The ‘Gentle Recitation’: Writing Trauma in Contemporary Children's and Young Adult Literature

Abstract

Trauma signifies the collapse of personal, social, and cultural meaning systems that causes a rupture to the bond that unifies the individual and the society. While narration of such devastation has been deemed impossible, and its presence in children's and young adult (YA) literature has been debated at great length, writers have attempted, nevertheless, to narrate the ‘unspeakable’ and ‘unrepresentable’ through memoirs and fiction for adults as well as children. Through the study of a select list of titles for children and young adults on the contemporary suffering and displaced populations of Syria and Palestine, this article aims to study the narration of trauma for young readers. It evinces the narrative strategies employed by authors to strike a balance between the two extremes of suffering and optimism. In doing so, it establishes that YA fiction authors construct a niche narrative that offers the realism of trauma through a safe distance.