THE CHILD’S VOICE AS A NARRATIVE CRITIQUE IN AFRICAN EX-CHILD

SOLDIER MEMOIRS

Thesis

Submitted to

The College of Arts and Sciences the

UNIVERSITY OF DAYTON

In Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for

The Degree of

Master of Arts in English

By

Julius Maingi Muthusi, M.A.

Dayton, Ohio

May 2019 THE CHILD’S VOICE AS A NARRATIVE CRITIQUE IN AFRICAN EX-CHILD

SOLDIER MEMOIRS

Name: Muthusi, Julius Maingi

APPROVED BY:

Thomas Wendorf, Ph.D. Capstone Advisor Committee Chair

Kara Getrost, Ph.D. Faculty Advisor

Thomas Morgan, Ph.D. Faculty Advisor Associate Professor

Tereza Szeghi, Ph.D. Associate Professor Director of Graduate Studies

ii ABSTRACT

THE CHILD’S VOICE AS A NARRATIVE CRITIQUE IN AFRICAN EX-CHILD

SOLDIER MEMOIRS

Name: Muthusi, Julius Maingi University of Dayton

Advisor: Br. Thomas Wendorf, Ph.D.

African Ex-Child Soldier Memoirs to some extent have been viewed as humanitarian texts that raise sympathy or even funds from readers to enhance child rights initiatives. Such initiatives have been noble and worthy. However, my literary analysis research goes beyond the humanitarian reception, to examine how the use of the child’s voice functions as a narrative critique of a distorted adult world. Exploring Ishmael

Beah’s A Long Way Gone and Senait Mehari’s Heart of Fire, I examine how these authors employ a blend of aesthetic invention, remembered and experienced history inherent in the child’s voice within their narratives. My interpretive work involves tracing the political, social and economic histories of authors’ native spaces; examining functions and effects of child narrators; and understanding memory reconstruction paradigms and the functions of storytelling in confronting trauma. Displaced identities in children;

Child’s Safety within a social justice quest; and Violence and trauma on children are some of the major themes arising from my research. The child’s voice indicates that adult-led national, international, socio-political and economic networks and practices are responsible for violations of the child’s rights. Through the capacity of the child’s perspective to cross taboo lines and the adult shame frontier, and to penetrate emotional danger zones easily, my research shows that the child’s voice exposes how adults within

iii child soldier spaces and beyond, are flawed and limited by their participation in social, cultural and ideological institutions and discourses.

iv

Dedication to those whose childhoods are lost because of war in Sierra Leone,

Eritrea, Southern Sudan, Central African Republic, Angola, Democratic Republic of

Congo, Somalia and Liberia.

v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am indebted to many for the successful completion of this thesis, especially to

Br. Tom Wendorf for his generous guidance and untiring support as my capstone supervisor. My two readers, Dr. Thomas Morgan and Dr. Kara Getrost for their critical feedback to my work, and to the Marianists of the Chambers Community for their patience and encouragement.

My gratitude goes also to the Rector’s Office and Br. Dan Klco for generosity and caring support throughout my Master’s Program. To the Marianists of the USA Province and those from the Region of Eastern Africa, I couldn’t have reached here without you.

vi TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT ...... iii

DEDICATION ...... v

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... vi

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS AND NOTATIONS ...... ix

CHAPTER 1 THE CHILD’S NARRATIVE VOICE ...... 1

CHAPTER 2 CONTEXT AND PARAMETERS ...... 4

Background context ...... 4

Research goals ...... 7

Research questions ...... 7

Research methodology ...... 7

CHAPTER 3 CRITICAL LITERATURE REVIEW ...... 9

Fact and fiction ...... 9

Memory Reconstruction ...... 11

The Child Narrator’s Effect ...... 17

Social Justice Quests ...... 24

Displacement...... 29

CHAPTER 4 ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION ...... 31

Displaced Identities in Children...... 32

The Child’s Safety within a Social Justice Quest ...... 37

vii Innocent Children taking Adult Roles ...... 40

Violence and Trauma on Children ...... 43

CHAPTER 5 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION ...... 50

WORKS CITED ...... 52

viii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS AND NOTATIONS

Child Soldier – Any person under the age of 18 years who is part of any kind of regular

or irregular armed force or group in any capacity.

CRC – Convention on the Rights of the Child

ELF – Eritrean Liberation Front

EPLF – Eritrean People’s Liberation Movement

RUF – Revolutionary United Front, also referred to as Rebels.

ix CHAPTER 1

THE CHILD’S NARRATIVE VOICE

The use of a child’s narrative voice basically means that readers see through the eyes of a child in a narrative. Child narrators have been commonly employed by adult authors to achieve certain artistic goals. Linda Steinmez argues that child narrators and child perspectives provoke adult readers’ reaction and thinking about or questioning established worldviews (47). Unlike adults, children have fewer filters when they meet the world and exhibit innocence and uniqueness in how they see it. In some cases, as

Michael Seraphinoff suggests, adults are even more tolerant when the child gives voice to certain uncomfortable or controversial truths (2). They disarm adult prejudices and provide potential converging points of reflection and reconciliation for differing factions of the adult world.

In ex-child soldier memoirs under this study, the narrator and the main character are the same. This is a key aspect for this research partly because the authors are engaged in a narrative of self-interest while they remember their own painful childhood past.

Readers of the narratives thus perceive through the first person narrator ‘I’ and potentially take the child narrator’s side, while they also bring in their adult perspectives into their reading. Unfortunately, readers do not have the richness of the omniscient narrator, or the third person narrator points of views. The first person narrator is limiting in that not all events taking place are recorded or are of interest to the narrator, yet those events may contribute to the development of the story. Nevertheless, life writings are often characterized by their use of the first person narrator.

1 Memoirs, like other life writings, generally take the first person narrator’s point of view because their story is not a created one but one that has been lived. So the narrator remains superior to the reader because it’s only through the narrator that we can access and perhaps process information. However, memoirs under this study bring in personal details based on events that are in the public and historical domain. Ishmael Beah in A

Long Way Gone, writes within the context of the Sierra Leone civil war, while Senait

Mehari narrates her personal story within the Eritrean liberation wars in her memoir,

Heart of Fire. Through historical research, these public and historical events provide me with a context from which I draw information that is beneficial towards the interpretation of their texts.

My thesis explores how ex-child-soldier memoirs utilize the child’s voice as a means of exposing flaws of the adult world in their environment and beyond, but also implicitly aim their criticism towards the historical, political and economic decadence of adult systems that have led to the narrator's’ experiences as child soldiers. Using Beah’s

A Long Way Gone and Mehari’s Heart of Fire, my thesis will examine how the memoirs’ use of the child’s voice draws critical readers to a conversation of truthfulness and social justice, beyond a humanitarian consumption that only stirs a sentimental response from readers and at most charity to mitigate the results of a human disaster. The root causes unfortunately seldom get fully addressed, and perpetrators have been known to escape punishment. My argument explores the idea that the child’s voice can reach adults who are uncomfortable facing the issues from an adult-to-adult point of view (Seraphinoff 2).

The child’s voice often portrays innocence and a lack of adult complexity, which enables the writers to cross taboo lines, the adult shame frontier, and penetrate emotional danger

2 zones far more easily (Wilkinson 125). Additionally, my research traces the historical past of child-soldier spaces and brings into play memory reconstruction theories among other tools to aid in the literary interpretation of the select memoirs.

3 CHAPTER 2

CONTEXT AND PARAMETERS

Background context

Beah’s Sierra Leone and Mehari’s Eritrea are nations with key historical systems and events that over time have come to result in the child-soldier effect. Sierra Leone’s capital Freetown was first established in 1787 as a British colony to settle freed slaves, and later the colony expanded to the interior parts of West Africa to become what is now known as Sierra Leone (Peter Pham 6). Nova Scotians- the African American former slaves and the Jamaican Maroons - who worked in Spanish and Britain settlements in

Jamaica are among the groups of former and freed slaves to settle in Freetown. The colony mainly provided agricultural produce to Britain and later on, diamonds became a coveted resource. The freed or rescued slaves from Jamaica, Britain and the US also became the Creoles. Together with the British, the freed and former slaves developed

Freetown in most modern ways more than the native-occupied interior of Sierra Leone.

Certainly they grew to be more successful in education and business than the interior indigenous people and were much more equal and favored by British colonialists. The

British extended the colony in the native hinterland by enticing Paramount chiefs and getting involved in battles of succession, ignoring the will of the native majority. At independence in 1961, one can agree that like in many African nations, Sierra Leone was only united as far as freedom from colonial rule was concerned. The country therefore lived in a period of suspicion, animosity, prejudice, corruption and often neocolonial tendencies until a civil war broke out on March 23rd, 1991.

4 In the civil war, a group of rebels known as The Revolutionary United Front

(RUF) went on the offensive against the corrupt and authoritarian government of Sierra

Leone’s All People’s Congress (APC) party. Many citizens wanted an end of APC’s twenty-four year rule and thought this would only be done through a bloody uprising. So the RUF was partly welcomed as a group that would overthrow the regime, but things escalated into a civil war (Conteh Prince 59). With such an escalating situation, Ishmael

Beah found himself fighting on the side of the government army at the age of 13 because

RUF rebels killed his family in 1993, and also because he became tired of running away

(6). He was rescued by UNICEF and went through rehabilitation at Benin home in

Freetown. Afterwards, he was repatriated to his uncle, the only traceable relative. But another coup made him decide to move to the US under the care of his foster parent

Laura Simms.

Eritrea, on the other hand, had been detached from Ethiopia in 1890 when Italy colonized parts of Africa from 1870-1941. Then after WWII, the British and Ethiopian army, the Arbegnoch, conquered Italian- Eritrean troops and occupied the country until

1952 (Pool 21). Due to weak capacity for self-rule, Eritrea was federated with Ethiopia for 10 years under the UN General Assembly Resolution 390 (Randall and Pat 12-16).

But after the decade, Ethiopia annulled the Eritrean parliament claiming that Eritrea was still part of Ethiopian national territory. The annulment consequently provoked the three- decade Ethiopia-Eritrean war between 1962 and 1992. The Eritrean Liberation Front

(ELF) and The Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) were the two groups that actively fought Ethiopian forces that occupied Eritrea. The ELF was the first group

5 formed but due to its Islamic inclinations, some members broke away to form EPLF in order to be all inclusive and reflect the true Eritrean identity.

The two groups developed differences with EPLF suspicious that ELF wanted to make a deal with the Ethiopian government. But EPLF, which had now become a strong militant group, was against such deals. The suspicion escalated into intermittent armed confrontations similar to civil wars from 1972-1974, then 1980-1983. It is within the latter period of wars that Mehari was caught up. Mehari’s father fought on the side of

ELF and when he was injured, he retired. However, he personally took Mehari and his two other daughters to join the ELF. So Mehari fought on the ELF side though at a time when the group was on the verge of defeat by EPLF. Before joining the war, Mehari’s early life was spent as an orphan because her Ethiopian mother left her in a suitcase because she realized her incapacity to rear a child, but also the scandal of a child born of an Ethiopian mother and Eritrean father, the two sworn enemy states. Mehari thus grew in an Ethiopian orphanage in Asmara, later in another one run by Italian nuns and then she was released to the old parents of her father. After the war she spent four years in

Sudan and later relocated to Germany.

Generally, both Ishmael Beah and Senait Mehari became child soldiers within the contexts above, which have political, economic, social and historical underpinnings.

Their child-soldier memoirs and the child’s narrative voice function also as a representation of the collective voices of such children demanding a reflection on how history, power and politics continue to haunt their societies in Africa.

6 Research goals

This research aims to provide a new understanding of child-soldier narratives as narratives that actually demand accountability for historical, political, economic and social injustice, beyond the typical humanitarian reception.

The research also aims to illuminate how these narratives create their effect in calling upon readers and leaders from both the international and the child soldier spaces to change through a deeper reflection on the interconnectedness of historical, economic and political adult choices across the globe. My hope is to raise a greater sense of responsibility, integrity, wisdom and self-sacrifice amongst readers. I hope to reveal how the authors use the child’s voice as a strategic means to establishing a dignified life for children and future generations in the war-torn spaces.

Research questions

a. How does fact and fiction function to form the Child’s Narrative Voice?

b. How does memory reconstruction affect the child-as-narrator experience in

African child-soldier narratives?

c. What are the flaws in historical, political, economic and socio-cultural systems as

constructed by adults?

d. How does the child’s voice critique the adult’s flaws in (c) within the select

memoirs?

Research methodology

The study employs a mix of theories that include a historical research method, literary analysis, and post-colonial and gender theory frameworks for analysis. Another key theory is that of trauma which explores therapeutic and testimonial purposes of

7 narrators of the select texts. These research methods are used within the parameters of child narrators, memory reconstruction and historical systems in African history, specifically, Sierra Leone and Eritrea. Furthermore, issues that touch on narrators’ positions and goals in writing their memoirs will be explored.

8 CHAPTER 3

CRITICAL LITERATURE REVIEW

Fact and fiction

Critics of life writings such as Memoirs and Autobiographies often raise the basic question of the fictional and factual dichotomies within the genre. I find it normal that in describing people and places from the past, the life writer often has to employ imaginative and metaphoric coloration so as to bring them to life. Goodwin James supports this position in arguing that the powers of imagination and invention can be as important to the life writer as they are to the novelist, dramatist, or poet (12). Ishmael

Beah and Senait Mehari’s memoirs to a certain extent combine imagination and reality to speak through literature of threatening impunities found in real life. The authors use a fictional narrative voice of a child to represent the reality of their past life. However, inexact facts involving time periods, dates and persons involved have been criticized as factual flaws in Memoirs and Autobiographies.

The memoirs of Beah and Mehari have witnessed credibility challenges that relate to some factual discrepancies in their texts (McMahon, 1 - 4 and The Asmara, 8). Though such criticism does not fall under the parameters of this study, the criticism raises the question of truthful representation which Leigh Gilmore addresses in The Limits of

Autobiography. Gilmore asserts that the question is not just about the line between truth and lies, but rather, the limit of representativeness (5). Thus the experience of “self” and that of “others” are at a crossroad in the crafting of autobiographical pieces, and often the variations of self- and other-experiences complicate the matter. Moreover, while narrators

9 move from the private to the public sphere, that movement creates a legalistic framework, and consequently narrators run the risk of losing control not only of their texts but also their interpretation. I am in agreement with what Leigh Gilmore underlines as the genuine task of these writings to strive to produce “truth” because they function as cultural codes of producing truth (19). Meanwhile, fiction and reality operate together, with fiction helping to represent reality in memoirs under this study. Indeed, Beah and

Mehari’s memoirs still provide opportunities for truth production that hinge on differing perspectives of people who participate in traumatic historical events such the ones in the two memoirs.

With trauma representation, the challenge of representing the objective truth is real, but the Memoir and the Autobiography arguably stand tall as genres under whose literal auspices trauma can be written about. Allison Mackey interprets credibility criticism of ex-child soldier memoirs as a form of violence to the already violated child

(104). Mackey’s interpretation suggests sympathy towards the authors. Alongside

Mackey, Ann Douglass goes further to express caution against extreme criticism of such texts. She opines that it is not the absolute truth of the witness’s experience but, rather, the “speech act” or the work of narrating these stories that transcends questions of truth

(83). The transcending move therefore arrives at the most crucial point of the texts, the experience being transmuted into words. I concur with both Mackey and Douglass because relaying a traumatic event from memory is a complex and perplexing process that highlights the difficulty and courage involved despite opening doors to criticism. The experience of transmitting a wordless experience holds greater value especially when told from a child’s perspective within factual history. Hence, memoirs such as Beah and

10 Mehari’s stretch the idea of self-representation by throwing light on suppressed histories and creating new emphases.

Memory Reconstruction

The broad functions of memory in reconstruction theories of memory and traumatic literature are important in the interpretation of the selected memoirs. Qi Wang identifies the “self,” the “social,” and the “directive” as crucial functions of memory (6).

The self-function of memory concerns itself with identity building; the social-function creates, maintains and enhances relationships; and the directive one guides solutions to current problems and future behavior, and regulates emotions (6). Beah and Mehari compose their texts within the confines of the West away from Africa where their lives were violated. As such, there is an extent to which the supplied memories in their texts serve Wang’s threefold purposes. Generally, there are three areas of interest that I suspect are being served: foremost is to gain greater sympathy, acceptance, and/or legitimacy for being in their new homes within the Western space; second is their desire and that of humanitarian agencies for ex-child soldiers to be perceived as innocent children rather than violators of human rights themselves; and third, purposes of therapy and self- improvement. In all respects, Wang’s functions of memory ultimately point more to an inward-looking agenda in memory reconstruction than an outward political agenda.

While, the inward agenda fits more within a child-centered paradigm than the latter, the child-centered agenda nonetheless enables the child’s narrative voice to function as a critique to adult and dominant identities.

Wang’s proposition of memory in serving the “self” is supported by McAdams, who notes that self-identity is a force to reckon with in autobiographical memory works

11 (104). To serve the self, these critics suggest that narrators select what is meaningful to them from memory and consciously or unconsciously leave out memories that misrepresent the self-agenda. Nevertheless, self-interests in life writings necessarily form the basic grounds for their authors’ retrospection and reflection, and contribute to the conversation between the personal and the communal experience. In other words, I hold that normalization of what is portrayed as “selfish” interests in autobiographical writings should not be regarded at the expense of the critical social concerns being raised, and especially when the issues concern a class of people who suffer under adult-driven economic selfishness.

Unlike Wang, Mackey and Abrams, Mariana Achugar distinguishes two perspectives of memory. Achugar believes that both perspectives of observer memory

(from passive participants) and field memory (from active participants) of an event have critical implications to memory reconstruction. Citing Neisser and Nigro’s study on memory, she argues that the field memories are much more inclined to bring clear renditions since we tend to remember our participation as actors in older memories (9,

10). Moreover, when focusing on emotional events, we remember from field perspectives, while objective aspects take the form of observer memories (10). On the same note, Conway and Pleydell-Pearce in discussing autobiographical memory point to

Event Specific Knowledge (ESK) memory, as basic and important in providing more details associated with one very specific event. Such events are remembered in visual images, and allow writers to present, expand, revisit and connect such moments with surrounding memories (262). Both Beah and Mehari extensively reconstruct their memoirs around field memories that emphasize their role as actors, which shows how

12 they were immersed in the actions taking place while they remained unconscious of cultural, political and economic dynamics at work. Their unconsciousness of such dynamics also accounts for the nature of the child’s narrative voice used in the select texts, a claim on which literary analysis can expound.

The influence of social-cultural contexts on memory reconstruction cannot be overlooked. Indeed, Achugar underscores that the time and place from which we remember accounts for variations in different people’s memory (11). Motivations behind reconstructions are therefore multifaceted and at times tricky to pick out. In Beah and

Mehari’s memoirs, there are not only social-cultural dynamics at play, but also power and identity relations. The relations between narrators, narrator spaces, collaborators, co- writers and the Western audience raise contentious implications. Felman and Laub refer to collaborative work involved in these memoirs as the “project of address” where narrators call for a form of action from the reader (38). Referring to the ex-child soldier memoirs as “human rights narratives,” Maureen Moynagh also argues that the narratives suggestively invite readers to sympathize with benevolent intervention (43). However,

Moynagh is critical of the human rights child-soldier who is portrayed as innocent because, as she asserts, these children have been compromised through the atrocities they have committed, which makes their agency culpable (46). Admittedly, Moynagh’s allegation could be true considering non-child-soldiers like the Lost Boys of Southern

Sudan. There has been a greater openness and support extended by the West to these boys. On the contrary, ex-child soldiers have received very limited and often non-state sponsored admission into the West. Nonetheless, by questioning the agency or culpability of the ex-child soldier, Moynagh also opens up the realm of neopolitical ideology where

13 powerful and dominant identities turn the tables on those they exploit. This opening runs the risk of losing the important socio-economic and political questions that Beah and

Mehari’s texts raise, and consequently ignoring the circumstantial motivations surrounding the occurrence of a child soldier phenomenon. Thus, I argue that the ex-child soldier exists within difficult neo- and geopolitical structures where, from a critical reader’s view and in the light of co-writing dynamics, their narratives walk on a tightrope between preservation and exposition of the same systems that conceivably create a child soldier. It is a preservation through an alliance with a dominant and capitalistic West, which has its own agenda, an agenda that may not be helpful to the ex-child soldiers’ home spaces.

Whereas Moynagh’s argument is exposed to serving the interests of the dominant classes, the ex-child soldier narratives still hold solid ground as authentic texts for broaching issues of social injustice, identity relations, political power and economic dominance. The cold shoulder given to ex-child soldiers by the West as compared to the

Lost Boys reveals a continued reign of capitalistic, socio-economic and political appetites, despite the child soldier phenomenon signaling the effects of such appetites. I propose that the ex-child soldier memoir and the child’s narrative voice embody a criticism directed towards the dominant forces and identities that enjoy powerful reign, despite producing such a child. Colonial systems, nation state systems, globalization waves and economic systems form the dominant forces in the recipe for African civil wars.

Indeed, Leigh Gilmore suggests that autobiographical writings could be turned towards the interests of those without a dominant identity or story to tell (21, 22). I find

14 Gilmore’s assertion agreeable particularly when I look at Beah and Mehari’s memoirs.

They serve the interests of the less-recognized, less-privileged, and less-represented identities in civil war processes and the sociopolitical and economic dialogue in Africa.

Dominant identities are found at different levels in the context of African civil wars. At the ground level are the rebel and government force commanders, at a political-economic level are politicians and war lords, while a more abstract – though potentially most powerful – level includes geopolitical and economic actors and intercontinental networks.

Such dominant forces are also featured at the table of peace brokerage when the voice of children and even women violated by war, like Beah and Mehari, remain at the whims of the dominant groups. In that case, ex-child soldier narratives actualize what David Shield in Autobiography as Criticism, Criticism as Autobiography sees as a form of criticism on the dominant identities in society. Such dominant identities in the public discourse include Sir Albert Margai, Siaka Stevens, Joseph Momoh, Foday Sankoh and Charles

Taylor among others in leadership before and during the national crisis in Sierra Leone.

On the other hand are Isaias Afewerki, Hamid Idris Awate and other EPLF-ELF leaders against Ethiopia’s leadership of Haile Selassie and Meles Zenawi in the Eritrea war

(Williams 74-79). International and global forces are also part of dominant identities for historical actions and policies, and for the very nature of intervening in a war, which is not often a value-neutral activity.

Against the above dominant identities is a need for impoverished and subservient ones to find a means of critique. Beah and Mehari’s texts manifest a history whose narrative function is to expose how dominant identities have failed and consequently altered and distorted lives. The texts embody a spirit of courage and candor through their

15 willingness to say what others have not revealed succinctly (Shield 152). Importantly, the reconstructed memories and the use of the child’s narrative voice found in the memoirs in this study expose areas for economic, political and socio-cultural critique to dominant identities. The memoirs critique the use of children as a means to adult economic and political ends; destabilization of socio-cultural structures that define and guide child-adult relations; the disregard of the sanctity of human life; and the erosion of confidence in one’s own culture, language and nationhood. National governments local to Beah and

Mehari are taken to task by these memoirs. Similarly, anti-government forces and international collaborators in wars that have produced experiences in these memoirs are tasked to take responsibility and face justice. The memoirs therefore act as legitimate evidence that lean on art to represent the unrepresented.

Far from Gilmore and Moynagh’s assertions, Allison Mackey contends that the ex-child soldier memoirs upset the spaces where child soldiers are being used and where the narratives are being consumed, in a manner that perpetuates a symbiotic relationship

(99-121). By colluding with humanitarian regimes and marketers for literary consumption, the writers of memoirs produce memoirs as devices of processing and presenting suffering, inviting sympathy and benevolence. Like Mackey, Richard Priebe also maintains that ex-child soldier narratives are among scores of African literary works consumed in the West that continue to paint Africa as a place of violence, where violence is seen as a necessary tool for both good and bad agents (51).However, this study explores how these memoirs go beyond the depiction of violence and humanitarian consumption and actually implicate the Western reader in conditions that bring about the child-soldier phenomenon. The memoirs also summon readers as potential witnesses,

16 holding them accountable for their own responses (Mackey 100). The memoirs offer us an opportunity to explore how representing violence enhances the possibility of understanding and accepting a common humanity in the world, where acts such as terrorism continue to plague the planet. Moreover, these memoirs are a signpost of global imbalances and injustices revealing global historical, economic and political issues that underlie the narratives.

The Child Narrator’s Effect

In the selected memoirs for this study, the stories are narrated from a child’s view point, although the authors are already adults. It is important to distinguish that the authors have lived the experiences narrated during their childhood; they are not authors who fictionally create child narrators only to achieve their own artistic ends. However, since the narrators are already adults, they use a fictional child narrator and voice to represent their past. Strictly speaking therefore, the child’s narrative voice in the select texts is a reflection of the past self of an author whose current self is an adult.

Apart from enjoying a blend of authentic experience and fictional child’s voice,

Beah and Mehari benefitted from co-writers. Co-writers improved the smoothness and artistic qualities of the memoirs that would have otherwise been susceptible to grammatical mistakes, loss of logic or stream of thought and fragmentation of information. Thus, the fictional child’s narrative voice enjoys a sense of adult control and expertise.

The child’s narrative voice of course comes along with a child perspective that is different from adults. Like children in real life, child narrators tend to ask more questions about the environment than adults. They also have the ability to question people, events

17 and experiences, because they most probably are encountering the world for the first time and have no points of reference. The adult in the text or the one reading the text has to provide the reference, and in so doing he can marvel at and reflect on the meaning of the child narrator’s perspective. Linda Steinmez argues that children are interested in a different reality than adults. Consequently, the child narrator perspective reminds the critical reader that adult understanding of the world propagates tolerance and understanding of otherness but also the contrary (66). The child’s voice and perspective in the select memoirs point to social and adult shortcomings and add weight to the moral question of children fighting in an adult-initiated war and demands reflections on local and international implications.

In representing war experiences, an adult voice from rebel or army authorities would likely present events as a result of certain logical reasoning and decisions. For instance, Mariana Achugar argues that army historical discourses in Uruguay’s dictatorship present events accompanied by abstract, technical, institutional, semiotic and metaphorical explications that emphasize ideological meanings while the human and adult agency is masked behind such events (50, 51). The child’s voice on the other hand,

I would argue, often demonstrates not only the concrete and sees events through human actors, but it also exhibits a lack of background understanding that is available to the adult’s viewpoint. The child’s voice therefore leads to exposing contradictions and flaws in the adult world. Expressed in a different way, the adult voice is subject to partisan understanding and influence of the complex forces of world. And while this adult awareness and influence is not entirely negative in itself, the child’s voice carries greater critical power in its innocent objectivity and reaches across divides of adult worldviews.

18 The innocence and uninformed status of the child’s narrative voice manifests the narrator’s power to speak to the critical adult reader. In examining the representation of violence in the African novel, Richard Priebe holds that sometimes the child narrator, such as the child narrator found in Ahmadou Kourouma’s novel, Allah n’est pas Oblige’, bears too much knowledge of the real historical and social details of the violence, and renders the child narrator perspective ineffective artistically (51). Priebe implies that the child’s narrative voice should exhibit a sense of disconnect from multifaceted adult knowledge. Therefore, Beah and Mehari’s use of the child’s voice succeeds in representing lived experiences by maintaining innocence and disconnect from an understanding of the real historical and social forces at work amid the violence they recount. The silence in such narrative reality offers the child’s narrative voice greater potency in provoking the critical reader to contemplate meaning. Although silence on certain issues in the adult voice could be interpreted as a cover-up, for the child’s voice, it has much more to do with the child’s limited perspective. Importantly, unvoiced understanding or interpretations are not entirely lost in child-narrated life writings; rather, critical readers can easily notice images and symbols that silently float in the narratives and hopefully awaken greater appreciation of the deeper complexities represented.

In another perspective, Irina Kyulanova explores child innocence and adult complexity in child-soldier memoirs. She reads ex-child soldier narratives as texts that test war as a rite of passage from innocent childhood to complex adulthood and vice versa. She offers that the texts “emphasize a common contemporary inversion of traditional child-adult roles with knowledgeable, experienced and powerful children on one side, and naïve, innocent and powerless adults on the other” (46). The reversal of

19 roles is evidence that something about the adult’s control of society has collapsed within child soldier spaces. Clearly, war as a tool for initiation into adulthood is a sign of a failed community. This failure shows a distortion of healthy social systems and signals a justice system on its death bed, where adults, the custodians, have turned violators.

Instead, I would argue, the child’s voice in these narratives functions as the voice of conscience that opens the Pandora’s box of adult failure. Since the child is much less constrained by adult filters of social experience, the child’s narrative voice is able to make observations that implicitly reveal adult imperfections. Steinmetz and Kyulanova therefore demonstrate the effectiveness of the child’s voice and the capacity of ex-child soldiers to represent themselves and their experiences.

Todd Steven moves away from war as a rite of passage for children in the select memoirs, to a listener-reader framework centered on the term ‘testimony.’ In examining the ethical reading of traumatic literature, Steven proposes that listeners and readers come to expect one’s words to be accurate and truthful (139). This expectation assumes a cultural mode where words from firsthand experience bear weight because listeners are absent from where narrators have the experience. As such, readers become listeners of testimonies and read them as “one voice, one true account and with one truthful perspective” (70). In reading these testimonies, readers also become secondary witnesses, which arguably explains why ex-child soldier narratives almost always receive great attention whenever they are published. The texts, as firsthand testimony, function as a backbone that authenticates and strengthens the effect of the child’s narrative voice despite perceived limitations of the child’s perspective and adult control. Once again, truth and fiction blend as a matter of necessity rather than choice.

20 Whilst the child’s voice in fiction is largely the construct of an adult, use of this voice by ex-child soldier memoirs enjoys a certain authenticity of a real lived experience.

In some instances though, the memoirs convey genuine limits of a child’s perspective, so sometimes logic is really missing and narrators jump from one theme to another. For instance, in her second chapter of Heart of Fire, Mehari moves through brief renditions involving different subthemes such as “egg thief,” “death in a bottle” and later “parents and orphans” (3-10), all of which are situated within a larger theme, an orphanage. Such subthemes sound disconnected, but they also exhibit the effects of trauma recollections.

In support of these disconnected subthemes, Achugar, Conway and Pleydell-Pearce have demonstrated that field-and event-specific memories help facilitate memory reconstruction. They are easier to remember and become important in reconstructing memories around them. Beah on his part makes a good attempt at maintaining logical and smoothly flowing prose from the beginning to the end. In both texts however, the collaborating adult input can be discerned in some instances. Beah, for example, narrates a scene where he and his friends return to their destroyed village and rebels capture them.

Later, an old man who had escaped is also captured and interrogated by a child rebel soldier. Beah points out:

Before the war a young man wouldn’t have dared to talk to anyone older in such a

rude manner. We grew up in a culture that demanded good behavior from

everyone, especially from the young. Young people were required to respect their

elders and everyone in the community (33).

The clear break with tradition in terms of how the old and the young relate is evident at the moment for the child, but the image/event processing shown in this excerpt

21 potentially reveals a collaborative work with specialist adults, including therapists. The collaborative work helps to fill gaps, develop ideas logically, and maintain smooth narrative flow. Importantly too, moments of processing trauma are realized by reaching out to pre-war normalcy and highlighting the subversion of systems of authority.

Trauma and Literature

Traumatic experiences are by nature difficult to represent due to limitations of language, internal choices of what to reveal, and societal expectations of truth as

Gilmore, Wang and McAdams earlier suggest. However, storytelling is a compelling technique of confronting trauma at work in ex-child soldier narratives. Being a child soldier involves exposure to traumatic experiences that forever alters one’s life even when great attempts for healing are made. Beah’s form of trauma has to do with silencing and reacting to noises reminiscent of gunshots and images of war that sometimes disturb his sleep. Mehari, on the other hand, continually has to deal with effects on her sexuality, with anger, and with acceptance of her identity and history, as well as her willingness to seek help – financial, psychological or otherwise (215). Both writers experience Post

Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) at different intensities, and more than anything else, the condition indicates their turn to literary writing in search of healing.

Sandra Bloom explains that trauma theory demands that interventions for traumatized individuals be focused on mastery and empowerment while avoiding further experiences of helplessness (3). Talking, talking and more talking about experiences, past lives, conflicts and feelings is helpful in confronting trauma. Shakespeare in

Macbeth urges that we must “give sorrow words; [because the] grief [that does not speak] whispers the o’erfraught heart and bids it break” (212). This act of speaking is what Beah

22 and Mehari do in the process of crafting their memoirs. Bloom also claims that apart from speech, art can play a great role in healing at both the personal and communal levels (7).

The art of storytelling presented in the select memoirs, a blend of fiction and biography, utilizes this healing power of narrative and provides new confidence to authors. As if to assure herself, Mehari intentionally writes, “now that I have written everything down, I am free. This book will give me peace” (ii).

Apart from storytelling, the narrators’ movement from violated spaces in Africa to safe spaces in the West can be interpreted through a framework of trauma and recovery.

Jopi Nyam views the de-emphasizing of Africanness through migration, music and adoption as a reconstruction of Beah’s identity to an agent free from the burden of the past (67). Mehari goes through this process, too, by leaving her father in Germany to start her own new life even when that newness meant living “beneath bridges” or going to unknown places with an unplanned future (194-197). Being physically in her father’s control was disturbing because he was not only violent, but also, in many ways, he represented the violence of the war she fought in Eritrea. Collectively, Beah and Mehari’s act of moving away from their violated spaces and any constant reminders of violence, as well as the writing of their memoirs, represent their willingness to work through the past.

Literature gives them a lifeline towards self-mastery, and physical distance from spaces of violence grants a sense of control over their external environment.

While Nyam sees a de-emphasizing of African identity as a freeing from the burden of the past memory, Michael Rothberg argues that memory is multidirectional, that it is an ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing where interaction of different historical memories illustrates productive and intercultural dynamics (3). For

23 Rothberg therefore, Beah and Mehari are not necessarily pushing away past memory and identity, but are involved in an unstable and ongoing reversal of collective and individual memories. Collective and individual colonial, racial and ethnic memories particularly for

Beah and Mehari seem to arise and intersect in different spaces and times throughout their narratives. This ongoing intersection of such memories within trauma narratives in the select memoirs reflects a convergence of separate histories and also registers a long history of social concerns globally such as slavery, colonialism and racism.

Social Justice Quests

Besides exploring trauma in literature, the study of ex-child soldier memoirs also encompasses an engagement with concerns for social justice. These social justice concerns also present a case for how art can be used for sociological ends. This study argues that ex-child soldier memoirs indeed espouse a critique of socio-political, historical and economic systems within child soldier spaces, key critiques in social justice. The Edmond Rice Centre defines social justice generally as “the way human rights are manifested in the everyday lives of people in every level of society” (1). As commonly understood, social justice promotes a world whose members, regardless of background and justice systems, enjoy basic human rights and equal access to the benefits of their society (Hemphill 2). Clearly, justice is the central focus irrespective of the social justice issue at hand. Justice is also a preserve of adults, with males in most cultures still dominating the field. Thus as an adult-safeguarded virtue, justice is ideally embodied and dispensed by institutions such as electoral bodies, judiciaries, parliaments, schools, hospitals, financial bodies, and others. Of course, justice also lies within the sphere of individuals who wield power, influence and authority in a society. Although

24 these individuals are part of the institutions above, reality suggests that the individuals often fall short of the ideals of justice, arm-twist the institutions or simply disrespect them. Children are usually the beneficiaries or victims of these power holders. Often children are inadequately equipped to participate in the complexity of the adult’s world of justice systems, let alone call for social justice when it is denied (Lansdown 3).

Social injustices usually take different and often highly sophisticated forms. Some of those forms are economic inequality, unfair treatment of groups within a society, and unequal or discriminative access to social services including education, health care, food provision, etc. Other dominant forms involve inequitable shares of national resources, misuse of national resources, external interference and oppressive government policies.

Specifically, Sierra Leone and Eritrea, from which Beah and Mehari respectively come, reveal safety as a critical concern for children though tied to the social justice issues above too. Paul Williams claims that the social injustices in spaces such as Beah and

Mehari’s nations are attributable to colonialism, post-colonial ruling elites, ethnicity and greedy warlords (8,9). I will discuss reasons for the social injustices later in this review, and more specifically at the point of analysis in this paper. The child-based narratives for this study use biographical data and the narrative voice for children to point at and demand explanations of conditions of social concern that adults do not seem to answer adequately or even reflect upon. What is clear is that seeing the threat to their safety,

Beah at 12 and Mehari at 6 could not fathom the complexity of social injustices within their societies, let alone their interconnectedness and contribution to the lack of safety.

Rather, the child’s voice and perspective demands the critical readers explore the gaping holes in social responsibility revealed by adult assumptions and inconsistencies. Perhaps

25 visible signs like disruption of school, older people obeying gun-wielding children and death happening so often, are easy enough to notice. But these realities represent the tip of the iceberg where social injustices are concerned.

Social movements that demand justice have traditionally been led by adults.

Youth participation usually follows adult influence. But the terms “youth” and specifically “child” do not provide adequate distinctions. The defining legal age of the child versus a youth/young adult varies. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of a Child (UNCRC) defines a child as “a human being below the age of 18 years unless under the law applicable to the child, [age of] majority is attained earlier” (4). This definition does not give a fixed age applicable across the world. However, for the purposes of this paper we shall use age 18 in accordance with UNCRC and the African

Child Policy Forum (ACPF). Having addressed the defining age of the child in relation to authors of texts under this study, we look at safety for children as a social justice issue.

I believe that essential to social justice quests for Beah and Mehari is the demand for safety. Safety begins at the individual level but must always be seen in the context of community, whether the community is as small as a family or village, or as big as a nation or continent. Levels of safety can be assessed from physical, psychological, social and even moral perspectives. What the demand for safety presupposes is, on the one hand, the ultimate threat to justice systems, and on the other, the protective measures designed to counter the fear of such threats. These threats corrode the pursuit for truth and peace and become a major concern for human rights across the globe. The problem of safety could also be a question of whether justice systems indeed serve all equally or only exist to serve a group within society. In California, for example, Shawn Ginwright

26 and James Taj observe that a proposition was initiated that allows youth to be tried as adults at age fourteen and that criminalizes many of the normal things that youth do (32).

Some examples include accidental damage of property (from balls or any youth recreation activities) and the definition of youth gangs as three or more people wearing similar clothing. The problem with such legislation is that it most severely impacts minority youth who are likely poor and live in situations where crime is more prevalent.

Favored or unfavored groups can therefore be racial, ethnic, political, social, economic or geographical. The California law is an example of how some legislation or even the total lack of legislation can disadvantage a group. In Sierra Leone, there was lack of responsible legislation and accountability for diamond proceeds to benefit the local people, therefore eroding the capacity of the government to provide and protect its citizens (Pham 68). For Eritrea, it was a lack of internal trust within groups and the external threat of Ethiopian annexation. Thus, Beah and Mehari’s memoirs can be read as texts whose basic purpose is the quest for safety. Beah alludes to this safety in an address to a UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) chamber in 1996 when he said, “the problem that is affecting us children is war that forces us to run away from our homes, lose our families, and aimlessly roam the forests” (199). The two memoirs expose how the lack of safety differently affects men and women, where culturally masculinity condemns helplessness while femininity encourages it.

Safety and other child welfare concerns have been publicized and addressed through some forms of direct engagement with children. The UN Committee on the

Rights of the Child is internationally the body that specifically promotes rights of children. It organizes discussions with children on a variety of social justice issues every

27 year such as Protecting and empowering children as human rights defenders (2018);

Children of Incarcerated Parents (2011); Rights of the Child to be heard (2006); State violence against children (2000); and the discussion that Beah and Mehari might have been glad to enter, Children in armed conflict (1992). These discussions eventually lead to publications by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human

Rights (OHCHR), which can be accessed freely by the public. Apart from these publications, children also get an opportunity to speak at United Nations gatherings such as the ECOSOC assembly that Beah addressed in 1996 in New York. One might question the efficacy of these child rights advocacy measures other than informing economic and political decision-makers of society, particularly when they are at times the prime suspect abusers or contributors to the abuse of human rights. On the other hand, a life story such as Beah’s or Mehari’s can arguably be more personal, detailed, and instructive for a wide range of people throughout the world, from a young student learning literature in junior high school to an elderly man enjoying the evening of his life. Although successfulness of the efforts of any single channel used in advocating for social justice may be difficult to measure, the child’s voice encompassed within memoirs makes its own contribution to positive change. The memoirs attempt to respond to the question of how broken the child narrators are, rather than give statistics and analytical explications such as those presented in highly decorated diplomatic and peace meetings. The memoirs provoke reflective and critical thinking on global issues and demand long-term responses, not to mention the short-term humanitarian assistance they help bring to the specific situation.

28 Displacement

I use the term displacement here both pragmatically and metaphorically to represent acts of forcefully moving people and resources from their natural settings and processes. It also refers to tramping on people’s identities and cultural prestige, while forcing new ones upon them. Colonialism, slavery and politics of patriarchy have had short and long-term ripple effects in communities such as those represented by Beah and

Mehari. The wars in Sierra Leone and Eritrea-Ethiopia are a culmination of historical, economic, social and geopolitical adult choices. The conflicts have had physical, social, economic, political and most significantly psychological ramifications. The memoirs under this study revisit and demonstrate how displacement continues to affect the authors and their home nations resulting in immigration and refugee status.

Beah and Mehari’s experience result in what Jopi Nyam refers to as

Transnational Migrant Identity. Nyam contends that texts such as Beah and Mehari’s negotiate displacement in the context of global mobility and intercultural construction through a universalized childhood and their narrator’s trauma (56). In other words, the memoirs act as documents that authenticate the necessity and demand for their authors’ acceptance in the West. Through the loss of childhood, the memoirs underline the sense of displacement and invite sympathy from the West. The child’s voice helps crystalize the sense of alienation by pointing to the unfulfilled childhoods of Mehari and Beah.

Nyam also sees a universality of childhood that attracts and shames the international audience, calling them to act and save the children (60). But the critical reader further notices in these texts what I view as a paradox of globalization and displacement in a

29 world that claims to move away from capitalistic nationalism towards a more interactive and integrated world.

In addressing the issue of globalization through an economic lens, David Slater observes that as national economies come closer to each other, there are critical paradoxes being played out where the trends towards social disintegration become accentuated, and where nations and neighborhoods are being pulled apart (649). For instance, free markets that have unregulated or poorly regulated production and consumption, like the case of diamonds in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Angola before and during the war, end up in international markets while immediate communities are torn apart instead of benefiting (Williams 97-99). Indeed, large foreign economies have been known to have interests in smaller economies and end up sliding into these violated areas through promises of assistance like humanitarian aid, specialized skills and military equipment. On the other hand, from a cultural perspective Nyam sees Western pop culture as a tool that de-emphasizes the importance of ethnic origins for globalization and particularly in the case of transnational migrants in order to claim their global citizenship

(66). Beah loves American rap music from his childhood days, while Mehari enjoyed

German pop music as she started her own music career. While media and pop culture permeate national borders, show a capacity to actualize the dream of globalization, and help reconstruct violated identities of people, one wonders whether they could also be responsible for renewed nationalisms in the current world that embolden demarcations between ‘us’ and ‘them’.

30 CHAPTER 4

ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION

In the Literature Review, I have explored connections between art and reality in relation to life writings that demand memory reconstructions through child narrators. I have also shown challenges that are encountered especially in representing trauma in the context of ex-child soldier memoirs. In this section, I analyze and discuss ways in which the child narrators in ex-child memoirs function as voices of critique to adults and the adult-constructed world. The section is organized under four major themes: displaced identities in children, child safety in the quest for social justice, innocent children taking adult roles, and violence and trauma on children.

As established earlier in this paper, Sierra Leone’s Ishmael Beah and Eritrea’s

Senait Mehari come from communities that suffered from a number of challenges: a sense of oppression, corruption and robbing of resources, inequitable distribution of resources and the denial of freedom for self-determination. Pre-war Sierra Leone was marked by massive government corruption especially under Joseph Momoh, Siaka

Stevens and their international sympathizers (Pham 52 - 61). On the other hand, Eritrea was under an unceremonious occupation by Ethiopia. Eritrea’s ELF and the EPLF liberation movements had a basic goal of fighting the Ethiopian occupation, but Mehari joined ELF at a time when the two groups, ELF and EPLF, were themselves at loggerheads. As children, Beah and Mehari were far from complete awareness of these complexities and the circumstances under which they were caught up as child soldiers.

Amongst the many reasons explaining these wars in Africa, colonialism and its effects

31 cannot be downplayed. Other factors are economic and social injustices entailing displacement of socio-cultural systems, values and identifiers like language and communal spirit.

Displaced Identities in Children

The child’s perspective does not understand the roots and contributing factors of war. The critic’s work necessarily goes deeper to find out those factors because they are implicitly and at times explicitly the target of the critique by the child’s voice. Paul

Williams argues that colonialism is not a principal cause of African civil wars, because such an assertion not only eliminates African agency in the war but also goes against some factual evidence that not all colonized nations of Africa have had civil war (8). I do agree with him in principle, but I register the fact that post-colonial leaders in specific

African countries such Beah’s Sierra Leone did not provide the right leadership to address questions of national unity, economic stability and equity, which were remnants of colonial administration and policies. Many nations adopted the colonial administrative structures that only worsened very young national prestige and sustained the psychological dent of colonialism. Ethiopia, on the other hand, chose to emulate imperial expansionism ideals embodied by Britain and Italy, imposing these upon Eritrea, her own sister nation. Therefore, colonialism still held the greatest responsibility as a trigger of civil wars in Africa. Neocolonialism and the politics of patrimony increased the division in some cases, too.

To help us understand the context of child’s critique also is the colonial and postcolonial socio-economic structures in Beah and Mehari’s communities that affected traditional or indigenous ones. The strength and longevity of marriage for instance was

32 impacted by new religious and economic demands. This uncertainty and weakness in the family bond has had ripple effects on children’s lives. We can understand this displacement clearly when we focus on the families from which these ex-child soldiers came. With the penetration of Islam into rural Sierra Leone, divorce was a reality which began to be entertained. In A Long Way Gone, Beah’s parents were themselves separated

(or divorced – the child narrator doesn’t differentiate the two). Beah’s father is a polygamist, which is an acceptable African traditional practice, but under Islam he was able to divorce Beah’s mother. Divorce becomes pronounced, a practice that was traditionally rare, which in Beah’s case complicated family bonds and strained financial capacity. On the other hand, Mehari in the Heart of Fire was born a reject simply because her mother could not face another failed marriage and her Christian father was unfaithful to monogamy (1-2). Polygamy was largely normal in pre-colonial Africa, but with

Christian and European cultural influence, the practice came to be regarded as abnormal beginning with colonial and afterwards post-colonial Africa.

The problem with polygamy was that it could not stand within the new socio- economic dispensation coming from the colonial era into post-colonial times. The child narrator sees the financial failures on the parent’s side as deliberate and not circumstantial. For example, Beah’s father had paid school fees for Beah and his brother

Junior before he separated from the mother and married another woman. Beah declares in

A Long Way Gone that the reason he and his brother Junior made frequent visits to their mother was because his father “refused to pay” school fees (10). Certainly formal schooling required tuition fees in order to prepare young people for the new skills needed in the colonial and post-colonial job market. But Beah’s parents could not fully respond

33 to the needs – such as schooling fees and family-bonding – of their children. Beah mentions that he had not seen his father for a while because “another stepmother had destroyed our relationship again” (10). In these accusatory observations by the child narrator, Beah is challenging his father by implying that he failed to read the signs of changing times and to adjust appropriately. Beah’s father does not seem to care that a larger family, including obligations to the children of his divorced wife, had greater economic and social needs than he could provide. But in essence, the critical reader understands that the socio-economic structures introduced by colonialism demanded a change in traditional practices such as polygamy, which then had a lesser ability to survive. Thus, the child’s narrative voice exposes not just the effects of colonial structures on the family setup, but also the unviability of the African traditional systems with the emergence of new structures. The effect was felt by the child and not the adult father. The onus is on adults such as the parents of Beah, but also on those adult readers within such contexts, to realize the unfortunate call for change – a change from traditions like polygamy and the option of divorce as a solution to personal and family challenges.

At another level, one can also read the challenge that colonial presence brought to the African traditional family. The capitalistic colonial trends worked counter to the communal ones. In this case, the child’s voice asks the reader to reflect beyond what the child sees and says. The capitalistic financial burden of school leaves the boys unsure of their future but also forces them to take responsibility for self-education, which they do through rap music and watching Western movies like Rambo (Beah 1, 6). Beah’s free time because of the space left by lack of schooling in the midst of a strained father- mother relationship is a gap in his growth created by adults. Unfortunately, the larger

34 community of neighbors and the extended family can no longer care for the challenge to the common good that Beah and other non-schooling children present. They too have their own burden of paying schooling fees and are likely caught up in the struggle of schooling their own children. In fact Beah and his brother received negative comments from the community to the effect that they were the “misfits in the community.”

In Heart of Fire, Mehari is a child who considers herself a “scandal” in the context of Eritrean-Ethiopian conflict because at her birth, Eritrea was still an Ethiopian province, and peoples from these two locations had been at war for fifteen years (1). She is essentially a child of mixed heritage, with an Ethiopian mother and Eritrean father.

Other children call her a ‘suitcase baby’ from what they hear from adults because Mehari was abandoned in a suitcase by her parents as an infant (1). So, at the beginning of her memoir, Mehari reveals a negative outlook on her parents whom we eventually meet later in the narrative. This revelation from a child’s narrative voice about her parents invites the reader to share her understandable negative attitude to her parents. Unlike Beah,

Mehari does not have an opportunity to live with both her parents before separation nor afterwards. She had no idea of what it felt like to be cared for and loved by parents. Thus, even before she met her father, she didn’t like him. She admitted that she associated her father with “bad things: soldiers searching for him at his parents’ house; other children asking her who and where her father was; and the uneasy knowledge that her auntie fetched her from an orphanage and that her father had done nothing to help” (35). There is a sense in which the child narrator in Mehari’s text implies the question, “how can I accept you when you didn’t want me in the first place?” On another level we know that

Mehari was abandoned by her parents because their marriage couldn’t work with the

35 Eritrean-Ethiopian conflict. She thus seems to challenge her parents that they never really thought through their union. But the child’s voice is also extending its criticism from parents of both Eritrean and Ethiopian origin, to the very actors that cause the conflict to exist. Italian, British, and Ethiopian imperialist collaboration were the main forces against Eritrean freedom and legitimacy (Pool 45). Had there been no conflict, perhaps

Mehari could have had an opportunity for parental care and love, but with the conflict, her identity is impossible right from her conception. Hers becomes a displaced identity for almost the first three decades of her life.

In terms of language displacement, Mehari suffers the greatest form of alienation and instability. She spoke her mother tongue, Tigrinya, at the beginning while at the government orphanage in Asmara. When she moved to the Comboni Sisters home, she was forced to learn Italian (14, 15, and 21). Moving back to her grandparents’ house, she had to relearn Tigrinya again. At the time she found it hard in school because she hardly understood the language (21). Many times she found herself an outsider in class, and she had to fight for her place in it, a reality we see repeated even when she moves to

Germany (21, 194). There is always a dilemma of language identity for Mehari, and the struggle is compounded by her Eritrean and Ethiopian parentage. The implied child’s critique is that she lacks a stable language and cultural identity due to parents neglect and war-related instabilities. Critical readers of Mehari’s text should also be aware of the element of imposed language in colonized societies, and how it devalues indigenous identity.

In A Long Way Gone, Beah on his part has a different experience with regard to language. As a young boy he was interested in English, especially the kind found in rap

36 music. When his father found Beah and his brother listening to and learning rap, he asked them, “can you even understand what you are saying” (6, 7). Beah’s father thinks that the boys should listen to BBC English, which he says is “good English” (7). However, Beah preferred rap English because it enabled him and his friends to prepare to perform at a talent show in Mattru Jong (6). Furthermore, it is rap music that saves the boys in some occasions during the war and later helps Beah to process his trauma by connecting to happy childhood days (38,163). However, Beah’s father doesn’t realize that BBC English is a norm forced on him by British colonial powers in Sierra Leone. In a sense, the child narrator enjoys the fractured standards of English found in hip hop and finds solace in it.

The adult, on the other hand, is perhaps afraid that the child has authority in an area he cannot follow.

The Child’s Safety within a Social Justice Quest

Escaped American slave and prominent abolitionist Fredrick Douglass once said,

“where justice is denied, poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither person nor property will be safe” (1886 speech). His remarks contextualize well the quest for different forms of justice for Sierra Leone and Eritrea. In both nations, war is used by adults as a tool for social justice. The child’s voice in memoirs under this study first critiques adults’ use of war for justice. Secondly, the voice is also critical of the contributing factors that necessitate war for their threat to the safety of the child.

In Sierra Leone, most adults expected that war was the only remedy for the corrupt government (Conteh 27). Beah’s father tells his son that the declaration of a one-

37 party state by Siaka Stevens was the beginning of “rotten politics” in Sierra Leone that culminated to “a revolutionary war, a liberation of the people from corrupt government”

(14). The explanations have a general truth in tandem with the allegations of “corruption, misrule, authoritarian tendencies and incompetence of the successive presidential administrations of Siaka Stevens and Joseph Momoh” (Pham 77). Beah, however, does not seem to understand why war is a necessity despite the reasoning given. In an innocent child’s perspective, Beah asks “what kind of liberation movement shoots innocent civilians, children…?” (14). The child’s narrative voice points to a safety concern for the child but also a contradiction between ‘killing of innocent people and liberation’ (14).

Reinforcing the child’s bewilderment, Beah asserts that “there wasn’t any one to answer his questions” (14). The adult, whose role it is to respond to Beah, is silent, which suggests that the adult ignores the child’s rights to knowledge and safety. The child’s narrative voice therefore shows that while the adult may want to control what the child knows, he cannot control the impact of that hidden knowledge on the child’s safety. On the one hand no adult within Beah’s environment can give any objective justification for killing innocent children and civilians. And on the other hand, critical readers as secondary witnesses through their reading of the testimony in Beah’s text are challenged to respond to his questions. Such an attempt at responding necessarily brings critical readers to explore the recipe of Sierra Leonean war in all its historical, economic, social and political configurations. That response may be a humanitarian one, as Mackey suggests, but I submit that it can as well be an evaluation of how the Western reader is implicated in that war, even if it’s through the purchase of their own diamond jewelry.

38 Pham documents that a good fraction of the diamonds reaching the international market, the biggest being in the West, were smuggled from Sierra Leone (67).

Later in A Long Way Gone, the experience of war changes Beah’s perspective and voice. Beah as a child soldier says of his army group, “my squad was my family, my gun was my provider and protector and my rule was to kill or be killed” (126). While his perceptions reveal the pressures of militaristic training and survival instincts, the bonds formed here go beyond comradeship for Beah. He probably takes this military family as a real one because his biological family is wiped out. A family is a source of safety for a child but after his family dies, ‘squad-family’ and ‘gun’ fills the space for Beah. That filling in can be interpreted as the adult’s brutal response to Beah’s earlier question on death and liberation. His safety is compromised and manipulated by the army leadership of Lieutenant Jabati, Corporal Gadafi and staff sergeant Mansary (128), and the government of Sierra Leone on whose behalf the military acts. Beah is thus trapped in layers of internal and external control where his own thoughts and childhood are lost. The child’s voice suggests that since the natural family that provides safety is no longer present, then the child’s vulnerability necessitates taking adult responsibilities for oneself and for others. The child narrator by implication reveals that during the war, the child acts as an adult. Again begging the question, where is the reasoning and responsible adult.

Unlike Beah, Mehari in Heart of Fire is in the Eritrean war of Liberation by the choice of her own father. He brought Mehari and her two step-sisters straight to the

Eritrean Liberation Front recruitment office (52). It is absurd that her father tells the little girls that they’ll stay with the ELF who will take care of them and their education (52).

39 Mehari’s unusual circumstances suggest that her father could not assure safety for his children and instead ELF provided such safety. The child’s narrative voice registers a criticism of negligent fatherhood, and shows the act of surrendering one’s own children to a war group as an act of violence to the child. Even as a communal group, ELF cannot provide safety because it transforms children to soldiers.

Innocent Children taking Adult Roles

Children in Beah and Mehari’s memoirs take adult roles, not just performing gun- related acts, but also the use of basic common sense. The child’s narrative voice that

Mehari embodies in the Heart of Fire questions many things including killing of

“enemies”. For example, Mehari asks her gun trainer Mihret “why are we killing them

[EPLF soldiers]?” adding that “they look exactly like us” (105). The child’s voice here carries a particular power – that of asking questions that the adult won’t ask. If an adult voiced these questions, it might seem naïve. For Mehari, what further confuses her is that while living in Asmara with the Italian nuns and later her grandparents, she had known people of other tribes, and everyone had lived together peacefully. Mehari’s expression of her confusion rises from anger and the threat to her safety. Her innocent words contain sharp criticism towards the ELF and EPLF conflict. It appears that the child narrator demonstrates a more basic fundamental reasoning for unity between the two adult-led groups. For the child narrator, the bare physical and linguistic likeness between ELF and

EPLF fighters is enough for unity. Her criticism is thus directed against the adults who lead the two factions. It appears, according to Mehari, that the right thing for ELF as well as EPLF is to unite and fight Ethiopia’s military.

40 In A Long Way Gone, one of the first disturbing adult role that Beah and his child mates assume is that of a community enemy. As a matter of course, one would only expect adults to be the natural suspects in enemy roles. But instead, children are forcibly drawn into the center of the conflict. Beah attests to the absurdity of children being assumed as enemies when he narrates that:

People were terrified of boys our age [7-16 years (110)]. Some had heard rumors

about young boys being forced by rebels to kill their families and burn their

villages. These children patrolled in special units, killing and maiming civilians…

[So] some people tried to hurt us to protect themselves, their families and

communities (37).

In this excerpt, Beah seems to resonate within the context of war and portray communities as acting in self-defense as the situation demands. But the real issue is how a society gets to the point of considering its own children as enemies. Boys are no longer taken as innocent children. They are dangerous enemies, and on several occasions we see

Beah and his fellow boys mistreated before villagers come to accept them as lost children

(38, 60). The child narrator implicitly presses the social question of how children can be denied protection and trust from adults. The child’s voice also questions the assumption that a human society espouses certain human values and principles. But this also seems to explain why the UN’s Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) came into existence.

Societies were neglecting a central role to protect and nurture their young ones. The extent of absurdity for Beah is not just that some children are murderers and others are potential enemies, but rather that the adult is actually unreliable and untrustworthy.

41 The child’s agency comes to the surface when Beah says his heart seemed frozen and his childhood passed without his knowledge (126). In this case Beah is not acting as a child but a vessel for the adult’s agenda. Before Beah and his fellow boys joined the war, they made efforts to escape it. During one encounter while escaping the war, the boys encountered a village that was so afraid to protect itself from unarmed boys that it was only the old who could not run away that were left. Beah is very appreciative of the one old man who was left, “he was for us” (57). Beah sees hope in the old and frail man as opposed to those who escape in fear. Readers can understand this reaction of escape as warranted by the fact that many people were afraid of boys generally because they formed a good number of the Rebels. However, the child narrator underlines the abnormality where the defenseless bring fragments of hope to unarmed children. The meeting of both the defenseless child and the elderly man sounds a symbolic message of how power, corruption and the fight for resources, strips human beings of the very beauty of peace. This critique is further cemented when Beah narrates an experience in another village where when he and his fellow boys went to the river to wash their faces: “mothers would grab their children and run home” (57). The boys weren’t armed, yet adults in the villages already treated them as if their presence embodied evil. These boys are certainly seen as agents of the flawed adults, both in the government army and the rebel group. A view that gestures to the fact that the apparatus that measures evil and good within the child soldier environment is faulty. War thus bestows the boy child an adult burden, one that the child’s voice in Beah’s text demands to be taken away. The child soldier has no agency and so demand to be seen as innocent, while adults who have placed him in such circumstances are to blame.

42 With the adult burden of responsibility removed from the child, atrocities narrated by the child’s narrative voice become evidence against the adults. Such evidence underscores a general strength of Beah and Mehari’s memoirs because they have detailed evidence against government military as well as Rebel and Liberation groups. Evidently

Rebel leaders like Foday Sankoh, the leader of Sierra Leone’s RUF, have been captured and charged for war crimes including recruiting children as soldiers and crimes against humanity (Pham 162, 163). Contrary, most government leaders in both the Sierra Leone and the Eritrea-Ethiopia conflicts never faced punishment. Beah and Mehari basically fight on behalf of these governments, thus accusing the government/liberation forces under adult leadership. Beah documents that in his unit they attacked civilian villages to capture recruits and whatever else they could find (122). He also mentions that they rounded up civilians hiding in the huts and houses and made them carry the military loot back to the base (123). Beah and Mehari’s memoirs in effect criticize their governments and by implication constitute at least informal grounds for indictments of some of the unpunished adult actors in the war-consumed childhoods. The child narrators also leave a permanent mark through the memoirs, as a reminder to present and future societies within

Africa, to be accountable and continually re-evaluate their political and national duty and commitment towards preserving the safety and dignity of their children.

Violence and Trauma on Children

In their respective memoirs, Beah and Mehari embody some distinctive differences based on their gender, geography and history, which account for the ways the plague of war affects them. Such differences can be deciphered in the storytelling as they make efforts to process their psychological trauma. Even though he does not appreciate it

43 at first, Beah is lucky to have found a counselling center to help him navigate the psychological trauma of war. Mehari, on the hand, is not so lucky in accessing such help to untangle herself psychologically. She accesses the services much later after adjusting to normal life.

Beah hates the constant statement “it is not your fault” by civilians at Benin

Home, a rehabilitation center for child soldiers (160). But as critical readers, we may appreciate that the phrase functions first as a therapeutic message. The phrase presupposes that becoming a child soldier is a mistake forced on him, and performs the therapeutic work of rescuing the “child” from the “child soldier”. The reverse movement from adult to child is difficult, but trauma theory suggests that this is a fight and flight situation in which Beah tries to hold on to a strong adult representation of self as a

‘soldier’ and keeps fighting the efforts of therapist nurses and staff who push him to accept the weakness of a child, because he is one. Indeed, when he calls civilians and city soldiers “sissy” (153), it’s for the same purpose of refuting weakness and denying his childhood. It is a transitional moment for him that signals a release of the adult-burden that was wrapped around him.

Secondly, the statement ‘it is not your fault’ also functions as a question that the critical reader needs to respond to concerning whose “fault” it is. Beah, of course, eventually accepts the truth of that statement, but only after a dream that he narrates later in the memoir. It’s a nightmare that begins with his childhood happiness and that takes him to his original home where he meets men who kill each other with guns and knives.

Of the dream, Beah recalls:

44 Each time a person was stabbed, I felt it; saw blood dripping from the same part

of my body as that of the victim. I began to cry as the blood filled the room. The

men disappeared and the door immediately opened, letting the blood out with a

rush. I went outside with the blood all over me and saw my mother, father, older

and younger brother. They were all smiling as if nothing had happened, as if we

had been together all this time (164).

Beah’s feelings, his emotions at last begin to come to the foreground. The dream is symbolic of a return of his childhood and a signal of resolving his Post Traumatic Stress

Disorder (PTSD). It is after this dream that Beah admits that he began to believe and own the statement “none of these things are your fault” (165). By owning its truth, Beah, who embodies the child’s narrative voice in his narrative, leaves the critical reader to direct the ‘fault’ elsewhere – to military and political leaders of his time. Government and

Rebel leadership, and international political and economic interest groups among other direct and indirect actors, constitute the people to be faulted. The fault is not based only in the use child soldiers, but much more on their economic, historical and social crimes that arguably led to the war scenario in the first place. Foday Sankoh, Charles Taylor, and several commanders under the RUF group and on few the government’s part, Chief Sam

Hinga, Johnny Paul Koroma, Alex Tamba and others have since faced consequences of the law (Pham 162, 163).

For her part, Mehari lacked a therapeutic opportunity immediately after war.

Although she was not frequently involved in gruesome acts like Beah, her lack of parental love as a child and the child soldier experiences she did experience still called

45 for therapy. In some instances in the Heart of Fire, she breaks into a self-talk and is quite clear and articulate about her feelings and thoughts:

My mistake had always been to blame myself for everything that went wrong, not

others, even my father. I never blamed him for having sent me off to be a child

soldier. I did myself harm by thinking of myself as stupid and weak and being

unable to accept that I had better qualities (245).

In the excerpt, we have what appears to be a personal journal entry. Such journal writing is a characteristic of Mehari more than Beah and perhaps implies a female mode of processing trauma, a mode that is personal and in many instances quite inward-looking with extensive narrations based on relationships with people around and beyond. For instance, she admires Helen Meles, an Eritrean singer because her songs are “joy[ful], pure and full of conviction,” while she says that her own are full of “doubt and brooding emotion” (246). Although these renditions appear in one of the last chapters she entitles

“Today”, they have much to do with her past experiences as a child. The block excerpt almost puts the reader in the position of a therapist, as Mehari seems to ask the reader not just to listen, but to sympathize with her predicament. Critical readers can thus acknowledge the amount of destruction done to Mehari and turn the blame first to her father, and then to the ELF group that used children like her as soldiers, and of course the historical and global forces in the shadows of Eritrean war. In the block excerpt, Mehari is transferring blame from self to her father and “others,” a reference that encompasses

ELF leadership as well as those behind Ethiopian aggression. With that release, she is probably better able to work through her brooding emotions and self-doubt.

46 The critical and adult reader probably agrees that the child soldiers ought to accept the counsel ‘it is not your fault’ even when the narrators have committed terrible acts. This is because the child’s narrative voice implicitly reveals that the child’s wartime actions were mostly a result of adult negligence or incapacity to nurture. Beah says “my childhood had gone by without my knowing, and it seemed as if my heart had frozen”

(126), an indication that his actions were not consciously self-directed but influenced by adults. With Beah, therapists help underscore where the fault lies; for Mehari, it is much of her own discovery.

Apart from dealing with child soldier issues, Mehari also attempts to deal with her broken family in Heart of Fire. Her father’s violence is obvious. Mehari notices even from the beginning that her father had a specific anger towards her. She says that although smacking children was a norm, “the longer she lived with her father, the clearer it became that he had it in for me… [my father had] a vindictiveness, regardless of whether I had done anything wrong” (48). Further, she says that her father was not quite as violent with his other children; he beat them, but never lost control like he did with her. This distinctive vendetta spirit in her father is also a driving factor for Mehari’s resolve to break away from him. Psychologically speaking, Mehari probably reminds her father of her mother and even more specifically, the Ethiopian regime that he spent a good chunk of his life fighting against. Using American novelist Tony Morrison’s suggestion that a literary work interrogates the reader (xii), I imagine that Mehari’s father would read his daughter’s book as an interrogation, especially the very uncomfortable pages that paint him as brutal. He is directly complicit in Mehari’s predicament. He has to face the shame of his own violence and of giving his children over to violence when

47 there could have been another way out. But the reader is also under interrogation in their own context, especially their potential contribution to the child soldier phenomenon. The child’s narrative voice acknowledges a general truth that children recognize quite easily when they are mistreated. The child’s narrative voice acts as a means of posing questions to the adult world, and offers an opportunity to revisit and heal painful memories of parental, communal, national and global injustice against the child.

In reflecting on her trauma, Mehari particularly challenges male chauvinism in

Africa against the girl child. As young as she was, she could grasp that there was a clear value-demarcation between boys and girls. She writes that “the difference between the way boys and girls were treated was an accepted fact” and adds that she was made to feel that she was in the wrong even when she felt she was right (49). It is quite interesting that she is critical of the way boys are treated differently from girls in ELF and Eritrea in general. Unlike boys, she says that girls got the proper beating and were not expected to have a mind of their own. But she had her own mind, which made her more susceptible to beatings. Surprisingly for Mehari, quite a few of the leaders were women in the ELF (55), but she is quick to add that the majority of women were middle leaders and that only in war were women in Eritrea almost equal to men. Domestically, she says that her father’s regime of terror was only to save him from doing any work (49). The child’s perspective is, of course, limited, and although it is informed by the hindsight and retrospection of the adult Mehari, by the admission of gender differences, the voice is critical of men’s sense of entitlement and dominance in Mehari’s society.

In a similar register of sexual difference, Mehari brings forth the experience and effects of rape in her memoir. Rape has great traumatic effect and becomes a strong

48 hazard of the emancipation of the girl child in Mehari’s context. In fact, it is through her own rape that she realizes she is “still a girl”, despite being a soldier like her male counterparts (123-125). The rape affects Mehari’s future relations such as the one she has with Stefan. She could not enjoy sex because she was paralyzed with pain – physical pain and the pain of knowing its origin (215). For Mehari, sex was as she says “a wasteland,” which she associated with pain and humiliation (193). The biggest challenge for Mehari is that she cannot speak out about it because it was a ‘secret’ and a shame that could not be shared (125). But through the child’s narrative voice Mehari is able to speak out and condemn the silencing of the girl child by males. Her section on ‘Big bellies’ shows how

“girl after girl growing large with child” encapsulates a critic by the virtue of narrating about an abuse instigated and covered up by adults, especially men (124,125). The child’s voice empowers Mehari to break norms in her society besides helping her to process the trauma of rape. Again the child’s narrative voice turns away the shame from the girl child to men with Mehari’s context. Thus there is hope that her narrative can speak to her community in ways that will lead to greater care for the girl child.

49 CHAPTER 5

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION

The child’s narrative voice in African ex-child soldier memoirs in this study has exposed inconsistencies and flaws of the adult in war-torn Africa, and by extension those involved in national and global socio-economic and historical forces of dominance and control. But the voice also functions to turn away the burdens of adulthood placed on children involved in war back to the adults. In essence, the child’s voice demands that adults stop projecting their problems onto children, through forcing the children into complex adult conflicts and compromising safety. Thirdly, the voice functions to challenge adults on opposing sides of economic, political and historical conflicts to sit across the same table, to take stock of how they have drifted away from the beauty and purpose of humanity.

Further research on the reception, availability, integration into literature curriculum and general impact of the memoirs under this study, and others, is appropriate, especially in Africa. As products of African history, Beah’s and Mehari’s narratives can speak to leaders and communities in Africa particularly about strengthening the moral compass within their society. Another area worth exploring further is the child’s narrative voice and its potential to question the ever changing

African socio-cultural landscape. With poetry and narratives such as Uwem Akpan’s My

Parents’ Bedroom and Camara Laye’s The Dark Child, the child’s voice is a literary tool that invites an adult to return to some basic principles of human life.

50 The purpose of humanity lies in the potential of every person. That purpose can be found through our active engagement as readers of Beah and Mehari’s memoirs. But also, that purpose exists deep in ourselves, in our own child-like vulnerability and in our willingness to protect and recognize each other’s vulnerability. Thus like Mehari, we can look at the other and say, “he looks like me”, or “they look like us”. If adults cannot begin approaching each other from the child’s innocent perspective, then Beah and

Mehari’s experiential narratives have not achieved their goal or in other words, adults have not grasped the full import of the memoirs.

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