War-affected Children in Three African Short Stories: Finding Sanctuary within the Space of Placelessness
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1 octobre 2020
- doi: 10.4000/ces.2198
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Annie Gagiano, « War-affected Children in Three African Short Stories: Finding Sanctuary within the Space of Placelessness », Commonwealth Essays and Studies, ID : 10.4000/ces.2198
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In short stories by three postcolonial African authors depicting war-affected children – Zimbabwean Dambudzo Marechera’s “The Camp” (1994, written in 1986), Nigerian Ben Okri’s “Laughter beneath the Bridge” (1986) and Ethiopian Maaza Mengiste’s “A Good Soldier” (2012) – the child protagonists are displaced and exist in precarious spaces of unbelonging. The conditions vividly evoked from these war-affected African children’s perspectives indicate that the unaccommodating “places” where the children find themselves propel them into terrifyingly featureless, engulfing and unrecognizable “non-places,” in need of sanctuary as a place of safety. Yet even in such places of desperation, the children somehow retain or find precarious shelter in “places” of love, tenderness and loyalty. war-affected children, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Ethiopia, displacement, sanctuary