Childhood Traumas: Narratives and Representations

235 Pages·2020·2.056 MB·English

by  Kamayani Kumar and Angelie Multani

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

CHILDHOOD TRAUMAS
Narratives and Representations
Edited by Kamayani Kumar and
Angelie Multani
First published 2020
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa
business
© 2020 selection and editorial matter, Kamayani Kumar and Angelie
Multani; individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Kamayani Kumar and Angelie Multani to be identified
as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their
individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77
and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-1-138-61192-4 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-34127-4 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
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CONTENTS
List of Figures vii
List of Contributors viii
Acknowledgements xii
Introduction 1
1 Poof! Up in smoke: A modern fairy tale 13
KAMAYANI KUMAR
2 Colours of trauma paint a thousand words: “Leaving
Tibet” in paintings by Tibetan children in India 22
ANURIMA CHANDA
3 War babies 37
BETHANY SHARPE
4 “Waiting for my mum to come back”: Trauma(tic)
narratives of Australia’s stolen generation 50
SOMRITA GANGULY
5 Drawing an account of herself: Representation of
childhood, self, and the comic in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis 62
AMRITA SINGH
6 Cache-cache: Writing childhood trauma 75
NANCY ALI
v
CONTENTS
7 Negotiating trauma: The child protagonist and state
violence in Midnight’s Children and Cracking India 93
SOMESHWAR SATI AND CHINMAYA LAL THAKUR
8 Quest into the past: Heroic quest and narrative of trauma
in Jane Yolen’s Briar Rose 102
VANDANA SAXENA
9 Et tu, brute?: The child soldier and the child victim in
Shobasakthi’s Traitor 114
USHA MUDIGANTI
10 Children at war: Child(hood) trauma in popular Japanese
animation 132
BENJAMIN NICKL
11 Returning horror, re-visioning real: Children and trauma
in Grave of the Fireflies 148
RITWICK BHATTACHARJEE
12 Coping with killing?: Child soldier narratives and traces
of trauma 160
SARAH MINSLOW
13 We needed the violence to cheer us: Losses and
vulnerabilities in Ishmael beah’s A Long Way Gone:
Memoirs of a Boy Soldier 174
RAHUL KAMBLE
14 Children of the trail: The trauma of removal and assimilation 186
AMIT SINGH
15 Child/hood and 9/11 trauma: A study of Jonathan Safran
Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close 194
NISHAT HAIDER
Index 209
vi
FIGURES
1.1 “Cutting Down Bunks”, Helga Weissova, 13 years old 17
1.2 Red Cross Visit 17
vii
CONTRIBUTORS
Nancy Ali has written extensively on the experiences of the mostly illiterate
female moujahidines in the guerrilla war that was to end French coloni-
zation of Algeria. More recently, she published articles on the element of
narrativity joining the historical and literary discourses, as well as on col-
lective memory as a political instrument, particularly with regards to the
Shoah in France. In September, she starts a fellowship at the Yad Vashem
in Jerusalem, on Holocaust Representation in Egyptian Popular Culture
since the 1990s.
Ritwick Bhattacharjee is Assistant Professor at the Department of Eng-
lish, SGTB Khalsa College, University of Delhi, India. He completed his
MPhil from the Department of English, University of Delhi on Stephen
King and the effects of the phenomenal fantastic on the everyday reality
of human beings. His research interests are in fantasy studies, phenom-
enology, continental philosophy, Indian English Novels, Disability Stud-
ies, and Graphic Novels. His publications range from academic articles
on philosophy, fantasy, politics, disability, and translation to journalistic
articles and fiction work. Currently, he is working towards the publica-
tion on a treatise on pessimism and the nature of spatio-temporal reality
within the pessimistic world.
Anurima Chanda is a Senior Writing Tutor at the Centre for Writing and
Communication, Ashoka University, India. She has completed her PhD
on Indian English Children’s Literature from the Centre for English
Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. She was a pre-doctoral fellow at
the University of Wuerzburg (July 2016-Oct 2016, DAAD Programme
“A New Passage to India”) working under Prof. Isabel Karremann. She
writes for children and has published with leading publishing houses.
Somrita Ganguly is a professor, poet, and literary translator, presently affili-
ated with Brown University, Rhode Island, USA, as a Fulbright doctoral
research fellow. She has taught British Literature to undergraduate stu-
dents in Delhi and Calcutta, and translates from Bengali and Hindi to
viii
CONTRIBUTORS
English. She was selected by the National Centre for Writing, UK, as an
emerging translator in 2016. She has been invited as translator-in-resi-
dence at Cove Park, Scotland, in October 2017, and in December 2017
she was invited as poet-in-residence at Arcs of a Circle, Mumbai, an
artistes’ residency organized by the US Consulate in Bombay. Somrita’s
work has been showcased at the 2017 London Book Fair and she has
been published in Asymptote, Words Without Borders, in Other Words,
and Muse India, among others. She has thirteen academic publications
to her credit and is a recipient of the Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund
Award (2013) and the Sarojini Dutta Memorial Prize (2011). Somrita
has recently completed translating a political biography, an anthology of
lyrical verses, a five-volume novel-in-verse, and a contemporary retelling
of the Mahabharata. She is currently translating a novel on the Russian
Revolution from Bangla to English.
Nishat Haider is Professor of English at the University of Lucknow, India.
She is the author of Contemporary Indian Women’s Poetry (2010). She
has held numerous administrative and scholarly positions on boards and
committees, and has also served as the Director, Institute of Women’s
Studies, University of Lucknow. Recipient of Meenakshi Mukherjee Prize
(2016), C. D. Narasimhaiah Award (2010), and Isaac Sequeira Memorial
Award (2011), she has presented papers at numerous academic confer-
ences and her essays have been included in a variety of scholarly journals
and books. Her current research interests include postcolonial studies,
popular culture, and gender studies.
Rahul Kamble is Assistant Professor in the Department of Indian and World
Literatures in the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad,
India since 2010. He teaches courses on Childhood Studies, Afri-
can American Literature, American Literature, Narratives of Conflict,
Drama, Theatre, and Performance, etc. In 2015 he published a co-edited
anthology Approaches to Childhood: Issues and Concerns in Creative
Representations.
Sarah Minslow is Assistant Professor of Children’s Literature at California
State University Los Angeles, USA. She teaches children’s literature and
global human rights. Her research has two strands. The first is the poten-
tial for children’s literature and media to influence developing attitudes
towards Otherness. The second is the intersection between human rights,
literature, and film. Also, she works with educators to develop human
rights curriculum in the K-12 setting.
Usha Mudiganti is Assistant Professor at the School of Letters of Ambedkar
University Delhi, India. She teaches courses on literatures in India, North
America, and Britain. Her research interests include gender studies with
ix