At the end of October, some of us Pirate Tree-sitters will be gathering in person in Fresno, California for a panel at the USBBY conference, where we will explore the literature of children in wartime. Each of us will talk about our own novels and others that touch on the same themes. My book list features children and teen protagonists as combatants.
I define “combatant” broadly, including young people who engage in non-violent civil disobedience or minimally violent acts of self-defense (building a barricade to prevent the army from attacking peaceful demonstrators, for instance). The motivations for young people becoming combatants differ greatly, from those who are forcibly conscripted by the government or anti-government forces, to those who join voluntarily to protect family members, to those who can no longer take the violence and oppression leveled at their communities. For each of the youngsters in question, becoming a combatant has both physical and emotional consequences that will affect them for their entire lives.
The adult literature on child soldiers in various countries in Africa is extensive, encompassing Ishmael Beah’s memoir of fighting in Sierra Leone’s civil war, A Long Way Gone; What Is the What, Dave Eggers’s fictionalized account of Sudanese child soldier Valentino Achak Deng; and the late Ahmadou Kourouma’s novel Allah Is Not Obliged, set in the Ivory Coast. Both A Long Way Gone and What Is the What also address what happens afterward, when a young man who has lost his childhood fighting in a brutal war comes to live in a foreign culture with the promise of safety and a new life.
What happens “after” is the focus of a recently published young adult novel featuring a former a child soldier. Pegi Deitz Shea’s Abe in Arms (PM Press/Reach and Teach, 2010) is the story of 17-year-old Abe Elders, adopted from a refugee camp in Liberia at the age of 13 by a well-to-do African-American family living in Maryland. In his senior year of high school Abe seems to have the perfect life—a loving family, a brother to whom he is close, an adoring girlfriend, good grades, and the possibility of a Division I track scholarship. But as the book opens in the backseat of his girlfriend’s car, Abe suffers a flashback to his old life in Liberia, where he witnessed, and possibly perpetrated, unspeakable horrors during the country’s long civil war.
Abe and his adoptive father, Dr. George Elders, thought that a year of counseling after his rescue and adoption were enough to quell the traumatic memories, but as Abe’s flashbacks become ever more frightening and violent, those who love him don’t have the answers to help him. A new round of therapy opens the floodgates, as Abe recounts the life of his best friend in Liberia, Steven, and the heartless “James,” whose worship of the rebel commander Grant leads him to undergo and then commit atrocities as a child soldier.
Abe in Arms is a gripping tale that takes its place in the sad but necessary literature of Africa’s child soldiers. Shea’s novel will have special appeal to teen readers because of Abe’s daily concerns—his adopted brother Niko’s habit of drinking and driving, his ambivalence about having sex with his girlfriend, not-so-friendly competition with his track teammates. Teen and adult readers will be drawn in by the question of how a young man, whose childhood has been stolen from him by war, struggles to live a normal life.
The situation in Liberia is particularly relevant for readers in the United States because in the first half of the nineteenth century, many abolitionists saw the U.S. colony as a potential home for enslaved African Americans; however, those who returned through the efforts of the American Colonization Society disrupted the lives and livelihoods of the indigenous people, sowing the seeds of later ethnic conflict. In the past two decades, many refugees from Liberia have found refuge in the United States, with sizeable populations in and around New York City, Washington, D.C., Boston, Atlanta, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles.
Abe in Arms is the first—and currently the only—young adult novel published by the alternative children’s publisher Reach and Teach. A subsidiary of the Oakland, California-based nonprofit progressive publisher PM Press, Reach and Teach offers titles on topics and with perspectives rarely provided by the major publishing houses. When it came out last year, Abe in Arms received scant attention in the mainstream media. It is a book that deserves a lot more.
Shea has written a number of award-winning picture books and titles for older elementary age readers that present the stories of immigrants, refugees, and historical figures who changed the world. Among her distinguished books are the biography Noah Webster: Weaver of Words (a 2010 Orbis Pictus Honor Book for outstanding picture book nonfiction), the stories of Southeast Asian refugees The Whispering Cloth and Tangled Threads, and the fictionalized account of the life of Pakistani anti-child labor activist Iqbal Masih, The Carpet Boy’s Gift.
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