Nightmares of History—: The Outer Limits of Children's Literature

Abstract

Nightmares of History—The Outer Limits of Children's Literature Hamida Bosmajian In the last two decades the ironic mode—the depiction of the human condition as limited by realistic historical time and space—has made definite encroachments on children's literature, particularly in stories about familial or social trauma. Though reviewers often question if works about child abuse, family disintegration, sex, violence, drug addiction, and prejudice can still be called children's fiction, perceptive adults would agree that such works can both have therapeutic value for young victims and raise the consciousness of youngsters whose environment is stable. There is, however, another category of the ironic mode in young people's literature: literature about historical trauma. The nightmare of history is de-creation by adults, a nightmare that always includes children, be they enslaved Africans, Nazi holocaust victims, or survivors of Hiroshima. Historical trauma is a collective inundation of a culture; it affects the life, not just of the individual or the small group, but of the entire social order, its past, present, and future. The reader of literature about such traumas can no longer comfortably apply us/them dichotomies, for this literature universalizes moral problems, choices, and consequences. The image of the child in such literature, as recalled by a survivor-witness, is often a devastating ethical challenge, for children have often been singled out to suffer special brutalities. We are loathe to shape our collective sin and guilt through the genre of children's literature. Perhaps we fear that to depict the children within the nightmare of history will both taint our own image of innocence and deny young readers trust in the future we shape; for is not children's literature a seduction of children into our symbolic structures and values? Yet children have lived and do live in historical time and voice their concerns today about the next possible nightmare—global nuclear war. Three works that confront the themes and horizons of historical trauma in children's literature are Paula Fox's The Slave Dancer, Hans Peter Richter's Friedrich, and Toshi Maruki's Hiroshima No Pika. In my discussion I will point out how the three cardinal sins of Western civilization—the enslavement of Africans, anti-Semitism and the holocaust, and the atom bomb as apocalypse—affect the child characters in these stories, and how they might influence the young reader's reaction to our civilization's discontents, crimes, and guilts. I contend that if such literary works are shared within a context where youngsters can voice their concerns and where adults are ready to engage in dialogue rather than diatribe, rationalization, and assuagement, they cannot but be therapeutic. They define and thereby set limits to the anxieties of young readers. In each narrative the main character is a victim-survivor. In The Stove Dancer and Friedrich the narrator writes a confession because he witnessed and participated in historical crimes. Seven-year-old Mii in Hiroshima No Pika is a portrait ostensibly intended for the pre-analytical reader. The impact of her story, told in the third [End Page 20] person, comes through the great simplicity of the text and its powerful illustrations. The Slave Dancer seems removed in time for some young readers, who have read it as an adventure story comparable to Treasure Island, but others are moved by the suffering depicted and find in this fiction an historical understanding of the oppression of black people. They can identify with the ethical problems of thirteen-year-old Jessie Bollier, who is kidnapped in New Orleans in 1840 and commanded to play his fife for the dancing of the slaves on board The Moonlight. Even though this book won the Newbery Award, Fox received negative criticisms, especially for her portrayal of blacks and Jessie's reactions to them. Yet when we compare The Slave Dancer with autobiographical accounts of concentration camp survivors, we find that Fox is accurate in depicting the psychology of human beings in extreme situations. Her fictional autobiography springs from Jessie's need to confess, for he finds no relief when he confesses to a runaway slave, and when Jessie tries to share his feelings with his mother, she cries...