In-between Fact and Fiction. Representing the Traumatization of Child Soldiers in Uzodinma Iweala's "Beasts of No Nation" and Emmanuel "Jal's Warchild‪"‬

Although the use of children in warfare is not a recent issue, child soldiering has received increasing attention throughout the past two decades. This trend led to a rapid increase of literary works that deal with the topic of child soldiers, both fictional and autobiographical. The topic of child soldiers often goes hand in hand with the topic of trauma and traumatization. Repeated exposure to overwhelming danger and life-threatening experiences can leave children with severe mental ill-health such as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and personality changes. Literary works draw attention to the relationship between child soldiers and trauma as well as to the difficult relationship between trauma and representability in this context. This analysis attempts to contribute to the literary research of how trauma is represented in child soldier literature and to increase awareness of this topic on an academic level.
As this analysis is meant to make a small contribution to the literary research on child soldier literature, it merely focuses on two narrations: Uzodinma Iweala's Beasts of No Nation (2006) and Emmanuel Jal's Warchild (2009). These two books were chosen based on the great differences of both the narrations and the authors'background. Beasts of No Nation (BoNN) tells a fictional story, whereas Warchild is an autobiography. Uzodinma Iweala is an African American writer with Nigerian roots and BoNN can be seen as a postmodern novel as it uses various postmodern and experimental narrative techniques. Emmanuel Jal (Jal), in contrast, was born and raised in Sudan and fought as a child soldier. Warchild is an autobiography about his life as a child soldier, before and afterwards. It mostly uses traditional narrative forms to recount Jal's experiences. Based on these differences, the two books can serve as good examples of how trauma can be represented in child soldier literature...