Term Paper

Can the Child Testify?: On Childhood, Testimony, and the Cultural Construction ofthe Child as Political Subject —Julia Emberley

In February 2009, the English playwright Caryl

Churchill presented her work. Seven Jewish Children: A

Play for Caza, at the Royal Court in London, England.

Her ten-minute play, directed in this performance by

Dominic Cooke, was staged free of charge. The play

consists of seven events in Jewish history, including,

for example, the Holocaust, the establishment of the

Israeli state, the first intifada, and the expropriation

of water supplies, and concluding with the recent

Israeli onslaught in Gaza in January of 2009. Each

scene in this production was performed by a different

actor. Churchill has made the text of the play and a

performance directed by Elliot Smith readily available

on the Internet. In Smith's production, the play is

performed by one woman, Jennie Stoller. In performing

all parts, Stoller is seen and heard speaking in a series

of oppositional imperative sentences, as if she is talking

to another adult or other adults, telling them what to

say or not to say to an absent Jewish female child in

order to explain the meaning of each of the events.

Churchill's directorial comments in the text of the play

made available on the web through the Royal Court

Theatre are as follows:

No children appear in the play. The speakers are

adults, the parents and if you like other relations of

the children. The lines can be shared out in any way

you like among those characters. The characters are

different in each small scene as the time and child

are different. They may be played by any number of

actors.

Here is an excerpt from the play, taken from the part

where Jewish settlers are living in the former Palestinian

territory. The adult voice exhorts the listener to instruct

the child in the following manner:

Don't tell her she can't play with the children

Jeunesse: Toung People, Texts, Cultures 1.2 (2009) 159

Don't tell her she can have them in the house.

Tell her they have plenty of friends and family

Tell her for miles and miles all round they have

lands of their own

Tell her again this is our promised land.

Don't tell her they said it was a land without people

Don't tell her I wouldn't have come if I'd known.

Tell her maybe we can share.

Don't tell her that.

The text is performed on the basis of this dialogic

tension, "tell"/"don't tell." What conditions the

rhetorical action of the play is the way the audience

is positioned as witness to the crisis of Jewish

individuals who, visibly torn by internal and external

pressures of censorship, desire to say one thing

but are compelled to say another. What becomes

apparent in the oscillation between the sayable and

the unsayable is that "truth" is overdetermined in the

sense that a regime of veridiction exists due not only

to historical realities, but also to the fear of violence.

The play incited a good deal of controversy (see

Henry; Jacobson); charges of anti-Semitism, rebuttals,

and defences abounded, including the making of

another play, titled Seven Other Children: A Theatrical

Response to "Seven Jewish Children," by Richard

Stirling. As with Ghurchill's play, Stirling's response was

performed free of charge in London, England during

May 2009. Stirling's intent was to demonstrate the

"distorted education of many Palestinians about Israel,

Israelis and Jews" (qtd. in Nathan).

Churchill's play "works" on the basis of an absent

child, gendered female, about whom the ostensible

instructions are directed. (In Stirling's adaptation,

the child is male.) This absent child constitutes a

subject position that may be filled by the promise of

a better future or by the overdeterm i nations of fear

and suffering as they are made to continue into the

present and future of Palestinian and Israeli political

relations. This rhetorical figure of absence is a powerful

subject position, in part because it is the figure of

the child, in all its connotations of fragility and

vulnerability, that is being recalled here, being female

making such vulnerability all the more extreme. But

what happens when the figure of the child no longer

signifies a conflict between a potential absence of

ethical consciousness and the possibility of a dissenting

voice? Can "the child" testify in the context of such

overdeterminations? I would argue that the figure of

the child as testifier is being deployed in contemporary

testimonial practices for purposes related to the

meaning and even the loss of childhood in a world of

genocidal atrocities.

Consider the following words from Three Wishes:

Palestinian and Israeli Children Speak, edited by

Deborah Ellis:

I just want to go to school. I don't want to blow

160 Julia Emberley Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures 1.2 (2009)

Can 'the child' testify in the context of such

overdeterminations?

anything up. The soldiers don't see me as a child. They see me as an

enemy. I don't like them, but I'm not their enemy. I just want to go

to school. (46)

These are the words of an eleven-year-old Palestinian girl named

Mona, who was living in Palestinian territory between Jerusalem and

Ramallah around 2004. Mona's understanding that she is perceived

as an enemy, and not a child, indicates the degree to which she sees

herself as a child under siege whose childhood has been usurped

by a military presence in her everyday life. The condition of military

occupation has forced a transformation of her identity from child

to enemy, a transformation that she does not welcome. In another

testimonial narrative, Mahmoud, Mona's schoolmate, also expresses

a desire to maintain, or perhaps protect, his childhood against the

insurgency of militarized violence, suffering, and pain when he

describes playing war with his friends and the real rules of war:

When I play with my friends, we play Israeli and Palestinians, and

we pretend to shoot each other. Everyone wants to be Palestinians,

of course, but we trade off, to make it fair. We have toy machine

guns and rifles, but we also make our own guns out of sticks and

things, so that there are enough guns to go around. We play around

the ruins of buildings that have been bombed, jumping out at each

other. In our game, the Palestinians always win. I play games where

we shoot the Israelis, but the guns aren't real, and no one really gets

hurt. I wouldn't want to hurt anybody for real. Also, we Palestinians

are forbidden by the Israelis to have guns. They want to keep all the

guns for themselves. (Ellis 50)

Jeunesse: Toung People, Texts, Cultures 1.2 (2009) Julia Emberley 161

Mahmoud insists, with unwitting irony, that his

playing at war is done in the fairest way possible.

Everyone has to play both parts, and there have to be

enough guns to go around. In the real war, however,

Palestinians are forbidden to use guns and are thus

overrun by Israeli military forces. Even playtime in

Palestine, Mahmoud is telling us, is more ethical that

the rules of war in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. In

their testimony, Mahmoud and Mona bear witness to

the loss of their childhood and the traumatic shift in the

boundary between the child and the adult, fantasy and

reality, that they are forced to undergo. They are more

than aware of how ideas associated with childhood,

such as play, innocence, friendship, and love, are not

givens, but are the privileges of others whose lives are

not curtailed and limited by military occupation.

The figure of the child as a site through which

to mediate across national boundaries is not a new

phenomenon in English literature. The rise of boys'

adventure narratives during the late-nineteenth and

early-twentieth centuries laid the groundwork for

representational mechanisms that could cross the divide

between the empire and the colonies. The child as a

figure of transcultural mobility entered literary modes

of territorial ization in such notable works as Rudyard

Kipling's Kim and Ernest Thompson Seton's Two Little

Savages. Along with J.M. Barrie's play Peter Ran: or. The

Boy Who Wouldn't Crow Up, boys' adventure stories,

in conjunction with the rise of youth movements such

as the Boy Scouts, introduced the child into the imperial

imaginary as a figure of transcultural mobility, whose

agential powers included always being prepared to "go

native" when and if need be.̂

In the disciplinary formation of English Literature,

the figure of the child occupied a central position

as an object of study in the context of genre studies

such as children's literature. While J. K. Rowling's

successful Harry Potter series injected new material

into the somewhat staid and predictable course

curriculum during the 1990s, other literary texts were

making use of the figure of the child, turning it to other

purposes not necessarily aimed at children's reading

pleasure. I have in mind Marjane Satrapi's graphic

novel, Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, in which

Satrapi deploys the figure of the child in a comic-book

format in order to create a narrative perspective of

her childhood experience of the Iranian Revolution in

the late 1970s (see Emberiey, "This Is Not a Game").

For Satrapi, the figure of the child makes it possible to

redraw the boundaries between reality and fantasy and

to highlight the ironic tensions between cultural and

political representations.

In both the Harry Potter books and Satrapi's graphic

novel, it is the trope of the knowing child that comes

to the fore. This is the child of experience, whose

innocence has been tampered with and destroyed by

the forces of evil, as in the case of Harry Potter, or at

the hands of autocratic political forces, such as Islamic

162 Julia Emberiey Jeunesse: Toung People, Texts, Cultures 1.2 (2009)

The institutional and discursive

politicization of the child and childhood is an important topic for

cultural studies.

religious fundamentalism in Iran during the 1978 and 1979 revolution

and counter-revolution. An anticipatory moment in the genealogy of

the knowing child can be found in the Romantic literary tradition,

where William Blake, for instance, in his poetic sequence. Songs of

Innocence and Experience, shifted the focus from the idealized figure

of the innocent child of English bourgeois Christian construction to

the newly visible industrial class of child labourers. Blake's uncanny

use of the figure of the knowing child is being reconfigured today by

a complex set of hegemonic interests including identity formations,

institutional pedagogical practices, and transnational economic and

political pressures.

This genealogy of the figure of the child provides some

historical contextualization through which to trace the significance

of industrialization and imperialism in the making of this figure,

and to situate the current hegemonic fluctuations permeating the

representations of children today, including the specificities involved

in the mobilization of childhood as a highly contested political terrain.

Nowhere, I think, is the mobilization of the child as a political subject

more troubling than in the field of testimonial studies.

Ellis's book, for example, was also met with controversy. In

discussing this book, and the controversy surrounding it, I argue

that the testimony of children who experience the trauma of

military violence is important to the contemporary politicization

of the child and to the meaning and memorialization of childhood

(Emberley, "A Child"). The politicization of the child and childhood

is occurring in a wide range of public institutions, including human-

rights organizations such as Amnesty International, with its current

emphasis on child soldiers; and Canada's Indian Residential Schools

Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which will be involved in

Jeunesse: Toung People, Texts, Cultures 1.2 (2009) Julia Emberley 163

collecting testimony from indigenous people on their

childhood memories ofthe abuses and deaths that

occurred in the residential school system (Emberley,

Defamiliarizing; "Indigenous"). The institutional and

discursive politicization ofthe child and childhood is

an important topic for cultural studies. The figure of

the child and the meaning of childhood are products

of representational technologies and techniques to

the extent that even nations, continents, and other

politically circumscribed spaces have "childhoods." As

both concepts and metaphors, "the child" circulates

through the national imaginary and "childhoods"

become the domain of state regulation and control,

but none of this would be possible without the

production of the figure of the child and the ways in

which value and meaning are ascribed to childhood

and childhood experience. In addition, the making of

the child as a political subject not only serves to fill

an apparent gap of lost innocence, but also has the

uncanny effect of blocking from sight the actual loss

of children's lives due to war, disease, and oppressive

labour and domestic practices, and the exploitative

reproductive and sexual violence in the trafficking

of children globally. Civen the historical, cultural,

political, and representational overdeterminations

that exist in the rhetorical and cultural construction

ofthe child and childhood, 1 wonder, can "the child"

bear witness to exploitation, abuse, and death due

to violent and traumatic events? Furthermore, what

happens when the child is launched as the figure

of truth, authenticity, and power in contemporary

political struggles? These are the questions that inform

my research into the making of children as political

actors in a transnational frame.

Notes

^ This moment in the genealogy ofthe figure ofthe child does not

exclude attention to the domestic sphere and girls' fiction as a site

of imperial/colonial negotiation of so-called civilization, propriety.

and racial regulation through the mother's body (on this point, see

Emberley, Defamiliarizing, specifically chapter one).

164 Julia Emberley Jeunesse: Toung People, Texts, Cultures 1.2 (2009)

Works Cited Barrie, J. M. Peter Pan: or, The Boy Who Wouldn't Crow Up. London:

Hodder and Stoughton, 1904. Print.

Churchill, Caryl. Seven Jewish Children. Dir. Dominic Cooke. Royal

Court Theatre, London. 9 Feb. 2009. Performance.

—. Seven Jewish Children. Dir. Elliot Smith. Perf. Jennie Stoller.

Guardian. Guardian, 25 Apr. 2009. Web. 20 May 2009.

—. Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza. London: Nick Hern,

2009. Royal Court Theatre. Web. 12 Nov. 2009.

Ellis, Deborah. Three Wishes: Palestinian and Israeli Children Speak.

Toronto: Anansi, 2004. Print.

Emberley, Julia. "A Child is Testifying: Testimony, Transnationalism,

and the Cultural Construction of the Child in a Transnational

Frame." The Journal of Postcolonial Writing 45.4 (2009): 379-90.

Print.

—. Defamiliarizing the Aboriginal: Cultural Practices and

Decolonization in Canada. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2007. Print.

—. "Indigenous Storytelling Epistemologies and Residential School

Testinnony." Reconciling Canada: The Culture of Redress. Ed.

Jennifer Henderson and Pauline Wakeham. Toronto: U of Toronto

P, 2010 (forthcoming). Print.

—. "This Is Not a Game: Childhood, Cultural Memory, and

Violence."/Austra//an Humanities Review 47 (2010). Forthcoming.

Print.

Henry, Brian. "Seven Jewish Children: An Incitement to Hatred." The

Jewish Tribune. B'nai Brith Canada, 7 May 2009. Web. 20 May

2009.

Jacobson, Howard. "Let's See the 'Criticism' of Israel for What it

Really Is." The Independent. Independent, 18 Feb. 2009. Web. 15

Mar. 2009.

Kipling, Rudyard. Kim. London: MacMillan, 1901. Print.

Nathan, John. Rev. of Seven Other Children, by Richard Stirling. The

JC.com. The Jewish Chronicle, 7 May 2009. Web. 15 June 2009.

Rowling, J. K. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. London:

Bloomsbury, 1997. Print.

Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood. Trans. Blake

Ferris and Mattias Ripa. NewYork: Pantheon, 2003. Print. Trans, of

Persepolis. 2 vols. Paris: L'Association, 2000-01.

Seton, Ernest Thompson. Two i/tt/e Savages. Toronto: Doubleday,

2003. Print.

Julia Emberley is Professor of English at the University of Western Ontario. Her recent book publication is

Defamiliarizing the Aboriginal: Cultural Practices and Decolonization in Canada (U of Toronto P, 2007). Dr. Emberley

has published widely on the topic of children, childhood, and testimony, and is currently completing a manuscript

that is provisionally titled "The Cultural Politics of Testimony and Childhood," supported by a SSHRC Standard

Research Grant. Dr. Emberley is a recipient of the Graham and Grace Wright Distinguished Scholar Award from The

University of Western Ontario for 2009-10.

Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures 1.2 (2009) Julia Emberley 165

Copyright of Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures is the property of University of Winnipeg and its content

may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express

written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.