The Child Soldier Narrative and the Problem of Arrested Historicization

This essay proposes a comparative reading of child soldier narratives from Africa, most of them novels, and argues that the recent texts (those published since the mid-1990s) exhibit a lesser engagement with history than the war novels from the colonial and immediate postcolonial periods. One reason for this loss of historicity lies in the way the human rights frame is applied to the child soldier identity and conditions his or her story. The earlier war novels were written in the context of resistance struggles that highlight the agency of the subject whereas the recent emphasis on the victim status of the child soldier seems to compromise his agency. Looking to narrative as a part of the therapeutic process of recovery, these recent texts contrast a past loss of agency that pertains to the time of the war with a future regaining of agency through recovery. This narrative pattern serves to individualize the child soldier and to shift attention away from social and political conditions that brought on his or her circumstances in the first place. The essay also pays attention to recent texts that critique this trend by framing their narratives as failed novels of education and hence tapping into an earlier tradition of African writing as a way of providing historical contextualization. Thus the works of Ahmadou Kourouma and Emmanuel Dongala demonstrate that the complexity of the historical, political, cultural, as well as individual circumstances of the child soldier requires the deployment of a less literal, more ironic, and even allegorical method of narrative representation.