Children of War
RSSNovels that view contemporary conflicts through the eyes of young people
By Terry Farish -- School Library Journal, 01/01/2004
As 12-year-old Sade Solaja gets ready for school, her mother is murdered at their home in Lagos, Nigeria, an act of revenge against her journalist father.
After his parents are murdered, 11-year-old Kaninda Bulumba of a fictitious East African country learns to survive on his own by wielding an M16.
A Kurdish girl, 12-year-old Tara Hawrami, answers the door to a panicked friend who says the soldiers are coming to take Tara's father.
In Kabul, Afghanistan, after soldiers take 11-year-old Parvana's father away, she dresses as a boy and earns money for the family by selling bones dug from the graveyards.
Young children on the Gaza Strip sing a nursery rhyme, "I am the child of Palestine/… I'll clutch a stone in my right hand/And never forget the martyrs' cause."
In 1988, I wrote an "Up for Discussion" article on books for children and young adults about the Vietnam War. Years had passed since images of that conflict were brought into American living rooms on the nightly news. The Wall–the Vietnam Memorial–had been created, and thousands of students and the children of veterans had touched it and had begun to imagine. My article focused on books that explored the impact of that faraway conflict on young people in the United States. Today, more and more literature allows American youth to understand other children's experience in wars happening at this moment around the world.
Sade's and Tara's and Kaninda's and Parvana's stories are examples of a new truth of war: 90% of the casualties of contemporary conflicts are women and children. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) says 50 million people are uprooted around the world; UNHCR cares for 10 million children under the age of 18. "More than 300,000 youths and girls currently are serving as child soldiers around the world" (www.unhcr.ch/children/glance.html).
Such facts can be found in newspaper accounts on a daily basis. However, if you give a child a story, odds are that its details will stay with the reader longer than any statistics. The books presented here, portraying the emotional world that good novels turn on, offer a key to understanding the news: a bombing on the West Bank, a tribal war, a Kurdish uprising. When youngsters meet a Kurdish girl in a story and she's like them, the struggle of the Kurds becomes partly theirs.
The authors of the novels I am discussing here—mostly British, Canadian, and American—have each revealed a wrenching reality of a child's world. In months and years to come, one hopes to see stories available in English from Afghanis, Kurds, Nigerians, and all of the people whose children are in war today. One recent firsthand example is not a novel at all, but a memoir in graphic-novel format. In Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (Pantheon, 2003), Marjane Satrapi describes growing up under fundamentalist repression in Iran. (A new online journal, Words Without Borders [www.wordswithoutborders.org], is dedicated to making available translations of international literature, and young adults will connect with many of these stories.)
In Bernard Ashley's Little Soldier (Scholastic, 2002), Kaninda knows that he must kill in order to avenge the slaughter of his family in a tribal war. As a soldier, the young teen does this very well until he "took the wrong turn, into the sun instead of away from it, and going through one village too many he found himself in the saving hands of the Red Cross." Kaninda is plucked out of guerilla warfare and placed with a fundamentalist Christian family in London. There, he waits like a prisoner to escape. But with the arrival of a boy from an enemy tribe, a complex plot emerges; Kaninda's obsession with revenge is merged with the London gang war that he interprets as tribal.
By showing Kaninda's reaction to the West, Ashley has shown readers the heart and drive of a young soldier in Africa. Among these books, this one has the strongest storytelling edge, tense pacing, and tight scenes, coming to a masterful end with Kaninda still running parallel to his guerilla lessons and somehow extracting from them enough resilience to forgive.
Beverley Naidoo tells a different story in The Other Side of Truth (HarperCollins, 2001). Sade is the daughter of a truth-telling Nigerian journalist. The night her mother is murdered, she answers the phone and hears a man say, "Is this the home of Mr. Folarin Solajo who writes for Speak? Don't trouble him. Just give him a message. Tell him: if we get the family first, what does it matter?" The threat sets up Sade's and her brother Femi's escape to England and their journey as they seek asylum.
Shattered (Knopf, 2002) is a collection of stories, some of which are not about contemporary wars, but the impacts of war are still felt. Editor Jennifer Armstrong includes "Hope" by Gloria D. Miklowitz, set aboard the ship Palestine Hope, and "Golpe de Estada" by Dian Curtis Regan, about an attempted coup in Caracas, Venezuela from the perspective of an American boy who is there with his businessman father. Ibtisma Baraket writes from her childhood experience of the Six-Day War in Ramallah, Palestine in "The Second Day." The daughter says, " 'Imagine' was Mother's favorite word. In Arabic, she would say Batkhayyal, which also meant 'to see the shadow of a thought,' as if one is separated from it by a thin cloth." She says this on the second day of the war, after they have become refugees, and they live in shadows of thought about the future.
Robert Westall writes with force and black humor about a middle-class British family in his short psychological story Gulf (Scholastic, 1992), about the Gulf War. Figgis is a boy with much compassion, or mental illness, as his family later perceives it. He feels deeply the pain of others when he becomes aware of their suffering and sometimes slips into their personas. He relates so completely to an Iraqi soldier that he begins to speak Arabic in his dreams. His psychiatrist, Dr. Rashid, says, "…we have agreed, you and I, that he is not mad. That he is suffering from a mystery of nature." In the end, Figgis's power of compassion dies along with the Iraqi soldier.
In A Stone in My Hand (Candlewick, 2002), Cathryn Clinton writes about a child coping with loss. Malaak's father leaves their home in Gaza to find work in Israel. She thinks of him as a prisoner and waits nightly on the roof of her house to see him return, though he does not come home. She describes her older sister, "Hend and I used to share a bedroom. But now my mother cries at night. Hend goes to her when she cries. A lot of the time Hend just sleeps with my mother."
All of these novels invite young people to get beyond the names that make a locale seem too far from their experience to matter, to slip inside the world, to grasp universal truths and emotions, and to build empathy.
Clinton's is a family story, as are Deborah Ellis's The Breadwinner (2001) and its sequel Parvana's Journey (2002, both Groundwood), set in Afghanistan. "I'm here for my husband," Parvana's mother pleads with the Taliban guards after they have taken him away. "I'm here for my father!" Parvana chants with her. When they can't free her imprisoned father, Parvana steps into the role of the family's breadwinner. In the second book, Parvana travels from Kabul in search of her mother and sisters. She leads a band of children, one-legged Asif, a baby who had been abandoned, and Leila who teaches the band to scrounge in minefields. " 'It's a goat!'" Leila exclaims, after they hear an explosion beyond the mud shack where she lives. " 'The mine only got a part of it. Most of it is still here!'" The girls drag the goat, each hauling a leg, while Asif waits: "He was waving a crutch and yelling at them. 'You are both idiots. You could have been killed!'" The goat meat sustains them a while longer. Ellis maintains a humor and grace in her storytelling so that readers feel not only rage and sympathy but also a tender affection.
Elizabeth Laird has said, "If you try preaching to children and set out to deal with a certain issue, then you can forget it, because that's not the way good books get written, good books get written because there's a story." (Jubilee Magazine interview www.jubileebooks.co.uk/jubilee/magazine/authors/liz_laird_interview.asp). Tara, in her Kiss the Dust (Dutton, 1991), tells a tender and terrifying story. Tara's Kurdish family members move from wealth in Sulaimaniya, Iraq and flee for their lives to a refugee camp across the mountains in Iran. They barely remain alive in a single room, the youngest child, Hero, barefoot in the snow because she's outgrown her shoes. The story gives background to the struggle of the Kurds to have a home country, but the power of the writing is in its intimacy. Readers can feel the protagonist's chador, the veil, and her terror when her sister playfully snatches her veil away as soldiers are approaching.
Like all of these books, Kiss the Dust addresses more than loss; it shows how small things of life sustain people. When Tara and Hero arrive at a new camp and get real soap and a shower, Hero skips to Tara, her hair still wet, saying, "Smell me, Tara. I'm all nice now. Smell me here and here and here."
Here are the wars as they are lived by today's children, where they need new shoes and come of age and, in some cases, get second chances. Their lives will be hard. Kaninda, and boys like him, are beginning again in Europe and the U.S. and in Canada. But Arab-American poet Naomi Shihab Nye insists on images of reality even when writing for youth: for many children, there are no second chances. Her poem "All Things Not Considered" in 19 Varieties of Gazelle (Greenwillow, 2002) opens with:
You cannot stitch the breath Back into this boy.
A brother and sister were playing with toys When their room exploded.
In what language Is this holy?
There was a melancholy in the stories I wrote about in the 1980s article. In those books, children were coming of age amid the sadness they saw in people who had come back from war, or they were growing up in families who had lost sons and fathers. These novels, in many ways, demand more of readers. They ask young people to imagine what it would be like to grow up unsafe and fearful, and, when possible, savagely courageous. These books bring the immediacy of world events happening at the very moment that readers are turning the pages.
| Author Information |
| Terry Farish is the author of If the Tiger (Steerforth, 1995; o.p.) and most recently a picture book, The Cat Who Liked Potato Soup (Candlewick, 2003). |
