#I RESIST BY TELLING MY STORY FULL#

Protracted conflict, increasingly urbanized warfare 6 and unprecedented forced displacement around the world 7 present a particularly challenging environment for children and for efforts to protect and empower them. Thus, they can reveal complex aspects of children's experiences of war that offer a rich resource for better understanding children's lives in war and possibilities for better addressing violence and supporting peace. Such memoirs reflect how ideas of children and childhood are constructed, reveal “cultural spaces available to host and circulate these narratives” 4 and are fundamentally located in a space of “struggle for recognition of individuals and groups” 5. Children's war memoirs show children who, even when violence and conflict overwhelm their lives, find ways of navigating, resisting, surviving amidst conflict. Thus, this article argues that such stories offer a counter-narrative to dominant framings of children in war as passive victims. Narratives of children's experiences of war, such as a memoir, open space to overcome the distance and abstraction of numbers. The genre of children's war memoir is growing in popularity in literary publishing. Much as I like facts, we are not numbers, we are human beings and we all have stories. … The year 2015 was when I became a fact, a statistic, a number. I hate the word refugee more than any word in the English language. It is the story of one boy, his memories, and what he witnessed.” 2 Seventeen-year-old Syrian refugee Nujeen Mustafa says: Sudanese former child soldier Emmanuel Jal prefaces his book, War Child, by noting that “this one is not meant to be a history of a country to be read by scholars. Yousafzai frames the book as a story of a specific experience of conflict and its consequences. So concludes the prologue to I Am Malala, the memoir of Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani girl who campaigned for education in the Swat Valley and was shot by the Taliban at age 15 in October 2012. Who is Malala? I am Malala and this is my story.

#I RESIST BY TELLING MY STORY FULL#

… By the time we got to the hospital my long hair and Moniba's lap were full of blood. … My friends say he fired three shots, one after another. Such a move may help address the comprehensive silencing of children's voices in the institutional architecture concerned with children in war. Children's authoritative voices in memoir writing reveal the limitations of protectionist-dominated approaches and offer a rationale for taking the participatory elements of international humanitarian mechanisms and responses to conflict more seriously. Children experience particular vulnerabilities and risks in conflict zones and their potential as contributors to the solutions to war must also be taken seriously. However, stories such as those in children's war memoirs draw attention to the agency and capacity of children to negotiate and navigate distinct traumas and experiences in war.

Protectionist frames of children as passive, uncomprehending victims characterize the international architecture of responding to children in war.

I resist by telling my story