone, he revisits traumatic events and tells of slicing open an enemy’s throat with a machete, admitting that “killing had become as easy as drinking water” (122) and that he “felt no pity for anyone” (126). Yet, readers are still not positioned to see him as a bad person. He is positioned as the victim. This is most clear in the reminders throughout his book that he “had no choice” (107). He says at one point, “my childhood had gone by without my knowing” (126). Once Beah and several fellow child soldiers are rescued by UNICEF, he is angry and confused, but the aid workers continually remind them all that “It’s not [their] fault” (148). The repetition of this statement leaves readers pondering whose fault the war is; who is responsible for so much death, destruction, and trauma? Unlike the three films, Beah’s story is one of rehabilitation. He survives being kidnapped, drugged, and forced to kill people in a conflict about which he understands little. As with Agu, readers are introduced to Beah as a typical adolescent who enjoys listening to rap, writing songs, and dancing with his friends. They enjoy a seemingly normal life, until one day, their village is attacked and they have nowhere to return home to. Beah highlights numerous aspects of the child soldier experience that resonate throughout other interviews, surveys, and reports about the lives of child soldiers. He was an orphan struggling to survive in the jungles during war. He and his mates were hungry and scared, and they were “rescued” by an armed militia who promised them safety, food, and revenge on the rebels who the Commander reminds them repeatedly, “killed your parents, your family, and [are] responsible for everything that has happened to you” (112). At such a young age, without the proper cognitive capacity to consider the complexity of the civil war, Beah believes his lieutenant when he tells the children, “We are not like the rebels, those riffraffs who kill people for no reason. We kill them for the good and betterment of this country” (123). The regime provided Beah and his fellow child soldiers with food, endless war movies, brown-brown (a combination of “cocaine mixed with gunpower”), and marijuana. With the continual glorification of violence and killing, Beah admits that he and the other child soldiers “wanted to be like Rambo” (121), so they never hesitated when the adult soldiers sent them out in the front lines to spy or divert attention away from themselves. As Charles London explains, many armed groups recruit young people by “playing on youth’s desire for adventure” (157). It also gives their lives a false sense of purpose and the promise of a future as a senior officer if they prove themselves worthy. Yet, we see in Beasts of No Nation and Johnny Mad Dog that this is not the case usually. Promises are broken and betrayal is just part of the cruel game in which they are involved. This sort of seemingly irreparable damage to one’s sense of self as a moral being is also highlighted in the memoir, War Child. Sudanese boy, Emmanuel 170

C oping with killing ?

Jal, explains in the preface that “most of the everyday violence of war never makes it into books” (up). Jal’s graphic depictions of violence and brutality encourage readers to visualize what life was like for Jal, who at nine years old began his training as a soldier. His story is similar to Beah’s in several ways. The boys are lied to, laughed at, and forced to do hard labour. They train “for hours and hours until it was time to . . . eat maize porridge served on the lids of empty bullet boxes” (77). Jal says he “was beaten almost every day” once even by his best friend who stated simply when Jal asked Malual why he had beaten him so hard, “Because I was ordered to” (85). Mulal had become the ideal compliant soldier with no consideration of the ethical dimensions of what one is doing. During combat, Beah and Jal admit to firing with intentions of killing anyone in the path of their bullets, kicking dead bodies, and being filled with hate and rage. They both suffer from PTSD—in one section of his memoir, Jal repeats “Pictures. Pictures. In my head” (156–158). Beah said that boys at the rehabilitation centre “would wake up from nightmares, sweating, screaming, and punching our own heads to drive out the images that continued to torment [them]” and that “It took several months before [he] began to relearn how to sleep without the aid of medicine” (149). They go through drug withdrawals. They feel guilt—Jal writes “a voice inside me whispered, ‘You’re as bad as the jallabas. You did to the Anyuak village what was once done to yours’ ” (105). And they are both saved by the kindness and choices of one single person. For Beah, that person was the General who turned him over UNICEF. For Jal, it was Emma, a British woman who risked her life to save him and adopted him. Yet, readers must consider that the lives of most child soldiers are much more likely to turn out as those portrayed in the films—unknowable and unlikely. Epigeneticists know now that childhood is a crucial stage of development and that traumatic experiences in childhood actually change a human’s DNA structure. Therefore, a traumatic event not only impacts one experiencing trauma but also the progeny of trauma survivors. Thus, the wellbeing of generations necessitates preventing the use of child soldiers. Roger Luckharst links trauma to the destabilizing effects it has on one’s identity. Luckharst argues that for modern subjects, “Self-identity . . . is uprooted from traditional verities and subject to a kind of permanent revolution” (PG). For the characters in these films, their identities are transformed from those of innocent, happy children to adolescents conflicted about whether there is anything in them that is good and lovable anymore, even human. For readers, the open ending of these films encourages reflection and action. Extant autobiographies written by former child soldiers support Judith Herman’s argument that “narrative is a powerful and empowering therapeutic tool” which can lead to the “eventual resolution of trauma” (Visser 274). These include War Child by Emmanual Jal and A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah, both of which follow the narrative through to the 171

S arah M inslow

men’s contemporary lives trying to raise awareness and help stop the use of child soldiers. Perhaps there is not resolution so much as integration of the trauma into the psyche, the effects of which don’t go away, but become more manageable. If society knows more about trauma, we must act to do more to prevent it and to support those who are traumatized repeatedly. The grassroots, youth-led activist organization Do Something supports Singer’s assertion reporting that “Children who are poor, displaced from their families, have limited access to education, or live in a combat zone are more likely to be forcibly recruited”. The statistics about children who fit into these vulnerable populations are disconcerting. UNICEF US reports that more than “250 million children live in areas affected by prolonged, violent conflict”. Caryl Stern, CEO of UNICEF US, told National Public Radio in December 2017 that “There are more kids being recruited than ever before”. Further, there are 65 million displaced people in the world with more than 50% of those being children. Therefore, we live in a world where child soldiers are real and becoming increasingly abused and traumatized. It is imperative that global citizens be more aware of the realities of child soldiers and understand how they may be disarmed, demobilized, rehabilitated, and reintegrated into society as productive, healthy citizens, especially if, as outlined in the Preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, we are to “strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms and by progressive measures, national and international, to secure their universal and effective recognition and observance” (“The Story” 14).

References Bayer, C.P., Klasen, F., and Adam, H. 2007. ‘Association of Trauma and PTSD Symptoms With Openness to Reconciliation and Feelings of Revenge Among Former Ugandan and Congolese Child Soldiers’. Journal of American Medical Association 298(5): 555–559. Beah, Ishmael. 2007. A Long Way Gone. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Beasts of No Nation. 2015. Film. Dir. Cary Joji Fukunaga. Netflix. Bleasdale, Marcus. 2013. ‘Child Soldiers’. Human Rights Watch. www.hrw.org/ topic/childrens-rights/child-soldiers (accessed on 10 February 2017). Boakye-Boaten, Agya. 2010. ‘Changes in the Concept of Childhood: Implications on Children in Ghana’. The Journal of International Social Research 3(10) Winter. Card, Orson Scott. 1977. Ender’s Game. New York, NY: Tor Books. Caruth, Cathy. 1996. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Hartmann, Geoffrey H. 1995. ‘On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies’. New Literary History 26(3): 537–563. Jal, Emmanuel. 2010. War Child. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Griffins. Johnny Mad Dog. 2008. Film. Dir. Jean Stéphane Sauvaire. France: MNP Productions. Luckharst, Roger. 2013. The Trauma Question. New York, NY: Routledge.

172

C oping with killing ?

Mead, M., and M. Wolfenstein. 1954. Childhood in Contemporary Cultures. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. National Public Radio. 2017. ‘UN Releases Troubling Stats on Children in Conflict Zones’. Morning Edition 28 December. www.npr.org/2017/12/28/573995885/ unicef-attacks-on-children-in-conflict-zones-is-shocking-in-scale (accessed on 14 January 2018). Singer, P.W. 2006. Children at War. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. United Nations. ‘Optional Protocol on the Use of Children in Armed Conflict’. https:// childrenandarmedconflict.un.org/mandate/opac/ (accessed on 14 January 2018). Visser, Irene. 2011. ‘Trauma Theory and Postcolonial Literary Studies’. Journal of Postcolonial Writing 47(3) July: 270–282. War Witch. 2012. Film. Dir. Kim Nguyen. Montreal: Item 7 Productions.

173

13 WE NEEDED THE VIOLENCE TO CHEER US Losses and vulnerabilities in Ishmael beah’s A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier Rahul Kamble I loved the dance, and particularly enjoyed learning the lyrics, because they were poetic and it improved my vocabulary. —Ishmael Beah (prior to the war) My childhood had gone by without my knowing —Ishmael Beah (post-war)

In his memoir A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier (2007) Ishmael Beah remembers childhood days he spent before and during the Civil War in Sierra Leone. The memoir throws light on issues of how civil war, an extremely hostile condition, created and perpetrated by miscalculated assumptions and ambitious plans of adult rulers, makes life of children, especially adolescents and young adults, extremely precarious and vulnerable. Early and sudden exposure to civil war makes Ishmael and his friends undergo psychological and physical confrontations. His socialization with the peacetime values of family and relationship is abruptly reversed by wartime values. The constant conflict between image making exercise such as the “passive” civilian and the “macho” rebel further problematizes his socialization. His untimely exposure to mindless and frequent bloodshed, through repeated sounds of gunfire and sights of killed bodies lead to an early and rapid internalization and normalization of violence in him, a forced deviation of perception during a child’s growth. The civil war further is responsible directly to evict the childhood of the children directly involved in such wars. Exposure of participation in war leads to children’s alienation from their families; familiar spaces—such as home, schools, and playgrounds; activities such as schooling, dancing, and sporting; and qualities such as innocence, tenderness, harmlessness, and trustworthiness. Forceful and rapid induction of war values replace/confront gradual value initiation 174

W e needed the violence to cheer us

during the normalcy which makes it difficult for Ishmael to handle the burden of his wartime masculine self with the external situation after the war. The period between 12 and 16, which he spent at war, falls in Erik Erikson’s stage of adolescence (between 12–16 years of age), crucial for child’s transition from adolescence to youth, handling independence, undergoing the crises of “role confusion”. In a normal external situation, the end of this phase should result in the “ability to integrate all identifications (. . .) with the aptitudes developed out of endowment, and with the opportunities offered in social roles” (Erikson 1977: 235). However, the external disturbances disrupt the normal role devolution in such a way that in an adult child on the course of becoming a mercenary the process of formal role formation is disintegrated. It so deviates that the rehabilitation post-war period too becomes difficult as the young adults have to unlearn the war roles to succeed to a higher stage. The quotes in the beginning explain the disastrous changes war brings to children in their growing years, especially the adolescence. The paper examines the accounts of Ishmael’s memoirs to analyze how children suffer loss of childhood, perception of the self, and the choice and how this loss deviates children’s growth to vulnerabilities. It will explore patterns in maturation of children facing war in terms of acquiring roles and relations. It will also juxtapose the worldview of a child before and after the war. Amidst the doubts that the memoir is written with the help of an external agency and reliability and authenticity of a child narrator in such cases the losses and vulnerabilities of children caught in wars deserve unambiguous attention. In fact, the doubt about the orderly narrative should be a sufficient enforcement to recover the embodied anxiousness, disturbance, self-destruction in erstwhile children soldiers which can neither be concealed nor revealed by the narratives constructed far away from the war sites. This paper focuses more on psychosocial aspects among children while coping with the losses and vulnerabilities during the war. WE NEEDED THE VIOLENCE TO CHEER US

RAHUL KAMBLE

Pre-civil war ambience The fairly peaceful life Ishmael lives in his native village prior to the war compared with the life he spends after the onset of war indicates that the loss of peaceful ambience is the precondition of ensuing uncertainties of events that would begin the traumatic conditions for children. Before Ishmael had a first direct encounter with civil war, at the age of 12, he had had a very normal and undisturbed social and political atmosphere in his village. This stability makes the socialization of Ishmael, his brother and his friends in familial spaces smooth. Many of the conflicts in adolescents develop if children’s socialization is shaky due to external factors. Ishmael recalls of forming a rap and dance group at the age of eight along with his elder brother Junior and other friends Talloi and Mohamed. They were introduced to the rap by the 175

R ahul K amble

foreigners working for an American Company at Mobimbi. They often used to go to Mobimbi for swimming. They got familiar with the huge television and the white people at the recreational area in Mobimbi. The playing of music had impressed them a lot. Although they weren’t able to understand anything of it, they had developed a sense of attraction in them about the music. After that almost every weekend they used to go to the quarters to listen and learn that music. When Junior joined the secondary school, he learnt about the foreign music and dance from his friends. He brought the cassettes and taught music to others as well. Ishmael recalls that time as he “loved the dance, and particularly enjoyed learning the lyrics, because they were poetic” (6). Even his father used to laugh at their craze and love for undecipherable language and music. Junior took their classes and taught them how to move the feet to the beat. They all love music, songs, fashionable things such baggy jeans, soccer shorts, and sweatpants for dancing, sleeveless undershirts, T-shirts, and soccer jerseys. When they finally leave for Mattru Jong, just before they see the violence begins, they have all their backpacks with notebooks of lyrics, cassettes of rap albums, slingshots, etc. (7). His socialization with the community and internalization of family rituals and thereby larger community culture also occurs through ritualistic gatherings of community through the occasions such as the name-giving ceremony organized by his grandmother. This ceremony was an event when everyone in the community participated and celebrated. Slaughtering of the sheep, preparation of food by men and women together, dancing, blessings by Imam, and so on ensures perfect community climate for the smooth social maturation of any child (76–77). Role playing in childhood is both the game and social acculturation. It pleases the adults and draws appreciation from them. A ritualization of these acts is essential in the lives of children. Ishmael remembers his recitals of Julius Caesar to the older people of the community at the town square where these men used to come for discussions at the end of every week. Ishmael remembers his father’s presence and inspiration with the “big smile” on his face, which he would not wear probably for years. He says, I stood on a bench and held on to a long stick as my sword. I would then start with Julius Caesar. “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears . . .” I always recited speeches from Macbeth and Julius Caesar, as those were the adults’ favorites. I was always eager and excited to read for them, because it made me feel that I was really good at speaking English Language. (104–105) Although he reads those lines for them, it has a fulfilling effect in him. Constant sense of fulfilling contributes to the idea of self-worth in his eyes. It effects a reassurance of his role vis-à-vis the community around him. 176

W e needed the violence to cheer us

Perceptions, worldview, and values developed under these circumstances too are stable, consistent, and positive. Ishmael was able to perceive his own place, role, relations with others in an unambiguous way. Healthy growth of a child depends upon how perceptive the child is and this then helps him/her form a better worldview. His reception of values at this stage also ensures imbibing and rehearsing of those values—familial, cultural, or communitarian. The values he/she may or may not adhere to in the later period of mature life but the association with values starts at the age of schooling. Now all these processes are enumerated frequently in Ishmael’s recollections of the life prior to the onset of war.

Onset of the war and confronting perceptions The Civil War suddenly brings scare, insecurity, and bafflement in the midst of children and disrupts the process of socialization and acquisition of values indefinitely. The understanding and control over their surroundings is replaced by the fearful, unknown, and unexpected. Even before they see the rebels they are besotted with fear, their villages are suddenly destroyed, and strong adults are reduced into helpless lambs. Ishmael and his brother Junior get the news that Mogbwemo, their village, was attacked immediately after they left it. They start returning to their home, and on their way back they see that Kabati, their grandmother’s village, too has been attacked. They witness the horror of war for the first time when they are waiting at the veranda of Grandmother’s home. A vehicle comes roaring and stops in front of them. A man with bleeding arm climbs down and vomits blood. Somehow, he goes back to the vehicle and opens the door. A dead woman, covered with blood, falls down from the vehicle. The people standing there cover their children’s eyes to prevent them from seeing this horrifying scene (12). The unexpected sight of horrifying deaths shocks all of them. Mattru Jong for the first time starts to develop fear and suspicion about the unimagined horror in everything he sees or hears. He says, “I became afraid of the road, the mountains in the distance, and the bushes on either side”. By the time they return to Mattru Jong that night he loses the sense of difference between reality and dream. He dreams that he has been shot at the side. This nightmare of being shot at becomes a reality while they are running from the rebels from one place to another. During the village raids the rebel mercenaries deliberately use young kids with guns to kill the civilians. With rigorous and fanatic training the rebels created the excitement of owning a gun among the adolescents, which also gives the kids an unknown sense of power over the adults. Villagers too become highly suspicious about mercenary children rebels. A chief of a village by that time sums up their status as, “little devils” (66). Even before becoming actual mercenaries on many occasions they are treated like mercenaries. 177

R ahul K amble

All of a sudden children’s schedule and activity is marred by the scare of the war and violence underlined by the fear of losing the family and other members. Escaping the rebels, hiding from them, proving their innocence to the villagers, remaining together, searching for food, shelter, and a safe passage keeps these children occupied. Suspicion about spaces, people, and circumstances fill their mind. They are suddenly made conscious about survival, survival from bullets of rebels, attacks by the villagers, and hunger. Quite early in their life they begin to be preoccupied with the idea of death, end, loss of family and friends. After being in the custody of the military another phase of their conditioning begins. Ishmael starts making sense of the war such as parties involved in the war, the reasons of war, and the options before the people, with the help of inputs provided by the Lieutenant in the camp. He explains to the children that the rebels killed their parents and other villagers. The temporary shelter which protects them from the rebels would also be attacked soon by the rebels, so it is imperative for everyone to take up arms and defend themselves from the rebels. Ishmael’s friends Alhaji, Kanei, Moriba, Musa, and he himself discuss the options open before them. Next day the Lieutenant shows them two badly mutilated dead bodies—of an old man and his child. The sight of the dead bodies helps the Lieutenant prove his point to the tender hearts and succumbing minds of children. They volunteer to take up arms against the rebels. During the phase of their training they are not only trained to kill, cut, and knife the enemy but to become most brutal in executing their task by constantly reminding them of the involvement of the rebels in killing their families. Corporal Gadafi, their trainer, shouts at Ishmael’s tenderness in stabbing the banana tree with bayonets, “Is that how you stab someone who had killed your family”? (112). The training is aimed at making them lethal mercenaries, although in support of the government. Age difference, physical preparedness, and mental discretion are subsumed in the process of making them counterparts of the adult rebels. Their survival depends on how quickly they become lethal, strategic, and swift. The obverse side of the process involves loss of values of childhood—innocence, imagination, and creative leisure. Further the children mercenaries on both the sides share similar fate—either they will be captured or killed. Loss of childhood and flickering chances of physical survival is their shared legacy.

Precedence of the new principles, receding of the tender self The virtuous values of curiosity, excitement, and wonder in the children’s natural world are at stake during the war. The abduction and mental conditioning obstruct the exercise of these values. Child-soldier.org mentions two types of children caught in the war—children from the poor and disadvantaged sections fall prey to the war as they seek the support to take revenge 178

W e needed the violence to cheer us

and the children who are abducted and kidnapped and forced to be soldiers. Despite their past, comfortable or vulnerable, and despite their willingness or unwillingness in participation of war their being in the war means an adoption of principles of war. In a later phase Ishmael imagines that they capture several rebels and kill them, he reflects his changed reaction to horror—“we watch it burn and I laugh” (113). He even struggles to cope with the new self with tears in his eyes, he couldn’t but has to muster his courage by gripping his gun for comfort (116). When his friends are killed, he too, in turn, kills people. Frequent witnessing of dead bodies removes his fear of death. He kicks and despises the dead bodies. Nightmares of being shot disturb his normal sleep, however, he becomes more comfortable with the gun and shooting. Screening of war movies in the camps—such as Rambo: First Blood, Rambo II, and Commando—creates and sustains the combative moods and models before the children. The ramboization of war roles tempts them to test war as a game of skill in which they can outsmart their opponent. Major concern of children in the adolescence, according to Erikson, is to develop and culminate the gist of earlier skills to serve the occupational tasks at the moment. The growing and developing youths, faced with this physiological revolution within them, and with tangible adult tasks ahead of them are now primarily concerned with what they appear to be in the eyes of others as compared with what they feel they are, and with the question of how to connect the roles and skills cultivated earlier with the occupational prototypes of the day. (Erikson 1977: 235) However, proper growth of occupational identity among children deteriorates from becoming a citizen to a mercenary. The enforced adoption of war occupations transforms Ishmael and others internally from children to children mercenaries. The desire to act like Rambo is to become more lethal, sharp, and acute in their attack, to be skilled in using weapons, to be senseless to the bloodshed and deaths including their friends. After successive raids and killings of the rebels they almost become identical to rebels, killing their counterparts for the cause very vaguely identified as “good and betterment of this country” (123). The hunger for killing increases after every act of killing. Ishmael says, “I shot as many as I could, but I didn’t feel better” (122). His friend Alhaji becomes overambitious and says, “Sometimes I am going to take on a whole village by myself, just like Rambo” (122). The gun becomes the sole “source of power” (124) and they “needed the violence to cheer” themselves (136). This violent new self overtakes the child self, first externally and then internally. The prolonged period of role confusion deviates the process of reconciliated identity and adult maturity in many such children like Ishmael. 179

R ahul K amble

Turbulent return to the earlier self A prolonged spell of role confusion, enforcement of a premature adult role, habitation in an un-child-friendly atmosphere mar the smooth transition to a more firm occupational identity from adolescence to young adult. Although they begin to identify themselves with the new adult masculine identity of a soldier it is a fancy of children soldiers like Ishmael. By the time they are rescued and sent to the rehabilitation centre they have been completely subsumed into violence, in terms of values, beliefs, and acts. The violence is so naturalized and normalized in their everyday life that they conceive their identities exclusively in and through the acts of violence. It almost becomes an addiction. The second phase of reverse identity crisis among these children begins at Benin Home, a rehabilitation centre, in Kissy Town under the supervision of UNICEF. The Benin Home staffers’ soft approach and treatment of them as children baffles them further. In the absence of fierce opposition from the staff they feel deprived of opportunities to display their masculinity. Frustrated over being deprived of chances to be offensive, they attack the staffers. The supervised transition back to the innocent identity and phase of childhood, however reverses the whole process of growth which the children had intended for themselves. Irina Kyulanova underscores the implications of identity reversal at such a crucial stage among the children affected by war. After the child soldiers are removed from the war zones, they are subjected to a rehabilitation process, which is meant to reintegrate the underage soldiers into society and at the same time to restore their status as children. This process is marked by the conceptual link between war and coming of age. While becoming a soldier is associated with the loss of childhood and the gain of maturity, withdrawal from military life is supposed to transform the young soldiers back into children. Rehabilitation is expected to rescue the children from their newly acquired identity of violent power over adult civilians by bringing them back to a pre-war state of innocence, vulnerability and need for guidance. (Kyulanova 2010: 30) The identity as a soldier and the consequent autonomy, power, and control gained during the process of maturation, although distorted and complexly related to the war experiences, is at stake during the process of rehabilitation. This role reversal adds to the confusion among the grown-up children. While the staff of rehabilitation camp makes an attempt to remove the war experiences from children’s minds, it is difficult to separate the war experiences from the autonomy, power, and control they have materially experienced. The return to the pre-war innocence also means surrendering 180

W e needed the violence to cheer us

the masculine power in favour of vulnerability, dependence, and fragility. This puts most of the children soldiers in dilemma regarding the outcomes of rehabilitation. They are unconsciously put at risk to choose between powerful masculine self and the powerless childhood. Also problematic is to give up the ascension in hierarchy vis-à-vis adults during the war. It is a phase in which “violent adolescents have more power than peaceful adults” (Kyulanova 2010: 40). Their identity associated with power conflicts with the enforced identity of innocent and powerless child. It could “become a social threat” if the society fails “to ensure the youths’ integration into its structure” (Kyulanova 2010: 40). Sudden exposure to violence, pressure about survival, alienation from the families and familial spaces during the war at tender age leads to certain psychosocial disorders. A 1996 research project, designed to evaluate the effect of psychosocial intervention on young children’s health and development following the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina concludes that the “problems typically seen in traumatized children are irritability, sleep problems, separation anxiety, psychosomatic symptoms, concentration problems, and nightmares” (Dybdahl 2001: 1215). Such situations results in the “risk of impaired social, emotional, and psychological development” (Garbarino, Kostelny and Dubrow 1991: 18) of children who are caught in war. Normal activities of childhood such as schooling, playing with peers, and uninterrupted sleep at night, participation in community rituals and celebrations, become dysfunctional. The continuous suppression of functional childhood makes the return to normalcy difficult. The two most indicative physical and mental habits of Ishmael developed after experiencing the war—inability to sleep without medicine and difficulty in remembering the past before the war—allude to the traumatic erasure of usually normal acts of body and mind prior to the experience of war. While at the Benin Home the exoneration of his acts due to his tender age is seen by him as denial of his masculine strength and lethality. All the children become desperate to register their strength; the only means they know is through the acts of violence. His immediate memories too are flashbacks of the incidents of slitting the throat of a man or killing the lined-up prisoners. Compared to the children in pre-school stages, where they do grapple with their functional identities more, the adolescents face complex problems due to their psychosexually transitional age. Engel explains, the situation of adolescents in war is quite complex. Even in the best of circumstances, pubertal years are a trial for young people as well as their parents. Uncommonly sensitive, buffeted by intense emotions, troubled by budding sexuality, adolescents require adult role-models, as well as exclusive, passionate friendships. (Engel 1984: 88) 181

R ahul K amble

Ishmael yearns for Esther’s company, imagines she is Abigail, the girl he had seen in his first two semesters in school and used to share stories about the past, and stares at Esther while she was working. Although Esther’s company at the rehabilitation centre is soothing temporarily the messed up childish masculinity and not-yet-adult status keeps him anxious about his relationships.

Survival and suffering Ishmael and some of his friends survive the war but suffer from “survivor syndrome” (Engel 1984: 85). His inability to save any of the family members roots the guilt in his consciousness. Child survivors remember his/her relatives in terms of their death and as such the memory of them constantly reminds him/her about death. The association of death with memory of the family members takes huge toll on children. The forward progression of children from school age to teenager, in terms of age and derailed transition from role confusion to traumatized role reversals, in terms of occupational identity, complicate normalization of survived children. The very active sensibilities during this phase become benumb. The curious, adventurous, industrious, and self-exploring selves of children loose motivation. Engel in her essay “Children and War” explains this benumbing: While in the midst of the wholesale horror of these wars, one can find refuge in “psychic closing off”, “robotization”, “psychic numbing”, and “automatization”. Such psychological maneuvers offer only a tragic haven for the preservation of the sense of self. Robotized, numbed, or automatized, the horrors of war may be banished from awareness but the sense of the reality of life and living may then remain in perpetual exile. Be it concentration camps, atomic explosions, or mass executions in a jungle, unbearable encounters with death pose an insurmountable obstacle for the ego’s ability to integrate and reconcile; numbed to memories of horrible deaths, personality may remain anesthetized to life. (Engel 1984: 85) In normal situations the death of relatives and the survival of children does not foster guilt as the survivor, through ceremonious performance of rites the connection with the dead is ritualistically observed. The prolongation of connection and the ritualistic outlet of survivor’s grief reduce the chances of fearing the guilt. Sudden and unexpected deaths of relatives in war deprive the survivors the opportunity to cherish at least the memorials of some kinds and forms which can fill the vacuum created by their absence. The absence of connection in any form with the dead makes the 182

W e needed the violence to cheer us

children emotionally precarious. Engel further sums up this difficulty of war-affected children: One penalty of survival is guilt, the pain of the unanswerable question: Why did one survive while parents, siblings, friends, and compatriots died? There are no graves to visit. Placing a wreath on the tomb of the unknown is not the same as visiting a relative’s or a friend’s grave. Such acts do not alleviate grief, do not relieve guilt and ambivalence. Collective mourning does not address personal guilt. This strange inability to grieve continues as a lifeline to the dead. The dead have to be placated. (Engel 1984: 86) The emotional precariousness turns him inwards, towards the vacuous relativity with the family members and perpetuation of the guilt. While in the rehabilitation centre Ishmael broods, I lay in my bed night after night staring at the ceiling and thinking, why have I survived the war? Why was I the last person in my immediate family to be alive? I didn’t know. (178)

Relational vulnerabilities While experiencing the war Ishmael and other children develop relationships, including the brief ones, with people and spaces. These relationships or associations they had developed or forced upon during the war continue to overshadow their attempts to relate even after they are removed from the war sites. Engel says, “to ask how adolescents cope with war, one is also asking what bonds can be made and sustained in this struggle” (Engel 1984: 88). The constant spatial displacement from his village to the army camp, from the camp to Benin Home and then to his Uncle’s home and homeless again keeps the dynamics of relationships changing. Although the adolescence is a stage of turbulent transition, the stability of home, family, and peers helps reduce the stress of pubertal transition. While moving through all the unsafe locations during the war or while being at Benin Home Ishmael develops relations which he cannot sustain or thrive upon for long. While in the rehabilitation home he develops love for Esther. He goes to her home, while hugging her he squeezes her. She looks in his eyes and asks him to come next week so that they can have some time together. Ishmael wonders about how she, along with other workers of the rehabilitation home, can live with stories of so many traumatized children. Although she can develop a strong bonding with them, he is neither able to develop that bonding with other children like him nor can he express his love for her. He writes, “It must be tough living with so many stories. I was just living 183

R ahul K amble

with one, mine, and it was difficult, as the nightmares about what had happened continued to torment me” (181). His attempts to re-associate with the school and learning are beset with doubts as other children in the school sit apart from them fearing that they might kill others. In his brief stint with the people around the world at ECOSOC Conference in New York he finds a new mother in Laura Sims, the storyteller in an NGO. However, all his bonds are temporary and have only little consoling effect on his life. His desire to have strong bonding with the people at conference cuts abruptly. His sadness, while leaving the US, his new mother and his other friends around the world, is however silver lined by the feeling that at least he could meet and relate to with people outside Sierra Leone. The interaction, however brief, with the outside world is substantially useful in the rehabilitation of waraffected children as it provokes to compare the advantage of violence-free life. Peaceful atmosphere, coordinating agencies, and parental or fraternal overseeing can reduce the risks for them. It is quite possible for the children to “overcome the trauma (. . .) and (. . .) live normal lives if they have the support of parent figures” (Garbarino, Kostelny and Dubrow 1991: 29–30). With the rebels taking over the government of country and the fighting resumes in Sierra Leone the atmosphere of uncertainty unleashes and Ishmael’s status as a former child soldier and the civilian at present makes him vulnerable again. The impending fear of death returns to Ishmael. He is sure that “the result would be death”, since he was a civilian now. (205).

Disowning of children Loss of child-friendly ambience and adult patronage proves detrimental to the growth of children. Children in Sierra Leone largely caught in the battle grounds due to “rupture in the intergenerational bargains a result of political and military miscalculations within the power structures” (ZackWilliams 2001: 73). This entrapment further splits them, internally as individual child and collectively as children soldiers, making them susceptible to allurement or attack from both the sides. The smooth rehabilitation attempting to settle them into adulthood is further disrupted by the conflict of choice between the government force or rebel force. Although Ishmael is more experienced this time to succumb to such pressures easily, he can ponder over the situation of other children from rural areas who would soon be recruited by either of the factions. Developmental stagnation, destabilized family/value structures, economic deprivation, and social insecurity in the country further aggravates the pressures on families that could be utilized by military and rebel factions to allure or abduct their children. Zack-Williams highlight the rising number of street children recruited as child soldiers. peripheral capitalism has transformed the form of the family, loosening controls over children. With ongoing crises in both the 184

W e needed the violence to cheer us

economic and political realms undermining kinship structures and leaving children with little security, some have turned to surrogate families for protection, either on the street or in the ranks of combatants. Although some of the children who have participated in the war have been volunteers, thousands more have been abducted and socialized via brute violence by both sides. (Zack-Williams 2001: 73) Ishmael’s memoir highlights the change from the peaceful and undisturbed childhood to the turbulent adolescence intervened by the civil war. The change from a dance and song-lover to a lover of violence sums up the precarious journey of thousands of children caught in the war-affected zones worldwide.

References Beah, Ishmael. 2007. A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. New York, NY: Sarah Crichton Books. Dybdahl, Ragnhild. 2001. ‘Children and Mothers in War: An Outcome Study of a Psychosocial Intervention Program’. Child Development 72(4) July–August: 1214–1230. Wiley on behalf of the Society for Research in Child Development. www.jstor.org/stable/1132438 (accessed on 29 July 2015). Engel, Mary. 1984. ‘Children and War’. Peabody Journal of Education: The Legacy of Nicholas Hobbs: Research on Education and Human Development in the Public Interest: Part 2 61(3), Spring: 71–90. Taylor & Francis. www.jstor.org/stable/1491710 (accessed on 28 October 2014). Erikson, Erik H. 1977. Childhood and Society. London: Paladin Grafton Books. Garbarino, James, Kathleen Kostelny, and Nancy Dubrow. 1991. No Place to Be a Child: Growing up in a War Zone. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books. Kyulanova, Irina. 2010. ‘From Soldiers to Children: Undoing the Rite of Passage in Ishmael Beah’s “A Long Way Gone” and Bernard Ashley’s “Little Soldier” ’. Studies in the Novel: The Young Adult Novel 42(1‑2), Spring‑Summer: 28–47. Johns Hopkins University Press. www.jstor.org/stable/29533967 (accessed on 28 September 2015). Zack-Williams, A.B. 2001. ‘Child Soldiers in the Civil War in Sierra Leone’. Review of African Political Economy: Civil Society, Kleptocracy & Donor Agendas: What Future for Africa? 28(87) March: 73–82. Taylor & Francis. www.jstor.org/stable/4006694 (accessed on 12 September 2015).

185

14 CHILDREN OF THE TRAIL The trauma of removal and assimilation Amit Singh In 1848, French political thinker, historian and traveler, and the author of Democracy in America (1835), Alexis de Tocqueville observed that through the removal of the Native Americans from the rich and fertile lands of southern America, “the United States succeeded in exterminating Native peoples and denying Indian rights ‘with wonderful ease, quietly, legally, philanthropically, without spilling blood and without violating a single one of the great principles of morality in the eyes of the world. It is impossible to destroy men with more respect to the laws of humanity’ ” (Perdue 2002: 67). Tocqueville is referring here to the phenomenon widely known to the Native American people as “Trail of Tears”. There is increasing agreement among Native American intellectuals today that the motivations behind this historic act of displacement of an entire people were unabashedly mercenary and unjust. Ironically, during the first half of the nineteenth century even as the cruel displacement was being enforced, it was projected by the Andrew Jackson-led American government as a competent and just solution to the “Indian problem”. In fact, the settlers’ greed for fertile land and natural resources abundant in this region was camouflaged as philanthropy. The reason cited behind the removal was that the Native Americans were getting corrupted and accumulating vices such as alcoholism due to their proximity with the Euro-American culture. To “save” them from complete destruction, it was necessary to deport them far away from the reach of “civilization”. “If the Indians resisted the westward path to salvation, whites felt legally as well as morally justified in forcibly evicting them from their southeastern homeland. Indians, whites believed, were only wandering hunters who failed to make proper use of the land. Moreover, they asserted that the European right of discovery took precedence over the Indians’ limited right to temporary occupancy” (Perdue 2002: 67). The violent and unjust eviction of these tribes from their homeland had far reaching consequences. By denying the natives, their geographical, ecological, and physical contexts of sustenance, the whites caused more than just infrastructural damage to these tribes. This chapter seeks to analyze the trauma caused to the Native American people, by this act of removal comparable to a cultural holocaust, 186

C hildren of the trail

especially through the experiences of Native American children who were not only the worst victims of death and disease on the trail, but also suffered the effects of cultural reconstruction on reaching the new land of western America. In other words, the trauma faced by the Native American children during the removal will be the central issue of this chapter. This chapter re-creates the “Trail of Tears” from the accounts of childhood and children in Native American literature. Through a close reading of Winnemucca Hopkins’s short story Life Among the Piutes (1883), Roseanna Snead’s non-fictional account Two Cherokee Women, Vicki L Sears’ short story Grace (1989), and Mabel Thompson Raunch’s short story Along the Trail (1941), this chapter looks into experiences of “The Trail” as they are recounted and remembered through the figure of children. The official documents of the Federal government are statistical and biased. They fail to capture experiences of the children who were a part of this mass removal and displacement. However, even the official written records of the events surrounding “The Trail” hint towards the atrocities faced by the peoples. A Cherokee leader named William Shorey witnessed the departure of the first detachment from the Cherokee land. His reflections on the conditions of this region, where the Cherokees where forcefully captured and confined to the camps just before the departure find mention in a letter he wrote to his friend John Howard Payne. Shorey mourns, “In all the bustle of preparation there was a silence and stillness of the voice that betrayed the sadness of the heart” (Rozema 2003: 133). The Native American tribes were divested of their rights, land, and livelihood. In the historical and literary accounts of “The Trail”, the children who were compelled to migrate out, against their volition, find mention in limited ways. Through the statistical documentations we learn about the deaths of children in a stoic tone: “five children aged two or under died of cholera infantum” (Rozema 2003: 94). While some wistful reports inform that “the little boy who died last night was buried in a coffin made of puncheons” (Rozema 2003: 144). These accounts do not give expression to the traumatic experiences of the children. A turn to fictional accounts fills in these narrative gaps. Mabel Thompson Raunch’s story Along the Trail is a non-native account of the event seen from the perspective of a child. This trail, in which “many foots faltered”, appears like “a procession of scarecrows come to life” (299). On a cold winter morning the snow though “trampled and dirty” was marked by a “brighter color than the grime . . . many of the footprints were stained with blood”! Migration and uprooting from the traditional lands defines the condition of the Native American peoples. In the case of Raunch’s story, the event of migration becomes a definitive part of cultural memory, even of the ones who did not physically undertake the journey. The brutal means adopted by the Federal Government for the eviction of the defenceless Native Americans resemble militaristic rigour. However, the CHILDREN OF THE TRAIL

187

AMIT SINGH

A mit S ingh

frequent occurrences of resistance to the Euro-American identity highlight the attempts to re-integrate with Cherokee values. In this context, Indian Reservation land has come to symbolize collective resilience rather than forced confinement today. Before the removal, the white settlers in North America had built relationships with the Natives in the domains of education, religion, and trade. Bearing witness to the deceptive ways of the settlers, children form derogatory stereotypes about them. Winnemucca Hopkin’s short story “Life Among the Piutes” reconstructs a child’s first encounter with the whites. Theme of betrayal by the “white brother” colours her perception of them. The repeated deception of the tribal chief by the white brothers and rumours of their cannibalism lead to their construction as owls in the protagonist’s mind. The removal acquired added horror for the children as it was brought by the “other”, the white man. The vivid memory of being buried alive by the mother to protect her from the whites informs her perception about them. All her later conceptions of the negotiations happening around are coloured by the fear of whites. In this case, the children internalize the fear felt by their parents and community. The disturbing and devastating memories weigh upon the child’s mind. Initial encounters with whites and the experiences of the trail find memorialization as instances of betrayal and violence. These experiences of growing up uprooted, exiled away from their land of origins, of being confined to the arduous life of reservation, is reflective of the struggles to come to terms with reality. The Federal Government’s policies to form segregated reservations and establish dormitories for children added further to the harm already done by the removal. The constitutional and educational “reforms” implemented by the Federal Government recognized the young generation as the most susceptible and impressionable of the subjects. This is the reason why one notices, through the reading of memoirs and personal narratives, a premium placed on instruction of the young ones in the community. This also makes one suspect the motives of the white Americans. Grabbing the land of Native Americans was accompanied with the interventions in matters of polity and administration. Missionaries and modern educators also descended upon these new territories within no time. Settlers’ interventions in the domain of education and religion further intensified the hurt of the Natives. English education left deeper and more violent impressions on the minds of Indian American children as it attempted to diminish their sense of being and instil a feeling of shame about their own linguistic traditions and cultural practises. The trauma of being a native child is intensely narrated by Roseanna Snead in her non-fictional account Two Cherokee Women, wherein she portrays the childhood experiences of her grandmother and mother, which were disrupted by reforms introduced by the Federal Government. In the insensitive attempts to homogenize Native American traditions is witnessed 188

C hildren of the trail

obliteration of the experienced realities of the Natives that assert how “Indian inspirations are different” (Jackson 5). Snead’s narrative explicates helplessness experienced by her mother and grandmother during their years in public schools. Snead’s mother was violently and forcibly pulled into English system of beliefs and education, in spite of her resistance, causing her to develop a sense of disrespect towards her own language, identity, colour, and cultural practises. The commonalities like imposition of settlers’ life-style, food habits, and education on the grandmother and mother hint at the overpowering influence of missionaries on Native American childhood. Some recurrent themes surface when experiences of American Indians who were forcibly enrolled in boarding schools by “truant officers” and made to follow the customs modelled on Puritan ethics are juxtaposed with the native ways of behaviour. There is an excessive emphasis on cleanliness based on racial and ethnic superiority. As Snead recollects her mother’s experiences, “The White matrons were always making the children scrub themselves hard. It seemed they were trying to get them to wash off some of their darkness” (Snead 4). Similarly, the children were coerced into eating soap to castigate the act of uttering words in their native tongues. The shaming of Indian American culture intensified when the children were re-christened and modelled in Euro-American image envisioned by the European settlers. The deracinated generation of Cherokees that grew up amidst white matrons and teachers away from its land and community—the land that signified belonging, home, and guardian spirit in the collective psyche—felt degenerate and incompetent leading to waning off of self-esteem. Children were, thus, treated as agents of subsuming native cultures and resistances under Protestant Christian values. Relevant to the discussion here are Victoria Haskins and Margaret D. Jacobs’ ideas on the act of establishing public boarding schools on or near reservations, the act likened to a systemic attempt to continue the assault on indigenous community and therefore termed as “warlike aggressions” (Haskins 2002: 238). The Boarding schools which functioned within the ambit of the missionary activity in the former case were aided by Federal Government in the latter. The Federally operated day boarding schools, therefore, emphasised on the vocational training of the students that brought them farther away from their cultural professions. European influence was an enforced intervention in both the cases, be it imposition of European medical practises that overhauled native healing practises or forced enrolment of children in missionary schools. The treatment meted out to Native American children here first led to stripping of pride in one’s Cherokee identity (shift from Native American to Cherokee is abrupt), followed by ridicule and demeaning of cultural practises of the Cherokee people that facilitated bonding of an individual with the community’s philosophy. The subsequent refashioning of identity, and cruel initiation into customs and traditions of America demonstrate how insensitively the fear of practising one’s own customs has 189

A mit S ingh

been instilled in the children of a culture that historically emphasised on the individual’s agency and learning through self-reflexivity. Important to note here is also how the family and community to which the child belonged were denied participation and influence in her upbringing. Divested of their mother tongue, Cherokee children now saw themselves drifting away from means to understand the spiritual symbols embedded in their oral narratives which would be rendered incomprehensible to them and deny them any access to the healing principles embodied in it. The psychic resources of the community, necessary for recovering from the trauma of migration and violence, which had been damaged already underwent further depletion due to the new education system imposed on the children. A continuum with the “Trail of Tears” was established for the native children. After severance of physical ties with their land, they were driven out of their own houses on reservations and alienated from their heritage and cultural consciousness. “The New England Primer” imposed on the Native American children through the institutionalized education is akin to psychological violence and attempts to completely annihilate Native American thought as the values embodied by the former suppress the ones with which the Native children have grown up. Creation is an outcome of God’s will in Puritan belief, whereas in Native traditions individuals recreate these creations. The violence here is intensified due to the medium of instruction. Instead of learning through participation and experiences, children are now being forcefully fed in a language and medium that is malicious to their own system of beliefs, thereby damaging the collective conscious of the children. The attempt to fashion the children on a Euro-American model doesn’t take into consideration the harm this different mode of value systems might cause. Puritan modes of sermonizing and disciplining children and practise of corporal punishment are at odds with the ways of Native American parenthood where the child understands the world through experience, thereby nourishing a sense of self-reflexivity and autonomy about one’s actions. The dominant written mode of instruction in the public schools would generate a sense of alienation among the children as the mores and values being inculcated nowhere acknowledge the native belief systems and omits historical experiences of their lives, thereby further isolating them from the studies. The Puritan education based on the dictum “Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever” undermines the value system entrenched in autonomy and individuality. The most important “word” now is the word of Bible. The intervention of the written text creates disjunction of thoughts and disintegration of the self. Notions of ultimate “God”, “Sanction”, and “Sin” seep into Native American conceptions. The child is now “instructed” in his duty rather than being initiated into it. The Primer first issued in 1693 leaves deeper and more violent impressions on the minds of Native American children as it attempts to decimate their sense of being and instil a 190

C hildren of the trail

feeling of shame about their own cultural practises. The Sequoyah Cherokee created in 1821, a sign of resistance to the colonial education, has remained unacceptable in American public schools until the first two decades of the twentieth century. The colonial contact of the natives belonging to the Southeast tribes began in the sixteenth century when they came into contact with a group of Spaniards led by Hernando de Soto. The Cherokees had established trade ties with the British settlers by the beginning of the nineteenth century and by 1820 the Moravians, Methodists, and other Christian denominations had already established missionary schools on Cherokee land. The sociological changes effected by the missionary presence greatly diminished the role of motherhood. Paradigms of childhood got imbued with newer meanings on the backdrop of these changes. Given the circumstances, the framework of the experience of childhood underwent a drastic shift causing alienation from the cultural symbols and idioms traditionally closer to Cherokee children. The Native American worldview emphasized on inculcating values necessary for coping with life close to and in consonance with the forces of nature. The methods of instruction were subtle and impart values to the children by making them realize its importance. But all these methods were headed towards annihilation by the beginning of nineteenth century. New values were inflicted on Cherokee social structures by 1820. The children who were earlier embedded in a complex matrix of kinship and looked after by the entire community were now put in the custody of missionaries. The alienation from the nexus of complex relationships and its replacement with school authorities alone caused dislocation in the children’s psychology as they couldn’t cope with the new modes of instructions which were violent and imposing in nature. Leslies E. Laud points out how the education system in America since its inception has been heavily infused with moral education. The dominant Puritanical perception of children as small monsters naturally given to mischief and therefore requiring an authoritarian suppressive training from the very beginning was far removed from the soft and loving ways of the Native Americans. Christian education caused great hurt as the Cherokee modes of education had always been subtle and informed by an understanding of the child as an independent and autonomous being. And yet, as Ronald Satz points out in his essay on Cherokee reception of western education, by the mid-nineteenth century English Missionary education had become aspirational. The hurt and isolation inflicted by this system of education came to the fore much later. Vicki L. Sears’ short story Grace portrays experiences of two Native American siblings: a nine-year-old girl Ann Jodd and her younger brother Billie Jim, who are put into a foster home after their parents divorce each other. In the foster home, the children are not treated as emotional beings having social and psychological needs but as “workers” who visit white people’s settlements to serve their labour. They are moulded on Euro-American 191

A mit S ingh

Puritan values. Jodd’s narrative suggests that she and Billie were sexually abused and were subjected to corporal punishment. The guardians become their abusers. The pain and trauma of being separated from one’s family, tradition, and customs affect the children deeply. Themes like childhood trauma, forced acculturation, and assimilation of the Native American peoples with the white settlers that imply imposition of the settlers’ religion and customs on the natives that is in-sync with the depreciation of indigenous belief systems emerge from the story. The story is derived from Vickie L. Sears experiences of the years she spent in “Washington Children’s Home Society” reminiscing on which she says, “That’s how you begin internalizing oppression: first comes pain, then comes repression”. Children here are unable to express or even comprehend their hurt and pain due to the limited psychological resources they possess, and more so when the spiritual media and methods of repose are different from the dominant ones. The children in the story are placed within a strict and disciplinarian matrix even before they have developed the mechanism to cope with the abrupt changes and incidents that they face after being enrolled in the foster home. Fear of getting sexually abused and exploited for labour lurks in their minds, which are triggered by the innocuous and reassuring touch of their new guardians who adopted them from the foster home. The separation becomes a traumatic experience for the children, especially when they do not have control over the circumstances shaping their lives and more so when they do not have anyone to depend on. To add on to the anxiety is the sexual abuse that often scars them forever. The “Trail of Tears” continues to hold a central position in the Cherokee consciousness as it still governs the lived experiences of the individuals of the community, and more so in the case of children as they are considered vulnerable and gullible sites for the projection of anxieties and identities. Childhood trauma in Cherokee culture is severe and all pervasive as it has a rich oral tradition that abounds in folklore related to the injustices inflicted on them by the whites. This historical memory is lived through its retellings, thereby acquiring an intimately distinct form of its own. The children growing in the households which have such a distinct and strong culture and tradition imbibe the experiences of their family members and suffer in their hurt and trauma. The migration from the traditional land signifies a break with the cultural and spiritual markers from which the community derived its strength and meaning. Native trauma is intrinsically linked to land as after migration the community got segregated to reservations and was forced to assimilate with American society by acquiring its education. Cherokee children then grew up living the migration as they found themselves isolated and dejected in the American society as well. Feelings of confusion regarding identity and purpose are prevalent amongst the youth who grow up on the reservation; despite being segregated from the rest of the dominant culture, young Cherokee people were required to meet up the expectations 192

C hildren of the trail

laid down by the social constructs governed by hegemonic white ideas. The trauma of Cherokee childhood is a continuum and accumulation of tragic experiences as the memories of the past pervade and colour the perceptions that are being formed about the world around oneself. The dominant forces around the children of the trail, like media, educational institutes, missionary churches, and even the Federal Government, insidiously try to reiterate a feeling of domination, isolation, and annihilation in them and simultaneously undermine native cultures and legacies that would have otherwise flourished and followed.

References Haskins, Victoria. 2002. ‘Stolen Generations and Vanishing Indians: The Removal of Indigenous Children as a Weapon of War in the United States and Australia, 1870–1940’. In Children and War: A Historical Anthology, edited by James Alan Marten, 227–241. New York, NY: New York University Press. Perdue, Theda. 2002. ‘The Trail of Tears: Removal of the Southern Indians in the Jeffersonian-Jacksonian Era’. In They Made Us Many Promises: The American Indian Experience 1524 to the Present, edited by Philip Weeks, 67–84. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell. Rozema, Vicki. 2003. Voices from the Trail of Tears. Winston-Salem, NC: John F. Blair Publisher.

193

15 CHILD/HOOD AND 9/11 TRAUMA A study of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close Nishat Haider Parents are always more knowledgeable than their children, and children are always smarter than their parents. —Foer, 2005: 37 CHILD/HOOD AND 9/11 TRAUMA

NISHAT HAIDER

This chapter situates Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), a postmodern Bildungsroman, at the intersection of child/ hood literature, post-9/11 melancholia and trauma studies. When Islamist insurgents hijacked four commercial airliners on 11 September 2001 and crashed them into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, DC, destroying the Trade Center and killing almost 3,000 people, the attacks were widely described as a moment of historical rupture. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close presents the story of nineyear old Oskar Schell whose father died on 9/11 in the collapsing World Trade Center. Approaching Oskar’s lived world from the theoretical lens of trauma studies, this chapter unravels how children and youth are enmeshed with societal power relations in the politics of culture and transnational conflicts. It aims to unpack the linkages between the processes of subjectification, socialization, and identity construction, that is, the micro-politics of personal experience and the macro-politics of the public sphere. Written from a position informed by Cathy Caruth, Shoshona Felman, and Dori Laub, this chapter begins by examining and offering a critique of trauma theory’s model of subjectivity, and its relations with theories of referentiality and representation, history, and testimony. Through this reconstruction of post-9/11 intellectual and theoretical lineages for trauma and memory studies, I will map out a conceptual core to study the loss and tragedy of the boy hero, Oskar. In this essay it will be my endeavour to situate Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close within ongoing debates in memory and trauma studies regarding the question of child/hood literature’s capacity, or lack of 194

C hild / hood and 9 / 1 1 trauma

it, to represent trauma. Examining the memorialization of Oskar’s loss, it will be my effort to map out trauma as a structuring yet elusive subject of representation by exploring the relationship between the experiences of terror and helplessness that have caused trauma, the ways in which survivors remember, and the representation.

9/11: A discursive analysis of trauma, memory, and identity We are living in “post-traumatic century”, an era troubled at the beginning, middle, and end with catastrophes that demand an interdisciplinary theoretical apparatus like trauma theory (Felman 1992: 1). Historical memory to a large extent is constituted by and through “institutionalized sites of memory” like literature. In his essay, Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, Derrida asserts, “Literature serves as real testimony. . . . It is a fiction of testimony more than a testimony in which the witness swears to tell the truth” (2000: 19). The insights offered via contemporary psychological literature, narratives, and cinema on trauma and memory provide these disciplines a space to “engage in articulating the complexities of the relationships among personal memory, historical representation, and meaning” (Walker 2001: 13). Many historians have written comprehensively on such interrelated subjects as social memory (Fentress and Wickham 1992), historical memory (Le Goff 1992), history as the art of memory (Hutton 1993), history as the phantasm of oblivion (Geary 1994), history constructed through traumatic memory (Roth 1995), and history as memories of symbols and myths (Isnenghi 1996, 1997). The debate about cultural trauma hinges on what Joshua Hirsch has addressed the “failure of representation” through the notion of “discourse of trauma” (2004: 18), as also postulated by the following theorists: Elaine Scarry (1985), for whom the pain of the tortured is not only “inexpressible” but it has the capacity to “unmake the world” through a shattering of language; Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (1992), who talk about a “crisis of witnessing” and underscore the significance of “testimony”; and Cathy Caruth (1996), who refers to traumatic experience as “unclaimed”. Art has this impossible task, which is sometimes possible, to provide a certain substance to the trauma, to the “absence” of the trauma (Caruth 1995: 9). Caruth points out, “[T]he impact of the traumatic event lies precisely in its belatedness, in its refusal to be simply located, in its insistent appearance outside the boundaries of any single place or time” (1995: 9). This belated experience and the belated occurrence of symptoms is what Freud called the “Nachträglichkeit” of trauma, and it is closely related to the way trauma is cognitively registered, or in fact, not registered (Lacan 1981: 207). However, the recent interventions propose the “discourse of trauma” as a way of facilitating not only a theory of trauma representation but also of bridging methodological gaps in analyses of individual and 195

N ishat H aider

collective historical experiences (Hirsch 2004: 9). According to Hirsch, “the discourse of trauma—as one encounters it in conversation, in reading, in film—gives one a language with which to. . . represent the failure of representation” (2004: 18). Trauma can only be approached and known by its telling and trauma narratives offer readers the possibility of narrative integration of both individual and collective trauma, by creating empathy for the suffering of others.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: a boy’s quest for meaning after 9/11 The central plot of the novel is concerned with Oskar’s quest arising out of the guilt for not having answered his father’s last call on the morning of 9/11. When the phone rang a final time, Oskar was too scared to respond to it, and this traumatizing “betrayal” has burdened the boy with a distressing sense of guilt: “That secret was a hole in the middle of me that every happy thing fell into” (71). In the wake of the disaster, Oskar is left struggling to understand what has happened, begging people to help him make sense of things that don’t make sense, like his father being killed in the building by people who didn’t know him at all. In his effort to cope with the loss he looks for traces in his father’s belongings and accidentally breaks a vase containing “a fat and short key, in a little envelope, in a blue vase, on the highest shelf in his closet” (Foer 2005: 37). Later he finds the name “Black” in his father’s hand- writing on the back of the envelope. These two things comprise the hints for his search to find the lock for the key and the person in New York to whom it belongs. He takes this as a cue or an idea from his father because earlier his father had sent him off on “Reconnaissance Expeditions” (8), occasionally without giving him any hint, with the injunction not to “stop looking” (10). Annoyed, he asks his father: “But if you don’t tell me anything, how can I ever be right” (9)? His dad’s answer captures the indispensable fatherly counsel: “Another way of looking at it would be, how could you ever be wrong” (9)? He evidently wanted to inculcate in his son the significance of the belief that the definitive purpose of the quest is the quest itself. Oskar devises a detective game for himself in which he attempts to unravel the “mystery” of a vase he finds in his father’s cabinet having a part of paper scribbled with the word “Black”. Certain that Black is the last name of a person his father got in touch with, Oskar spends eight months travelling around all the boroughs of New York City enquiring from “Blacks” in the phone book if they were acquainted with his father. Throughout the novel, all of Osker’s imaginative performances in Extremely Loud and are efforts to determine the events of his father’s death: “I need to know how he died so you can stop inventing how he died. I’m always inventing” (255). If traumatic loss is known only by what remains of it, then the politics and ethics of mourning lie in the interpretation of 196

C hild / hood and 9 / 1 1 trauma

what remains—how remains are produced and animated, how they are read and sustained (Eng 2003: IX). The novel as it intersects with history offers not only to bear witness and testify, but also an occasion to interrogate the tensions and to bridge the gaps between memory and history, and representation and remembrance. In Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Foer engages with and reveals trauma’s “traceless” (Radstone 2001: 199) or absent textual presence. Thematically, Foer’s novel revisits the predominant historical traumas of the twentieth century: primarily 9/11, but the bombing of Dresden and Hiroshima also feature as important subtexts.

Children, trauma, and the incapability of language The literary memorialization of the 9/11 events has predominantly represented the “traumatic influence on the American subject”, which culminated in the emergence of narratives with “the child or the adult metaphorically reduced to a child-like state of incomprehension . . . as the protagonist in many novels” (Sözalan 2011: XII). Following traumatic experiences, a significant number of children react in ways that substantially disrupt or impair their and their family’s daily lives, their growth and development, and their abilities to function normally.1 Since research has contradicted the notion that young children are more resilient following trauma (Scheeringa, Zeanah, Myers, and Putnam 2005), there is a growing need for a more comprehensive analysis of children’s affective responses to trauma, which include depression (Birleson 1981), anxiety (Reynolds 1980), and fear (Ollendick 1983). In fact, what so far has been left out of the debate is the issue of the appropriateness of children’s traumatic memories as viable narratives that attempt to access and to represent a painful past that is by definition inaccessible. In Foer’s novel, the 9/11 trauma that has ruptured Oskar’s consciousness, reveals itself as a form of aphasia or muteness. Following an immense traumatic tragedy “the destruction might appear so vast that the functions of language and thought necessary for remembrance and reflection seem permanently disabled” (Baer 2002: 4). Oskar cannot talk about 9/11 (which he keeps calling “the worst day”, unable even to speak its name), and he definitely cannot testify about his failure to answer his father’s last phone call. The fiction writers who engage a child narrator “ask their adult audiences to rethink the way they process information and therefore relearn in an untraditional manner” (Couch 2008: 12). Thus, Foer reconfigures the ungraspable magnitude of the 9/11 trauma and the relationship between memory and experience through Oskar’s fact-finding expeditions that bear both individual and historical referents. At the heart of these activities that incorporate elements of gameness and turning things into games is a new experience of subjectivity in which Oskar’s social and interpersonal relationships are all reconfigured. Huizinga (1950) underscored that play is at the 197

N ishat H aider

core of all human creativity and human social phenomena. Art and games come together here in establishing what Jacques Ranciere (2009) calls dissensus, which is defined by Ranciere’s critic, Joseph Tanke as “the means by which the sensible is deprived of its self-evidence, punctuated, and subject to dispute. . . . Dissensus breaks open an interpretation of sense thought to be incontestable” (2011: 61). According to this view, it is the play of the artwork that defines what Ranciere calls a new subjectivation. Foer crafts Oskar’s explorations for answers to the puzzling clues and the meta-textual diary as tools to represent the ruptures and gaps of trauma in ethicalempathetic way and to enable diverse perspectives and enunciations that contest a totalizing grand narrative of 9/11. By manipulating the child-like instances of play form of the puzzle and thinking about the world through storytelling and visuals, Foer subverts the privileging of rational analysis and probes illogical contrivances and mechanisms for coping with melancholia, loss, and tragedy. These puzzles and games range widely from the actual “Reconnaissance Expedition” games Oskar plays with his father to the post-9/11 real life fact-finding mission he enacts throughout the streets of New York City. Indicating methods for dealing with emotional trauma for the child, Margaret Higonnet in the essay entitled “Time Out: Trauma and Play in Johnny Tremain and Alan and Naomi” says, “The psyche may take refuge through repetitive play and re-enactment, or through numbness disconnecting the self from emotions and from the events” (2005: 152). Thus, by solving puzzles and indulging in gameplay, the child can grasp the “belatedness” (Caruth 1996: 7) of trauma and make sense of his or her world as the games/puzzles allow the child to perform rather than passively react to his/her circumstances.

Acting out and working/playing through trauma The fundamental way to deal with the trauma of a life-shattering experience entails an interlinking of the notions of “acting out” and “working through”, which are related to the Freudian terms of “melancholia” and “mourning”, the two likely psychological responses connected to loss (LaCapra 2001: 65). “Acting out” signifies “the repetition compulsion, with almost no other possibilities” (LaCapra 2001: 145), the tendency to repeat something compulsively by which the person experiences recurring memories of traumatic events, and “working through” is “a kind of countervailing force” by which “the person tries to gain critical distance on a problem and to distinguish between past, present, and future” (LaCapra 2001: 143). The issues of memorialization of trauma and their intersection with childhood in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close underscores not only an alternative way of performing or enacting childhood subjectivity, which allows for multiplicity and the privileging of difference, but also an understanding of narrative as a site in which epistemological and ontological 198

C hild / hood and 9 / 1 1 trauma

politics can be played out, challenged, and explored for working through melancholia. From a subjective perspective, trauma and bereavement usually encompass a wide range of conceivable responses to grieving and coping or mourning. Such understandings of trauma not only incorporate and deal with fear, anger, and resentment, but also wonder, ludification, and quest as part of experiencing and/acting out trauma. Describing the entire gamut of emotions that he (the young protagonist) deals with, Oskar says: “right now I am feeling sadness, happiness, anger, love, guilt, joy, shame, and a little bit of humor. . . . My insides don’t match up with my outsides” (Foer 2005: 163, 201). Oskar suffers from all the clinical and psychological symptoms that indicate “post-traumatic stress” (Regel 2010: 5–6). While sometimes he withdraws into himself (6, 37), at other times, he is simmering with anger. And, though he suppresses that feeling most of the time, there is one moment when he gives in to spite and despair—a moment in which nothing makes sense anymore (145–146). Oskar has trouble sleeping (10, 36, 41, 74). He inflicts bruises on his own body as a “pathological soothing mechanism” (Herman 1992: 109). He also suffers from hyperarousal. Oskar shies away from people with moustaches or turbans (36) and he is also prone to severe mood swings (170–173). In Welcome to the Desert of the Real (2002), Žižek reminds the world that the events of September 11 engendered a new reality, a reality that was so close and so familiar that it was “unreal” or “too real” to be portrayed by straightforward realist narratives. When reality becomes a traumatic nightmare, realism itself disintegrates and it is the textual combination of the literary and the visual that might just come closest to capturing the terrible trauma of 11 September 2001. The traumatic event is, by implication, sudden and unexpected, “something which [not only] violates the doxa of the narrated universe” but also defies integration into narrative. However, the ability to successfully witness, testify, and narrate the traumatic experience and the authenticity effect is achieved through the violations of conventions in fictional texts (Christinidis 2013: 39–40). Despite language’s inadequacy to witness the 9/11 violence and loss, the crucial aspect of Foer’s poetics and aesthetics of testimony is “to offer opportunities for new ways of seeing and new ways of thinking, and we expect this upheaval in sensory, emotional, and intellectual experience to transform literature on the level of form” (Smith 2011: 154). Foer integrates an emphasis on the visual image within his narrative (actual photographs inter-spliced with the text in Foer’s novel), thereby offering a heightened version of realism in order to accurately portray the realities of post 9/11 socio-cultural and personal landscapes. “Traumatic memories . . . are not encoded like the ordinary memories of adults in a verbal, linear narrative that is assimilated into an ongoing life story,” writes the psychoanalyst Judith Herman. Traumatic memories are “frozen and wordless” (1992: 156–157). The challenge for writers of trauma literature like Jonathan Safran Foer is “to find a way 199

N ishat H aider

of making this fundamental truth accessible to the mind and emotions of the reader” (Langer 1991: XXI). And because of this absence, people who have suffered traumatic experiences can become so “possessed” by them that they frequently describe themselves as living “ghosts”. What makes literature into the privileged, but not the only, site of trauma is the fact that literature as an art form can incorporate and denote a facet of an experience which was not comprehended or processed fully. Literature, in other words, because of its representational character, is a channel and a means for the transmission of trauma in order to render it, to use Felman’s and Dori Laub’s term, to be witnessed. In the novel, as the child protagonist Oskar struggles through the limitations of language to “speak the unspeakable”, the author (Foer) displays “the paradox of witnessing via discourse by revealing the artifice, while simultaneously co-creating the experience (through witness and audience, writer, and reader) in order to make meaning” (Atchison 2012: 105). Foer uses complex meta-textual narrative structures in the novel, which appear as letters, photos, numbers, words themselves, journal entries, spaces, sculpture, images of keys, a series of locked doors, photographs of New York City, pictures of people and places that Oskar meets along his journey. In Extremely Loud, Foer tackles the problematic subject of the failure and the breakdown of language and the loss of words in the event of great trauma. Oskar attempts to create objects that would make the world a better place in order to distract himself from his father’s death at a surface level but also to grab a hold of controllable situations through the act of creation. Among the many terms that Oskar describes himself with are as follows: a “jeweler”, an “inventor”, an “amateur astronomer”, as well as a “natural historian”, an “origamist”, a “computer consultant”, an “amateur entomologist”, a “Francophile”, a “Great Explorer”, and as a “detective”. Oskar’s depiction of himself as an “inventor” is specifically apt. Oskar “ceaselessly conceives impossible inventions . . . in a desperate attempt to cope with the grief . . . of losing his father in the twin towers disaster” (Faber 2005). This neurotic indulgence in excess compensatory imagination, which is not only intrusive and bizarre, is illustrated in the following passage when Oskar, in particular, wants his father to come back to life: What about a teakettle? What if the spout opened and closed when the steam came out, so it would become a mouth, and it could whistle pretty melodies, or do Shakespeare, or just crack up with me? I could invent a teakettle that reads in Dad’s voice, so I could fall asleep, or maybe a set of kettles that sings the chorus of “Yellow Submarine”, which is a song by the Beatles, who I love, because entomology is one of my raisons d’être, which is a French expression that I know. (1) 200

C hild / hood and 9 / 1 1 trauma

The narrative presents a series of invented scenarios in which Oskar reverses the actions of September 11 so that his father is reinstated into his life: So I can’t stop inventing how he died. I’m always inventing. . . . I want to stop inventing. If I could know how he died, exactly how he died, I wouldn’t have to invent him dying inside an elevator that was stuck between floors, which happened to some people, and I wouldn’t have to imagine him trying to crawl down the outside of the building, which I saw a video of one person doing on a Polish site, or trying to use a tablecloth as a parachute, like some of the people who were in the Windows of the World actually did. There are so many different ways to die, and I just need to know which was his. (257) Oskar’s inventions unravel his objective to reinvent the world, to live in a world that is devoid of trauma, in which the unthinkable and ungraspable has not yet occurred. Persuaded by this epistemophilia, Oskar invents fantastic devices—skyscrapers with movable parts, a portable pocket that holds people, a birdseed shirt that attracts birds to help people fly—intended to reduce all unfamiliar eventualities to an identified and controllable form. Like the symbolic search for the lock, these inventions pre-empt future death. Oskar compulsively invents whenever he feels insecure. He desires to make reality pliable so that it corresponds to his wishes. Apart from a kettle that speaks in his dad’s voice, he also “invents” microphones that register heartbeats (1), a birdseed shirt that would keep the wearer aloft (2), and “air bags for skyscrapers” (160). Among many other things, he “designs” “a Nature Hike Anklet, which leaves a trail of bright yellow dye when you walk, so in case you get lost, you can find your way back” (106). His inventions concern love and death and the need for transparency in a world that has suddenly become unintelligible and gloomy. Oskar’s inventions climax in the flick-picture book, an account in Oskar’s “Stuff That Has Happened to Me” diary, where the falling man climbs back into the building, reversing the descending fall into death. In Reading Contemporary Picturebooks, Davis Lewis discusses the possibilities that pictures can bring to a text: “The very presence of pictures appears to loosen generic constraints and open up the text to alternative ways of looking and thinking” (2001: 66). Oskar mentions the book he is working on, Stuff that Happened to Me, where he collects photographs of things he finds on the Internet or on his journeys. Most of the images readers see in the novel represent what Oskar himself observes; “the photographs are an attempt to show what Oskar sees” (Barbash 2005). Foregrounding the findings of trauma theory, many critics on visual studies such as Ulrich Baer, Barbie Zelizer, Susan Sontag, and Marianne Hirsch, have pointed out “photography’s therapeutic 201

N ishat H aider

functions and limitations in managing trauma” (Bardizbanian 2014: 307). The immediacy generated by these images collected and displayed in his scrapbook, Stuff That Happened to Me, derive from Oskar’s experiences and various media that include among other things, a man falling from the World Trade Center, a design for a paper aeroplane, mating tortoises, fingerprints, a rack full of keys, and photographs of astronauts. Foer advances the significance of Oskar as narrator by inviting the readers not only to view the events in the narrative through the lens of a child, and his position as an implied author, but also through the innate characteristic of a child. Talking about the Foer’s narrativization, Contos says, Foer shrewdly transitions from the postmodern semantic play (photographs, Morse-code, inserted edit marks, empty pages of Grandfather’s inexpressible thoughts and feelings, and phrases like, “I was already out of words when I met your mother”) into post-postmodern literature with a child-narrator who is desperately seeking to understand the “Stuff That Happened to Me” (28, 52). (2016: 51) Negotiating the links between trauma, memory, and history, Foer navigates the loss and fear created by the 9/11 terrorist attacks through the eyes of a young child who is at a stage in life where he is not only somewhat precocious, but also vulnerable and developing. When Oskar is exposed to the trauma of his father’s death and the frightening 9/11 events he experiences “speechless terror” (van der Kolk 1996: 286). Since the experience cannot be organized “on a linguistic level, and this failure to arrange the memory in words and symbols leaves it to be organized on a somatosensory or iconic level” (van der Kolk and van der Hart 1995: 172), after the bereavement, Oskar tries to prevent traumatic shock from rigidifying into a chronic condition by using a flipbook to travel back in time in order to undo the present or possibly save his father by reordering time and reversing history. The images are not represented in language but incorporated through photos as an intertext in a scrapbook entitled Stuff That Happened to Me. While Walter Kirn sees the “icono-textual flipbook” (Pozorski 2014: 125) composed of the photographs of the man falling, the critics like Richard Gray finds the novel ending with a “touching account” of a boy “ascending above loss” (2011: 52–53). Oskar testifies to his own trauma while reaching out to sense a possibility for a different reality. Encountering readers with what they see and what they do not “draws attention not only to the limitations of images but also the object of loss itself, that which images are unable to show” (Orban 2007: 63). While both the textual and visual mediums have boundaries and restrictions (which indicate absence in and of itself), in the dialectics of text-image relations, Foer uses these limitations of communication and representation to their benefit to create an analogy for the narrative’s 202

C hild / hood and 9 / 1 1 trauma

emotional ruptures. This dialectical tension between the images as well as that between the images and text usually generates more meaning than does the photo/image as a separate piece of art. By de-stabilising the established dimensions of time and space in his imaginative art, Oskar offers own his interpretation of the 9/11 events, its aftermath and his father’s death, which can be considered as a “counter-memory” where the borders between reality and fiction become fuzzy. Oskar turns disaster into something almost fantastical. Although Oskar knows that restructuring his personal history via the flipbook can only occur in his imagination, but through his child protagonist Foer is able “to posit, through the imaginings of alternative histories, an idea of history as provisional, precarious, indeterminate, and subjective” (Brauner 2007: 211). By restructuring the way we would ordinarily process this visual image, Foer invites attention not only to the act of framing and placement, but also to the fact that we come to a different conclusion than the photographer of the falling man originally intended viewers to draw. Though the critics like Updike have critiqued Foer for his “picto-/typographical antic” (138), but the images that rupture the flow of Extremely Loud attempt to portray “the condition of the traumatised mind” (Codde 2007: 248) that is “possessed by an image or event” (Caruth 1995: 41). David Palumbo-Liu asks whether these images/pictures address 9/11’s temporal traumas, or they become “manic”, succumbing to the imagination’s “self-generating frenzy, unchecked by the otherness of the external world” (2006: 158)? According to psychologists, these “intrusive thoughts/images of the traumatic incident . . . can appear to come ‘out of the blue’ . . . or feelings maybe prompted by media triggers, e.g., something on TV, newspapers, sounds, a song or piece of music, smells” (Regel 2010: 4). Foer’s reflexive meta-textual approach and intrusive thoughts/images of the 9/11 traumatic incident in Extremely Loud go “beyond a set of aesthetic ‘tricks’ to expose the writing process as a combining memory, imagination, and language to create and dispense some form of knowledge” (Floreani 2011: 139). For the critics, this repeated conjuring up of thematically corresponding images by the author and seeing by reader of the narrative is akin to the acting out of traumatic images of the actual events of the 9/11, a perpetual condition of post-traumatic stress to work through the “images of trauma” (Foer 2005: 95). Arguing that the September 11 terrorist attacks engendered a new form of narrative realism, “a form of realism born of a frustration with the limits of language as an effective and representative tool”, Catherine Morley sees Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close as an exemplar that blends merges “the written and the visual in order to realize the new realities of post-9/11 socio-political and personal landscapes of trauma, grief, and loss” (2008: 295). In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Foer has declared the dismissed fictional realism himself: “I am not really writing a nine-year-oldkid . . . not in a realistic way . . . sometimes you have to tell certain lies of 203

N ishat H aider

reality in order to tell certain truths of emotion” (Birnbaum 2005). Oskar’s narrative is deliberately non-realistic because “the self-described politicallyengaged Foer is experimenting in the necessary revision of narrative realism demanded by the attacks” (Morley 2008: 309). Oskar engages with the images in his journal entries as a tool to document and create his personal expression of self, as well as act out and work through his trauma.

Conclusion Extremely Loud is not only an “historical” but also, as Rushdie calls it, an aesthetic “pyrotechnic” (in Codde 2007: 241) representation of 9/11 trauma. The novel is “art that has been reclaimed and transformed back into the fragment of truth that has inspired it” (cited in Langer 1991: 5). The novel’s engagement with the personal/social/political traumas that have been induced by 9/11 is incisive, wrenching, and insightful in articulating the complexities of the relationships among personal memory, historical representation, and meaning. Though it is impossible to anticipate the impact of trauma in an age of brutality, the yoke of one’s responsibility to respond is never reduced by one’s failure to find an adequate way to respond. Remembering, witnessing, and telling the truth about loss, absence, and deeply rooted psychological traumas are prerequisites both for the restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual victims. The frame of childhood in the novel enables the writer to re-witness the realm of the unofficial/non-mainstream historical and narrate the violent loss that might otherwise challenge representation. History as a locus of personal/social/collective memory enters the novel emphatically as a series of linguistically encoded events, and September 11, as part of that history, fully participates in the dialectic that connects language to trauma. After the death of his father in 9/11 attacks, Oskar looks for ways to recover from his loss. His effort is complicated by the fact that he did not just lose his father; he also failed him. Oskar prevents the traumatic shock from ossifying into a psychological breakdown by his “urban and psychological wandering” (Bardizbanian 2014: 304), which enable him to cope with his loss and to mature in the process. Through his quest, puzzles, images, photographs, and scrapbook, Oskar not only overcomes the limits of linguistic representation that the survivors or family members of 9/11 encounter, but also tries to understand and work through his grief. As a child narrator, Oskar’s “ability to wrest order and meaning from chaos affirms hope” (Pifer 2000: 172). Through the web of images and text, readers recognize that not everything can be fixed but life will still go on. The narrative ultimately provides a vehicle for the eventual incorporation, by Oskar as well as an audience, of the narrative of survival and therefore “acts to mitigate traumatized isolation and create empathy with the sufferings of others in the present” (Radstone 2001: 192). Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, as it intersects with 204

C hild / hood and 9 / 1 1 trauma

post-9/11 trauma, not only endeavours to bear witness and testify, but also to negotiate the fissures between memory and history, and remembrance and representation.

Note 1 For more information refer to Fletcher (2003); La Greca, Silverman, Vernberg and Roberts (2002); Webb (2004); Wilson, Friedman and Lindy (2001).

References Atchison, Todd S. 2012. ‘Why I Am Writing from Where You Are Not: Absence and Presence in Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Clear” ’. In Literature, Migration and the ‘War on Terror, edited by Fiona Tolan, Stephen Morton, Anastasia Valassopoulos, and Robert Spencer, 105–114. New York, NY: Routledge. Baer, Ulrich. 2002. ‘Introduction’. In 110 Stories: New York Writes After September 11, edited by Ulrich Baer, 1–9. New York, NY: New York University Press. Barbash, Tom. 2005. ‘Mysterious Key Sends Boy Sifting Through His Life’s Wreckage After 9/11’. Review of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, by Jonathan Safran Foer, San Francisco Chronicle. Bardizbanian, Audrey. 2014. ‘Writing Post-Traumatic Memories, Writing the City: Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” ’. In Mapping Generations of Traumatic Memory in American Narratives, edited by Dana Mihăilescu, Roxana Oltean, and Mihaela Precup, 300–319. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Birleson, P. 1981. ‘The Validity of Depressive Disorder in Childhood and the Development of a Self-rating Scale: A Research Report’. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 22: 73–88. Birnbaum, Jonathan. 2005. ‘Jonathan Safran Foer’. Morning News 14 April. https:// themorningnews.org/article/birnbaum-v.-jonathan-safran-foer (accessed on 13 October 2014) Brauner, David. 2007. Philip Roth. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Caruth, Cathy. 1995. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press. Caruth, Cathy. 1996. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Christinidis, Georgia. 2013. ‘Truth Claims in the Contemporary Realisms in Contemporary Novel: The Authenticity Effect, Allegory, and Totality’. In Realisms in Contemporary Culture: Theories, Politics, and Medial Configurations, edited by Dorothee Birke and Stella Butter, 33–48. Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter. Codde, Philippe. 2007. ‘Philomela Revisited; Traumatic Iconicity in Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” ’. Studies in American Fiction 35(2): 241–254. Contos, Ashlie M. 2016. ‘Our Attachments Are Our Temple: Addiction, Recovery, and the Metamodernist Movement’. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, The University of Texas at Tyler.

205

N i s h at H a i d e r

Couch, Natalie Eva. 2008. ‘Pictures, Puzzles, and Missing Pieces: The Childlike Solution to Trauma in the Mature Novel’. Unpublished MA thesis, Clemson University. Retrieved from ProQuest Dissertations and Theses database. (MAI 46.5: Item AA1450718). Derrida, Jacques. 2000. The Instant of My Death/Demeure: Fiction and Testimony. Trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Eng, David L., and David Kazanjian, eds. 2003. Loss: The Politic of Mourning. Berkley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Faber, Michel. 2005. ‘ “A Tower of Babble”: Review of Extremely Loud and Incred‑ ibly Close, by Jonathan Safran Foer’. The Guardian 4 June. Felman, Shoshana, and Dori Laub. 1992. Testimonies: Crises of Witnessing in Lit‑ erature, Psychoanalysis, and History. New York, NY: Routledge. Fentress, J., and C. Wickham. 1992. Social Memory. Oxford: Blackwell. Fletcher, K.E. 2003. ‘Childhood Post-traumatic Stress Disorder’. In Child Psychopa‑ thology, 2nd. ed., edited by E.J. Mash and R.A. Barkley, pp. 330–371. New York, NY: Guilford Press. Floreani, Tracy. 2011. ‘Metafictional Witnessing in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated’. In Unfinalized Moments: Essays in the Development of Con‑ temporary Jewish American Narrative, edited by Derek Parker Royal, 139–152. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press. Foer, Jonathan Safran. 2005. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. New York, NY: Houghton. Geary, P.J. 1994. Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Gray, Richard. 2011. After the Fall: American Literature Since 9/11. New York, NY: Wiley and Sons. Herman, Judith Lewis. 1992. Trauma and Recovery. New York, NY: Basic Books. Higonnet, Margaret R. 2005. ‘Time out: Trauma and Play in Johnny Tremain and Alan and Naomi’. Children’s Literature: Annual of the Modern Language Asso‑ ciation Division on Children’s Literature and the Children’s Literature Associa‑ tion 33: 150–170. Hirsch, Joshua. 2004. After Image: Film, Trauma and the Holocaust. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Huizinga, Johan. 1950. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture. Boston, MA: Harper Torch. Hutton, Patrick H. 1993. History as an Art of Memory. Hanover, VT: University Press of New England. Isnenghi, M. 1996. I luoghi della memoria: simboli e miti dell’Italia unita, Bari and Rome: Laterza; 1997‑ I luoghi della memoria: strutture ed eventi dell’Italia unita, Bari and Rome: Laterza; 1997‑ I luoghi della memoria: personaggi e date dell’Italia unita. Bari and Rome: Laterza. Isnenghi, M., ed. 1996–97. I luoghi della memoria. 3 vols: Simboli e miti dell’Italia unita; Strutture ed eventi dell’Italia unita; Personaggi e date dell’Italia unita. Bari and Rome: Laterza. La Greca, A.M., W.K. Silverman, E.M. Vernberg, and M.C. Roberts. 2002. ‘Introduction’. In Helping Children Cope With Disasters and Terrorism, edited by A.M. La Greca, W.K. Silverman, E.M. Vernberg, and M.C. Roberts, 3–33. Washington, DC: APA Press.

206

C hild / hood and 9 / 1 1 trauma

Lacan, Jacques. 1981. The Language of the Self: The Functions of Language in Psychoanalysis. Trans. Anthony Wilden. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press. Lacapra, Dominick. 2001. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press. Langer, Lawrence L. 1991. Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Le Goff, Jacques. 1992. History and Memory. Trans. Steven Rendall and Elizabeth Claman. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Lewis, Davis. 2001. Reading Contemporary Picturebooks: Picturing Text. New York, NY: Routledge. Morley, Catherine. 2008. ‘Plotting Against America: 9/11 and the Spectacle of Terror in Contemporary American Fiction’. Gramma 16: 293–312. Ollendick, Thomas H. 1983. ‘Reliability and Validity of the Revised Fear Survey Schedule for Children (FSSC-R)’. Behaviour Research and Therapy 21: 685–692. Orban, Katalin. 2007. ‘Trauma and Visuality: Art Spiegelman’s Maus and in the Shadow of No Towers’. Representations 97: 57–89. Palumbo-Liu, David. 2006. ‘Preemption, Perpetual War, and the Future of the Imagination’. boundary 2 33(1): 151–170. Pifer, Ellen. 2000. Demon or Doll: Images of the Child in Contemporary Writing and Culture. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia. Pozorski, Aimee. 2014. Falling After 9/11: Crisis in American Art and Literature. New York, London, New Delhi and Sydney: Bloomsbury. Radstone, Susannah, ed. 2001. ‘Special Debate: Trauma and Screen Studies’. Screen 42(2): 188–216. Ranciere, Jacques. 2009. The Emancipated Spectator. London: Verso. Regel, Stephen, and Stephen Joseph. 2010. Post-traumatic Stress. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Reynolds, C.R. 1980. ‘Concurrent Validity of What I Think and Feel: The Revised Children’s Manifest Anxiety Scale’. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 48: 774–775. Roth, M.S. 1995. The Ironist’s Cage: Memory, Trauma and the Construction of History. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Scarry, Elaine. 1985. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Scheeringa, M.S., C.H. Zeanah, L. Myers, and F. Putnam. 2005. ‘Predictive Validity in a Prospective Follow-up of PTSD in Preschool Children’. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry 44(9): 899–906. Smith, Rachel Greenwald. 2011. ‘Organic Shrapnel: Affect and Aesthetics in September 11th Fiction’. American Literature 83(1): 153–174. Sözalan, Özden. 2011. The American Nightmare: Don DeLillo’s Falling Man and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Bloomington, IN: Author House. Tanke, Joseph. 2011. Jacques Ranciere: An Introduction. London: Acumen. van der Kolk, Bessel A. 1996. ‘The Complexity of Adaptation to Trauma: Selfregulation, Stimulus Discrimination, and Characterological Development’. In Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body, and Society, edited by B.A. van der Kolk, A.C. McFarlane, and L. Weisaeth, 182–213. New York, NY: Guilford Press.

207

N ishat H aider

van der Kolk, Bessel A., and Onno van der Hart. 1995. ‘The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma’. In Trauma: Explorations in Memory, edited by Cathy Caruth, 158–182. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press. Walker, Janet. 2001. ‘Trauma Cinema: False Memories and True Experience’. Screen 42(2): 211–216. Webb, Nancy Boyd. 2004. Mass Trauma, Stress, and Loss: Helping Children and Families Cope. New York, NY: Guilford Press. Wilson, John P., Matthew J. Friedman, and Jacob D. Lindy, eds. 2001. Treating Psychological Trauma and PTSD. New York, NY: Guilford Press. Žižek, Slavoj. 2002. Welcome to the Desert of the Real. London: Verso.

208

INDEX

Note: Page numbers in italics indicate figures. 1.5 generation of survivors 83–4 9/11 2, 10–11, 194–205; acting out and working/playing through trauma 198–204; Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (Foer) 10–11, 194–205; incapability of language 197–200; intrusive thoughts/ images of 203; Kaplan’s memory of 14, 93–4, 97, 99; literary memorialization of events 195, 197, 198; narrative realism 203–4; posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and 199, 203; Stuff That Happened to Me (scrapbook) 201–2; trauma, memory, identity and 195–6; Welcome to the Desert of the Real (Žižek) 199 Aboriginal children of Australia’s stolen generation 50–9 abstractions 151 acculturation 25, 39, 102, 176, 192 acting out and working/playing through trauma 198–204 Adam, H. 164–5 Admitting the Holocaust (Langer) 111 adolescence, Erikson’s stage of 175, 179 Adorno, Theodor W. 13, 79, 83 aesthetics of lack 83–4 aesthetic wit(h)nessing 14 affective responses to trauma 197 Africa 5, 160, 162–6 Against the Human Race, The (Ligotti) 151 Ali, Nancy 8 Along the Trail (Raunch) 10, 187–8 American Civil War 137

American Psychological Association 53 amnésie collective 87–8 Amy 56, 57 anamnesis through photography 86 Anand, Dibyesh 25 Anderson, Benedict 40 Anderson, John 66 angel in the house, image of 126–8 animated child figures 133 animated war trauma 132–3 Anne Frank’s Diary (Frank) 2 annihilation 106, 154, 191, 193 anti-war messages 143–4 Antonythasan, J. 114–15 anxiety 38, 68, 83, 181, 192, 197 Aries, Phillipe 160 Aristotelian tragedy 83, 124 art: cartooning 64–5, 67, 73; by children in Terezin 14–18; in Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (Satrapi) 62–73; by Tibetan children in India 22–35 Art of Exile: Paintings by Tibetan Children in India, The (Harris, Lukas, and Leaken) 24–35 assimilation 10, 13, 51, 52, 53, 73, 186–93; see also removal and assimilation “At Home Away from Home: Tibetan Culture in Exile” (exhibit) 24 Attack on Titan (TV series) 132, 136–7, 144 Auschwitz 13, 14, 76, 81, 83, 84, 88 Australia (Luhrmann) 50, 51–2 Australia’s stolen generation 7, 50–9 autobiographical I’s 63, 64

209

INDEX

autobiographies 7–8, 62–73; Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, A (Beah) 10, 162, 165, 170, 171–2, 174, 185; Persepolis (Satrapi) 7–8, 62–73; War Child (Jal) 10, 162, 165, 170–2; W ou le souvenir d’enfance (Perec) 8, 75–89 autofiction 76, 77, 79–82 autographics 63–4 avatars 63, 66, 139 Bacon, Yehuda 18 Baer, Ulrich 201–2 Bahnsen, Julius 151, 152 bail-out 139 Balaev, Michelle 51, 53–4 bandes dessineés 63 Barker, Clare 96, 97–8, 99 Bass, Franta 18–19 Bayer, C.P. 164–5 Beah, Ishmael 10, 162, 165, 170, 171–2, 174, 175, 185 Beasts of No Nation (film) 10, 162, 163–6, 170 Beck, Bernard 136 Being and Nothingness (Sartre) 150 belatedness of trauma 198 Benin Home 180, 181, 183 Bettelheim, Bruno 108 Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud) 84–5 Bhaba, Homi 56 Bhattacharjee, Ritwick 10, 148–58 bildungsroman narrative 11, 63, 70, 194 Biriibaazu (Believers) (Yamamoto) 138 Birthday Wish (Hosokova-Weissova) 16 Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (Kristeva) 93–4 black trigger 133–4 Bleasdale, Marcus 161 Blessed Haven for the Children of God 46 Bluest Eye, The (Morrison) 121 Boakye-Boaten, Agya 160, 163 boarding schools 189 Book of Genesis 124 borderline personality 78 Bosmajian, Hamida 102 Bosnia 181 Briar Rose (Yolen) 8–9, 102–12 British colonies 51, 56

British India, Partition of 2, 94–100 British in Sri Lanka 125–6 Brodzki, Bella 3–4 Buddhists 26, 119 Burkholder, Peter 133 Butler, Judith 62, 69, 70 “Butterfly, The” (unknown) 19 Buttigieg, Paul 54–5, 56, 58, 59 Cache-Cache: Writing Childhood Trauma (Ali) 8, 75–89 Campbell, Joseph 105–6 capitalism 164, 165, 184–5 Card, Orson Scott 160 Carpenter, R.C. 4 Carrolup 57 cartooning 64–5, 67, 73 Caruth, Cathy 11, 104, 164, 194, 195 causality 152, 164 Centuries of Childhood (Aries) 160 C’était des enfants exhibition 81 Chanda, Anurima 6–7 Charmaz, Kathy 140 Chelavanayagam, S.J.V. 115 Chelmno death camp 104, 109–10, 111 Cherokees 187–93 Child/hood and 9/11 Trauma: A Study of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (Haider) 10–11, 194–205 childhood, interrupted 75–9; double life 76–7; self as other 77–8; self-reflection 78–9 childhood trauma, writing 8, 75–89 child protagonist: Briar Rose (Yolen) 8–9, 102–12; in child soldier narratives 163–5; Cracking India (Sidhwa) 8, 94, 97, 99–100; Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (Foer) 194–205; in Life Among the Piutes (Hopkin) 188; Midnight’s Children (Rushdie) 8, 94–7, 99–100; Persepolis (Satrapi) 7–8, 62–73; Traitor (Shobasakthi) 9, 114–28; World Trigger (series) 132–45; W ou le souvenir d’enfance (Perec) 8, 75–89 children; affective responses to trauma 197; born as result of rape 2, 4–5, 46; born of liaisons between Vietnamese women and American soldiers 5; childhood, interrupted 75–9; coming

210

INDEX

of age 7–8, 62–73; conflicting values and global children’s entertainment 144–5; disowning of 184–5; incapability of language 197–200; literature and psychoanalysis 85–6; real traumas in fantastical 133–5; re-visioning the real 155–8; rites of passage 30, 33, 106–7, 118–20, 168; romanticized state of innocence 63, 83, 123, 160; as witness 80–2; see also child protagonists, child soldiers Children and Childhood in Western Society Since (Cunningham) 160 “Children and War” (Engel) 182–3 Children as Witnesses to History (Henry) 89 Children at War (Singer) 161 “Children at War: Child(Hood) Trauma in Popular Japanese Animation” (Nickl) 9–10, 132–45 Children of the Trail: The Trauma of Removal and Assimilation (Singh) 10, 186–93 child-soldier.org 178–9 child soldiers 10, 160–72, 174–85; Beasts of No Nation (film) 10, 162, 163–6, 170; Coping with Killing? Child Soldier Narratives and Traces of Trauma (Minslow) 10, 160–72; disowning of children 184–5; female 168–9; identity transformations 165–6, 180–2; Johnny Mad Dog (film) 10, 162, 164–5, 169, 170; Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, A (Beah) 10, 162, 165, 170, 171–2, 174, 185; occupational identity 179–80, 182; onset of war and confronting perceptions 177–8; posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) 116, 143, 164–5, 167, 171; precedence of the new principles, receding of the tender self 178–9; pre-civil war ambience 175–7; rape and 123, 127, 167, 169–70; rehabilitation 165–7, 170, 171, 175, 180–4; relational vulnerabilities 183–4; street children recruited as 184–5; survival and suffering 182–3; turbulent return to the earlier self 180–2; War Child (Jal) 10, 162, 165, 170–2; World Trigger (TV series) 132–45 chobu 31

Chompel, Tseten 25–6, 28–9, 31–2 Chophel, Sonam 30–1 Chophel, Tsering 22–3, 34 Chute, Hillary 63, 64, 73 Clendinnen, Inga 103 Cling, Maurice 81–2 Colours of Trauma Paint a Thousand Words: “Leaving Tibet” in Paintings by Tibetan Children in India (Chanda) 6–7, 22–35 comics 7–8, 62–73 coming of age 7–8, 62–73 Commando (movie) 179 commix 63–4 concentration camps: Auschwitz 13, 14, 76, 81, 83, 84, 88; Chelmno 104, 109–10, 111; Fort Oswego 110; Sachenhausen 109–10; Theresienstadt 16, 18; threat of deportation to 17–18 concentration problems 181 Congolese child soldiers 165 Congressional Hearings 45 consciousness 150–2 consciousness of consciousness 150–1 conspiracy of silence 13 Constitution of India 94–5 Contos, Ashlie M. 202 Convention on the Rights of the Child 161 Coping with Killing? Child Soldier Narratives and Traces of Trauma (Minslow) 10, 160–72 Costantino, Manuela 63, 71, 72 Costanza, Mary S. 19–20 counter-memory 203 Cracking India (Sidhwa) 8, 94, 97, 99–100 crisis of witnessing 195 cultural intimidation 2 cultural trauma 3, 9, 13, 195 Cummings, Susan 126 Cunningham, Hugh 160 Cutting Down Bunks (HosokovaWeissova) 16, 17 Dachung 28, 29 Dalai Lama 22, 24, 29, 32–3, 34–5 Dante 126 death and mortality, in Japanese war fictions 140–2 death camps see concentration camps

211

INDEX

dédoublement 77–8 dédoublement of ego 77–8 de La Ferrière, Alexis Artaud 137 Demeure: Fiction and Testimony (Derrida) 195 Democracy in America (Tocqueville) 186 Denison, Rayna 135 depression 116, 197 Derrida, Jacques 195 des idées fixes 85 de Soto, Hernando 191 Devil’s Arithmatic (Yolen) 9, 103 Devotta, Neil 116 Dharamshala 22, 23 Dickens, Charles 2, 160 Dicker-Brandeis, Friedl 14, 15, 20 Digimon (TV series) 138 discourse of trauma 195–6 disowning of children 184–5 displacement: of Aboriginals 55; of children during war 76, 183; of children in Sri Lanka 116; of Native American children 186, 187; of Tibetans 22–35 disrupted causality 164 dissensus 198 dissociative disorder 78, 85 districts 141 DNA structure changed by trauma 171 Dominance Without Hegemony (Guha) 56 Do Something 172 double life 76–7 Draconian system 57 Dragon Ball (TV series) 132, 137–8 “Drawing an Account of Herself: Representation of Turbulent Childhood in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis” (Singh) 7–8, 62–73 drawings: cartooning 64–5, 67, 73; by children in Terezin 14–18; Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (Satrapi) 62–73 Drazen, Patrick 140, 144 Dreamtime 55 Dresden 197 Dubrovsky, Serge 79–80 Duras, Marguerite 79 ECOSOC Conference 184 ego, splitting of (dédoublement) 77–8

Eliot, T.S. 53 Emerson, Gloria 45 Emmett, Lee 51, 56 emotions associated with trauma: in Japanese war fictions 142–4; repression and resurfacing of 87 empathy 105, 133, 135, 143, 196, 204 Engel, Mary 181, 182–3 enigmatic core of trauma 104 entertainment, conflicting values in children’s 144–5 Epstein, B.J. 103 Erikson, Erik 175, 179 “Escaping from Tibet” (Thankchoe) 32 ethical responsibility 69, 105, 112 ethnic bias, in war fictions 136, 144 ethnic cleansing 2, 13 Ettinger, Brach L. 14 Et tu, Brute? The Child Soldier and the Child Victim in Sobhasakthi’s Traitor (Mudiganti) 9, 114–28 Everdeen, Katniss 132 Everyone Is Hungry (unknown) 17 exodus 33, 84–5 experimentation 82–3 extermination 15, 58, 103, 111 extermination camps 15, 103 Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (Foer) 10–11, 194–205 fact-finding mission 198 failure of representation 195 Fairy Tail (TV series) 132, 138 fairy tales 1, 5, 9–10, 16, 76, 103, 106, 107, 110, 111 fausses notes 86 Feldman, Daniel 103 Felman, Shoshona 11, 163, 194, 195 Female Hero in American and British Literature, The (Pearson and Pope) 127–8 “Female Warriors, Martyrs, and Suicide Attackers: Women in the LTTE” (Hellmann-Rajanayagam) 119 fictional trauma association 139 Fils (Dobrovsky) 79–80 Fischlowitz, Barbara 38 flashbacks 85, 134, 167, 181 Foer, Jonathan Safran 10–11, 194–205 forced acculturation 192 Ford, Gerald 37, 39 Fort Oswego 110

212

INDEX

fragmentation 8, 76, 83, 111 Frank, Anne 2 Freud, Sigmund 3, 54, 84, 108, 195, 198 Friedrich, Jennifer 143 Friends of Tibetan Women’s Association 23 Frye, Northrop 105–6 Fukunaga, Cary 10, 162 games and constraints 82–5; 9/11 and 198, 204; aesthetics of lack 83–4; experimentation 82–3; remembering trauma 84–5 Gandhi, Indira 94, 95, 96, 98 Ganguly, Somrita 7 “Garden, The” (Bass) 18–19 gas chambers 13, 18, 81–2 Gaullist France 87–8 genocides 2, 4, 16, 54–5, 75, 78, 103 Gestapo 84 Ghana 160, 163 ghosts 34, 156–8, 168, 200 Gilbert, Sandra 126 Goethe 126 Goldman, Harvey 110–11 Goldsmith, Rachel 134, 139 Good Housekeeping 40 Gorham, Deborah 125, 126, 127 Gorilla (Antonythasan) 115 Grace (Sears) 10, 187, 191–2 Grave of the Flies (Japanese anime film) 10, 148–58 Gray, Richard 202 Gubar, Susan 126 guerrilla tactics 44 Guha, Ranajit 56 Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans (TV series) 138 Gyaltsen, Thinley 24, 31 Gyalwang 26–8 Hachenburg, Hanus 18 Haebich, Anna 55–6 Haider, Nishat 10–11 Halbwachs 79 half-caste children 51 Han Chinese 22 Harman, Geoffrey 164 Harris, Clare 24, 26–32, 33, 34–5 Harry Potter series (Rowling) 132, 136, 141

Haskins, Victoria 189 Helga’s Diary (Hosokova-Weissova) 13, 16–17, 17 Hellmann-Rajanayagam, Dagmar 119 Henry, Sarah 89 Herman, Judith 171–2, 199 heroic quest 103, 105–7, 112 Herzegovina 181 “H.H. Leaving Tibet on a Yak” (Youden) 32 hidden children 4, 77 “Hiding” (Norbu) 31 Higonnet, Margaret 198 Hindus 97–8 hinge generation 8 Hiroshima 132–3, 197 Hirsch, Joshua 14, 195–6 Hirsch, Marianne 29, 33, 201–2 historical memory 14, 192, 195 history as the art of memory 195 History of Childhood, The (Mause) 1 “Hmm . . .” response 114, 117, 120, 122, 124 Holocaust 2, 3, 5–6; 1.5 generation of survivors 83–4; Briar Rose (Yolen) 8–9, 102–12; diary entries 13, 16–17, 17, 81–2; distance between victim and listener in testimony of 105; ethical obligation to future generations to remember 102–4; experimentation in literature 83; gas chambers 13, 18, 81–2; Gestapo 84; Helga’s Diary (HosokovaWeissova) 13, 16–17, 17; heroic quest in narratives 103, 105–7, 112; homosexuals and 109–10; Nazis/ Nazism 13, 16–19, 83, 86, 103, 109, 110; survivors of Shoah 8; Terezin 6, 13–20; W ou le souvenir d’enfance (Perec) 8, 75–89; see also concentration camps Holthoon, Francisca van 23 homosexuals, Holocaust and 109–10 Hopkins, Winnemucca 10, 187, 188 horror 149–55 Hosokova-Weissova, Helga 13, 15–18, 17 Hughes, Kate 56, 58 Huizinga, Johan 197–8 human consciousness 150–1 human nothingness 153 Human Rights Watch 161

213

INDEX

Hunger Games trilogy (Everdeen) 132, 141 iconography 26, 71 identity reversal 180–1 identity transformations 165–6, 180–2 India: art by Tibetan children in 22–35; Constitution of 94–5; Indo-Pak war of 1965 95; national Emergency in 95–9; Partition of 2, 94–100 “Indian Problem” 10; see also “Trail of Tears” Indian reservations 188–90, 192–3 Indo-Pak war of 1965 95 I Never Saw Another Butterfly, Children’s Drawings and Poems from Terezin Concentration Camp (Volavkova) 13 International Committee of the Red Cross 5 international human rights organizations 5 intersubjectivity 105 “Introduction: Place, Space, and Identity: The Cultural, Economic, and Aesthetic Politics of Tibetan Diaspora” (Korom) 25 intrusive thoughts 85, 203 Iran 5, 8, 62–73 “I was once a little child” (Hachenburg) 18 Jackson, Andrew 186 Jackson, Michael 65 Jacobs, Margaret D. 189 Jaffna Public Library 115 Jal, Emmanual 10, 162, 165, 170–2 Janet, Pierre 78 Japanese war fictions 9–10, 132–45; animated war trauma 132–3; antiwar messages 143–4; conflicting values and global children’s entertainment 144–5; death and mortality 140–2; emotional scars and intergenerational repercussions 142–4; real traumas in fantastical children 133–5; traumatic socialization 135–7; war games, problematic 137–40 Jenks, Chris 3 Jewish children 14, 29–30, 80, 81, 82, 85, 103; see also Holocaust

Jigme, Tenzin 31, 32 Johnny Mad Dog (film) 10, 162, 164–5, 169, 170 Journal of Postcolonial Writing 162 Julius Caesar (play) 176 Kafkaesque 82 Kamble, Rahul 10 Kaplan, E. Ann 14, 93–4, 97, 99 Karlsson, Camilla 95–6 kathak 2 Kathmandu 23 Keig, David 53, 56 Kertzer, Adrienne 102, 111 Kestenberg, Judith 30 Kidd, Kenneth 52, 53, 56, 84, 85, 88, 89, 102 Kilbanoff, Susan 44 Kindergarten (Rushforth) 9 Kirby, Margaret and Michael 38 Kirn, Walter 202 Klasen, F. 164–5 knowing 151 knowledge 151 Kokkola, Lydia 102–3 Kolinsky, Adele 39 Korom, Frank J. 24, 25, 30 Kristeva, Julia 93 Kumar, Kamayani 6 Kyulanova, Irina 180 labour camps see concentration camps LaCapra, Dominick 83, 105 La Disparition (Perec) 82 L’Amant (Duras) 79 Langer, Lawrence 106, 111 language, incapability of 197–200 La Nuit (Wiesel) 82 “Last Good-bye, The” (Dachung) 28, 29 Laub, Dori 11, 105, 163, 194, 195, 200 Laud, Leslies E. 191 La Vie Mode D’Emploi (Perec) 82 Leaken, Kitty 23, 24, 26–32, 34 Lebeau, Vickey 141 Lejeune, Philippe 80, 82–3, 85 Le Livre brisé (Dubrovsky) 79–80 Le Miroir qui revient (Robbe-Grillet) 79 L’Enfance (Sarraute) 79 “Les lieux d’une ruse” (Perec) 85 Le Syndrome de Vichy (Rousso) 87–8 Lewis, Davis 201

214

INDEX

Lewis, Jane 127 Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) 114–21 Liebermann, Ella 17 lieux de mémoire 75, 86 Life Among the Piutes (Hopkins) 10, 187, 188 Ligotti, Thomas 151–2, 153–4 liminal phase of rite of passage 106–7 limited acculturation 25 literature as channel and means for transmission of trauma 199–200 Lives in Migration: Rupture and Continuity (Renes) 51 Lloyd, Alexandra 142 London, Charles 170 Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, A (Beah) 10, 162, 165, 170, 171–2, 174, 185 Luckharst, Roger 171 Lukas, Sarah 23–4, 26–32 Macbeth (play) 176 Madwoman in the Attic, The (Gilbert and Gubar) 126 Malcolm X 65 Malouf, David 59 Marxism 56, 67 Marx, Karl 56 Maus (Spiegleman) 63 Mause, Llyod De 1 Mayer, Edith 82 McCloud, Scott 64, 72 McGlothlin, Erin Heather 107 McLane, Janice 6 Mead, M. 160 Mehta, Pratap Bhanu 94–5 melancholia 11, 93, 162, 163, 194, 198–9 memoirs: Gorilla (Antonythasan) 115; Helga’s Diary (Hosokova-Weissova) 13, 16–17, 17; Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, A (Beah) 10, 162, 165, 170, 171–2, 174, 175; trauma(tic) narratives of Australia’s stolen generation 7, 50–9; War Child (Jal) 10, 162, 165, 170–2; We Should Never Meet (Phan) 7, 37–8, 46; W ou le souvenir d’enfance (Perec) 75, 76, 78, 82–3, 85, 86–7, 88; writing childhood trauma 8, 75–89

memory: of 9/11 194–6, 197, 202–5; in Art of Exile: Paintings by Tibetan Children in India, The (Harris, Lukas, and Leaken) 25, 28–9, 31, 32–3; autobiography of 63: autofiction 76, 77, 79–82; in Briar Rose (Yolen) 9, 103–4, 109, 110; of child soldiers 164, 167, 182; continuity of presence and 154; counter-memory 203; ethical and psychological constraints imposed by 82; ethical obligation to future generations to remember the past 102–4; external entities and 154; in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (Foer) 11, 194, 197, 202–5; in Grave of the Fireflies 154–5, 157; historical 14, 192, 195; of Holocaust 14, 53; of horror, reality, and temporality 154–5; in Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, A (Beah) 182; of Operation Babylift 37–8, 47; in Persepolis (Satrapi) 63, 65, 66, 67, 70, 73; postmemory and 29, 33, 107; second-generation witness and 107; self-reflection and 78; social memory 195; of Stolen Generation 53; of “Trail of Tears” 187, 188, 192; in World Trigger 139, 144; in W ou le souvenir d’enfance (Perec) 8, 75, 78, 79, 82–8 metaphors 64, 67, 96, 119, 123, 128, 197 Midnight Children’s Conference 96 Midnight’s Children (Rushdie) 8, 94–7, 99–100 migration: Aboriginal 51; Native American 187, 190, 192; Tibetan 22, 26; during war 136 Milton 126 Milton, Sybil 29–30 Minslow, Sarah 10 mise en perspective 86 missionaries 57, 188, 189, 191 Mission Island 51–2 Mitchell, Kathleen 5 mixed-race children 50, 51; see also stolen generation Miyao, Daisuke 133 model ghetto 14, 15, 16 model of subjectivity 194 Molesworth, Mrs. 126

215

INDEX

Monnig, Elizabeth 15, 18 Morley, Catherine 203 Morrison, Toni 121 Moses, Dirk A. 54 mourning 84–8, 183, 196–9 Mudiganti, Usha 9 Murphy, Louise 9 Museum of International Folk Art 24 Muslim societies 7–8, 62–73; civil war in Sri Lanka and 116; coming of age 7–8, 62–73; Partition of India and 98; veil and 62–73 “My Sorrow” (Gyalwang) 28 Nachträglichkeit of trauma 195 Naghibi, Nima 71–2 Napier, Susan 134–5, 136, 138 narrative realism 203–4 Naruto (TV series) 132–5, 139, 142, 144 nationalism 25, 35, 136, 144 National Public Radio 172 Native Americans 10, 186–93 Nazis/Nazism 13, 16–19, 83, 86, 103, 109, 110 Negotiating Trauma: The Child Protagonist and State Violence in Midnight’s Children and Cracking India (Sati and Thakur) 8, 94, 97, 99–100 Nehru, Jawaharlal 94–7, 98 Neon Genesis Evangelion (TV series) 132, 139, 142, 144 Nepal 22, 23, 31–2 “New England Primer, The” 190–1 new subjectivation 198 Nguyen Da Yen v. Kissinger 45 Nguyen, Kim 10, 162 Nickl, Benjamin 9–10 nightmares 30–1, 171, 179, 181, 184 Nijuseiki Shonen (Twentieth Century Boys) (Urasawa) 138 Nixon, Richard 44 non-dits 8 non-linearity 164 Norbu, Tenzin 31 nothingness 151–3 Nouveaux Romanciers 79 nursery rhymes 80–1 obliqueness 8, 84 obsessive-compulsive disorder 78

occupational identity 179–80, 182 “Offering Tea Along the Way” (Jigme) 31 O’Malley, Andrew 71–2 “On a Sunny Evening” (unknown) 18 One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom or Justine (Sade) 120 “One Night’s Rest at Nepal Border” (Chompel) 31–2 “On the Tragic” (Zapffe) 153 “On the Way to India” (Gyaltsen) 31 Operation Babylift 7, 37–48; Huan (orphan) 40, 41–2, 48; Kim (orphan) 40–2, 48; Mai (orphan) 40–1, 42; Phan’s reframing of US adoptive parents 38–42; Phan’s reframing of Vietnamese mothers 42–7; racism and 37–40; Vinh (orphan) 40; We Should Never Meet (Phan) 7, 37–8, 46 orphanhood 86–8 otherness 77, 203 Oulipo writers 75, 82 paintings: by children in Terezin 14–18; by Tibetan children in India 22–35 Pakistan 94, 97–100 Palumbo-Liu, David 203 parachute jumps 88 parenthetical nature of trauma 87–8 Partition of India 2, 94–100 “Past Lives: Postmemories in Exile” (Hirsch) 29 pater familias 125 Payne, John Howard 187 Pearson, Carol 127–8 Penney, Matthey 144 Pentagon 194 People’s Liberation Army (PLA) 25, 31 People’s Republic of China (PRC) 22 Perec, Georges 8, 75–89 peritext 111 Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (Satrapi) 62–73 Persepolis: The Story of a Return (Satrapi) 68–71 Phan, Aimme 7, 37–48; reframing of US adoptive parents 38–42; reframing of Vietnamese mothers 42–7; We Should Never Meet (Phan) 7, 37–8, 46 phantasm of oblivion, history as 195

216

INDEX

photography: anamnesis through 86; therapeutic functions and limitations 201–3 piecemeal manner 84 poetry: by Aboriginal children of Australia’s stolen generation 50–9; by children in Terezin 18–19 Poland 81, 103, 109 politics: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (Foer) 194, 196, 198–9, 203–4; in Japanese animation 138, 144; La Nuit (Wiesel) 82; Midnight’s Children (Rushdie) 8, 94–7, 99–100; Partition and 8, 93–100; Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (Satrapi) 7–8, 62–73; in postcolonial narratives 162–4, 168–9; of representation 6, 8, 11, 94; Sri Lankan civil war and 115, 117–19; of Tibetan diaspora 22, 24, 25, 33–4; Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature (Kaplan) 93, 94; of Vietnamese 43–4; War Witch (Nguyen) 162–4, 167–9 Pontalis 85 Poof! Up in Smoke: A Modern Fairy Tale (Kumar) 6, 13–20; see also Terezin Pope, Katherine 127–8 pornography 120, 122 Postcolonial Fiction and Disability: Exceptional Children, Metaphor, and Materiality (Barker) 96 postcolonial narratives 162 postmemory 5, 8, 29, 33, 107 post-traumatic embrace 3 post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD): 9/11 and 199, 203; in child soldiers 116, 143, 164–5, 167, 171 Potocki, Josef 109–10 Preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights 172 pre-civil war ambience 175–7 pre-linguistic event 54 prosthetic memories 5 psychoanalysis 30, 54, 85–6; anamnesis through photography 86; in children’s literature 85–6; “Les lieux d’une ruse” (Perec) 85; split subject 77–8; suspension and orphanhood 86–8; unconscious witnessing of the

subject 85–6; writing through trauma 88 psychological dissociation 78 psychosomatic symptoms 181 Punjabi shalwar-kamize 98 Puritan beliefs and ethics 189–92 puzzles and games 198, 204 Quest into the Past: Heroic Quest and Narrative of Trauma in Jane Yolen’s Briar Rose (Saxena) 8–10, 102–12 racism: Operation Babylift and 37–40; in war fictions 136 Ramaswamy, Anushiya 114, 118, 120, 121–2, 125, 128 Rambo II (movie) 179 Rambo: First Blood (movie) 179 Ranciere, Jacques 198 rape: children born as result of 2, 4–5, 46; child soldiers and 123, 127, 167, 169–70; as instrument of ethnic cleansing and cultural intimidation 2; as war crime 4 Rastegar, Kamran 97 Raunch, Mabel Thompson 10, 187–8 Ray, Sangeeta 99 Read, Peter 59 Reading Contemporary Picturebooks (Lewis) 201 reality 149–55 “Reconnaissance Expedition” games 198 Red Cross 5, 16, 17, 84, 85 Red Cross Visit (Hosokova-Weissova) 16, 17 rehabilitation 165–7, 170, 171, 175, 180–4 “(Re)imagining nationalism: Identity and representation in the Tibetan diaspora of South Asia” (Anand) 25 relational vulnerabilities 183–4 remembering trauma 84–5 “Remembrance of my Friend” (Chompel) 28 removal and assimilation 10, 186–93; Along the Trail (Raunch) 10, 187–8; boarding schools 189; education system 189–91; Grace (Sears) 10, 187, 191–2; Indian reservations 188–90, 192–3; Life Among the Piutes (Hopkins) 10, 187,

217

INDEX

188; migration 187, 190, 192; missionaries 57, 188, 189, 191; religion 189–92; symbols, cultural and spiritual 190, 191; Two Cherokee Women (Snead) 10, 187, 188 Renes, Martin 51, 55, 57 repetition 68–70, 72, 84, 104, 128, 198 repetition compulsion 198 representation, failure of 195 “Returning Horror, Revisioning Real: Children and Trauma in the Grave of the Fireflies” (Bhattacharjee) 10, 148–58 reverse identity crisis 180–1 re-visioning the real 155–8 rites of passage 30, 33, 106–7, 118–20, 168 Robbe-Grillet, Alain 79 Roe, Mrs. 126 role confusion 175, 179, 180, 182 role playing 103, 176 romanticized state of innocence 63, 83, 123, 160 Rosen, David 133 Rousso, Henry 87–8 Rowling, J.K. 132, 136, 141 Rushdie, Salman 8, 93–100, 204 Rushforth, Peter 9 Sachenhausen labour camp 109–10 Sade, Marquis de 120 Said, Edward 64–5 Saigon 38 Sangasumana, Pinnawala 116 sari 98 Sarraute, Nathalie 79 Sartre, Jean-Paul 150 Sati, Someshwar 8 Satrapi, Marjane 7–8, 62–73 Satterlee, Michelle 134, 139 Satz, Ronald 191 Sauvaire, Jean-Stephane 10, 162 Saxena, Vandana 8–10 “Scared” (Gyalwang) 28 Scarry, Elaine 195 Schell, Oskar 11 Schonfelder, Christa 53 scum babies 4, 5 Sears, Vicki L 10, 187, 191–2 second-generation witness 107

self: as other 77–8; receding of 178–9; turbulent return to the earlier 180–2 self-consciousness 151–2 self-consciousness-in-itself 151 self-conscious nothing 151 self-deprecation 69 self-esteem 189 self-identity 165, 171 self-reflection 78–9 self-reflexivity 162, 190 separation anxiety 181 Sequoyah Cherokee, The 191 Sewell, Elizabeth 126 sexual abuse 2, 5, 114, 123, 164, 192 sexual exploitation 4 sexual violence 53, 117–18, 128 Sharpe, Bethany 5 Sharpe, Sue 128 shell-shock see post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) Shoah 8, 9, 13–14, 75, 79, 82, 85, 86, 88 “Shoah” (film) 104 Shobasakthi 9, 114–28 Shorey, William 187 Sidhwa, Bapsi 8, 93–100 Sierra Leone 165, 170, 174, 184 Silva, C.R. de 115 Silverman, Phyllis 140 Sims, Laura 184 Singer, P.W. 161, 172 Singh, Amit 10 Singh, Amrita 7–8 Sinhalas 9, 115–16 Sivakumar, Chitra 115 Sleeping Beauty 103–4, 107–8, 110 sleep problems 181 Smith, Sara 126 Snead, Roseanna 10, 187, 188, 189 socialization 102, 106, 108, 135–7, 174–7, 194 socialization/education institution 160, 163 social memory 195 Somasundaram, Daya 116 somatisation 116 Songlines 55 Sontag, Susan 201–2 South Vietnamese 37, 43–4 Spiegleman, Art 63 split subject 77–8

218

INDEX

split-time narration 76–7 Sri Lankan civil war 9, 115–28 SS Troops 16, 17 Stahl, David 132–3 Stalcup, Alex 45 Standing in the Queue in Front of the Kitchen (Hosokova-Weissova) 16 Stargardt, Nicholas 19 state of exception 96 Stern, Caryl 172 Stevens, Lorna and Edward 38 stolen generation 7, 50–9; Australia (Luhrmann) 50, 51–2; defined 51; poetry of 7, 50–9; trauma theory 52–9 Stretton, Hesba 126 Studio Ghibli 148 Stuff That Happened to Me (scrapbook) 201–2 subject development 87 subjectivity: in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (Foer) 194, 197, 198; model of 194; in negotiating trauma 93–4, 99, 105; in Persepolis (Satrapi) 63, 66, 70, 73; splitting in the ego and 77 Suleiman, Susan 83 survival and suffering 182–83 survivor’s guilt 13, 134, 135, 139–40 suspension and orphanhood 86–8 “Swimming out of Tibet” (Jigme) 31, 32 symbolism 67, 71 Tamil Language (Special Provisions) Act of 115 Tamils 9, 115–28 Tamil United Front 115 Tanke, Joseph 198 Tehran 63, 68, 70, 71 Tel Quel writers 79 temporality 154, 156 Terezin 6, 13–20; art by children in 14–18; poetry by children in 18–19; surfaces used to create art in 19–20; theatre in 14 Terezin: The Story of the Holocaust (Thomson) 13 terra nullius 55 testimony: 9/11 194–5, 199; on child soldiers 137; on Holocaust 14, 19,

81–2, 105, 111; of stolen generation 52; in Terezin 14, 19; use of paintings as, by Tibetan children 5 Thakur, Chinmaya Lal 8 thangka style 25, 26, 29 Thankchoe 32 theatre in Terezin 14 Theresienstadt 16, 18; see also Terezin ThiLiem, Nguyen 43 Thomson, Ruth 13 Tibetan diaspora 6–7, 22–35 Tibetan exile education 24–5 Tibetan Homes Foundation (THF) 23–4, 26, 30 Tibetan uprising 22 “Time Out: Trauma and Play in Johnny Tremain and Alan and Naomi” (Higonnet) 198 Tocqueville, Alexis de 186 tone of an ethnologist 81 “Trail of Tears” 10, 186–92 Traitor (Shobasakthi) 9, 114–28 trauma: acting out and working/playing through 198–204; belatedness of 198; children’s affective responses to 197; cultural 3, 9, 13, 195; defined 164; discourse of 195–6; DNA structure changed by 171; emotions associated with 87; enigmatic core of 104; films realistic in portrayal of 164–5 (see also child soldiers); Grave of the Flies (Japanese anime film) 10, 148–58; horror, reality, and temporality 149–55; incapability of language and 197–200; literature as channel and means for transmission of 199–200; manifestations of effects of 164; narratives of 51, 53, 104–5, 162–5, 196; parenthetical nature of 87–8; problems and limitations when confronted with themes of 102–3; real, in fantastical children 133–5; remembering 84–5 (see also memory); of removal and assimilation 10, 186–93; re-visioning the real 155–8; studies 11, 53, 107, 194–5; subjectivity in negotiating 93–4, 99, 105; transmissibility of 163; unreadability of 84, 89; unspeakability of 162; writing through 8, 75–89

219

INDEX

Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature (Kaplan) 93 trauma theory: 9/11 194, 195, 201–2; change of perspective offered by 164; child soldiers 162–4; model of subjectivity 194; photography’s therapeutic functions and limitations 201–3; postcolonial reconfiguration of 163–4; stolen generation 52–9 traumatic neuroses see post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) traumatic socialization 135–7 Trites, Roberta 111 True Story of Hansel and Gretel, The (Murphy) 9 Tsongas, Paul 39 TuongNhu, Tran 45 Turner, Victor 106–7 Two Cherokee Women (Snead) 10, 187, 188 Ugandan child soldiers 165 UNICEF 170, 171, 172, 180 United Nation (UN) 161 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees 5 United States (US) 161 Universal Declaration of Human Rights 172 Updike, John 203 Urasawa Naoki 138 US airlift of Vietnamese children 38–9; see also Operation Babylift Valent, Paul 135 VanGennep, Arnold 106 veils worn by Muslim girls 62–73 Victorian Girl and the Feminine Ideal, The (Gorham) 125, 126, 127 Victorian society 2, 125–8 Vietnamese children, US airlift of 38–9; see also Operation Babylift Vietnamese mothers 42–7; see also Operation Babylift Vietnamization policy 44 Vietnam War 7, 37–48 Visser, Irene 50, 162, 163–4, 171

Vocational Training Centre at THF 30 Volavkova, Hana 13, 18–19 “Waiting for my Mum to Come Back” Trauma(tic) Narratives of Australia’s Stolen Generation (Ganguly) 7, 50–9; see also stolen generation Walkabout 52, 55 Walker, Janet 14 Waltz with Bashir (movie) 66 War Babies (Sharpe) 5, 37–48 War Child (Jal) 10, 162, 165, 170–2 war games, problematic 137–40 warlike aggressions 189 Warner, Susan 126 War Witch (film) 10, 162–5, 167–9 “Washington Children’s Home Society” 192 Weil, Jiri 16 Weissova, Helga see HosokovaWeissova, Helga Welcome to the Desert of the Real (Žižek) 199 “We Needed the Violence to Cheer Us”: Losses and Vulnerabilities in Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier (Kamble) 10, 174–85; see also child soldiers “We’re the kids in America” (Satrapi) 65 We Should Never Meet (Phan) 7, 37–8, 46 Wetherell, Elizabeth 126 Wexler, Alice 51, 57 Whitlock, Gillian 63–4 Wiesel, Elie 82 Williams, Linda Meyer 53 Williams, Mark 132–3 Witnesses of War (Stargardt) 19 Wölfel, Ute 142 Wolfenstein, M. 160 Woman’s Thoughts on the Education of Girls, A (Roe) 126 Women in England: 1870–1950 (Lewis) 127 Wordsworth, William 125 working through trauma 198–204 World Tamil Congress 115 World Trade Center 93, 194, 202

220

INDEX

World Trigger (TV series) 132–45 World War I 137 World War II: Grave of the Flies (Japanese anime film) 10, 148–58; World Trigger (TV series) 132–45; see also Holocaust W ou le souvenir d’enfance (Perec) 8, 75–89; aesthetics of lack 83–4; anamnesis through photography 86; autofiction 79–82; child as witness 80–2; childhood, interrupted 75–9; children literature and psychoanalysis 85–6; double life 76–7; experimentation 82–3; games and constraints 82–5; parachute jumps 88; remembering trauma 84–5; self as other 77–8;

self-reflection 78–9; suspension and orphanhood 86–8; writing through trauma 88 writing childhood trauma 8, 75–89 xenophobia 2 Yamada, Marc 138, 140 Yamamoto, Naoki 138 Yolen, Jane 8–9, 102–12 Yonge, Charlotte 126 Youden, Ngawang 32 Zack-Williams, A.B. 184–5 Zapffe, Thomas 153 Zelizer, Barbie 201–2

221

Taylor & Francis eBooks www.taylorfrancis.com A single destination for eBooks from Taylor & Francis with increased functionality and an improved user experience to meet the needs of our customers. 90,000+ eBooks of award-winning academic content in Humanities, Social Science, Science, Technology, Engineering, and Medical written by a global network of editors and authors.

TA YLOR & FRANCIS EBOOKS OFFERS: A streamlined experience for our library customers

A single point of discovery for all of our eBook content

Improved search and discovery of content at both book and chapter level

REQUEST A FREE TRIAL [email protected]