The Resilient Child in Contemporary Children's Literature: Surviving Personal Violence

Abstract

The Resilient Child in Contemporary Children's Literature:Surviving Personal Violence Eliza T. Dresang (bio) Violence—an intense, disruptive action, force, or circumstance—has many faces, takes many forms. The openness of the postmodern, increasingly connected electronic world encourages faces and forms of violent texts for youth virtually unknown in the past.1 In real life, young people encounter sexual abuse or other personal attack from within the family or community. Urban wars join those on remote battlefields.2 Violence, permeating daily existence, accompanies chronic poverty and homelessness. In the United States alone, according to the Annie E. Casey Foundation, more than 7.1 million children live in poverty. Alcohol and drug abuse make life unpredictable, uncontrollable, and irrational. In contemporary literature for youth, this violence appears in words and emerges in pictures. Books devoid of the idyllic settings and "everything turns out OK" endings that have permeated children's literature for decades demonstrate this radical change. Children are asked to contemplate and try to understand previously excluded segments of their own world or that of their peers. They find acknowledgment in this literature that they, too, may experience some of the dramatic and difficult situations that adults have pretended belong only to them. Perry Nodelman's description of the result of the traditional absence of sexuality in children's literature might stand, as well, for a description of the result of the absence of violence, poverty, and related topics: We produce a children's literature that is almost totally silent on the subject of sexuality, presumably in order to allow ourselves to believe that children truly are as innocent as we claim—that their lives are devoid of sexuality. In doing so, however, we make it difficult for children to speak to us about their sexual concerns: our silence on the subject clearly asserts that we have no wish to hear about it, that we think children with such concerns are abnormal. ("Other" 30) A small group of selected literary works, published by trade publishers in the United States between 1993 and 1996, provides the opportunity to examine texts that seem to break free from widely practiced, limiting conventions in literature for young children. In a departure from the more remote or fantastic violence of the past, each of these books realistically portrays violence as part of a child's immediate environment. These seven books—Davida Adedjouma and Gregory Christie's The Palm of My Heart: Poetry by African American Children (1996), Maya Angelou and Jean-Michel Basquiat's Life Doesn't Frighten Me (1993), Eve Bunting and David Diaz's Smoky Night (1994), Carolyn Coman's What Jamie Saw (1995), Nikki Giovanni and Chris Raschka's The Genie in the Jar (1996), Raschka's Elizabeth Imagined an Iceberg (1994), and Maurice Sendak's We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy (1993)—are each sufficiently complicated to sustain discussion. All of these authors and illustrators have produced award-winning books for children. Among the seven are the 1994 Caldecott Award book, Smoky Night, a 1996 Newbery Honor book and 1996 National Book Award finalist, What Jamie Saw; and a 1997 Coretta Scott King Honor book, The Palm of My Heart. All but one, What Jamie Saw, are picture books in which both visual and verbal elements convey content. Five of the texts unfold in poetry or nursery rhyme. But these books relate to one another most directly through the young age of the implied audience, the thread of real or implied contemporary community or family violence,3 and the portrayal of a resilient child protagonist who successfully survives the violence. By resilience, I refer here not to invulnerability but rather to the ability to "bounce back" when encountering chaotic or potentially chaotic external circumstances.4 The personal violence—the intense, disruptive action, force, or circumstance—experienced by the contemporary literary children differs substantially from book to book. In Smoky Night community violence erupts in the form of an inner-city riot. We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy personifies the violence of poverty and homelessness by showing giant rats chasing parentless children. In The Genie in the Jar and The Palm of My...