"That other world of light and rainbows and possibilities": an exploration of child narration in post-colonial sub-Saharan African literature and film

Around the world, stories about children, and childhood, dominate popular music, literature, film, and even the figures of speech used in everyday language. But why? Why are artists drawn to creating fictional children to tell their stories? How might we understand adult authors’ quest to recreate or repossess the moment of childhood? How is the memory of childhood corrupted in the very act of attempting to represent it? Do the ways that writers and filmmakers imagine children fictionally reflect real-life attitudes toward children and childhood? Are there moral issues related to adult artists creating fictional children?

In this project, I explore literature and film from a diverse group of Sub-Saharan African artists in order to reflect upon these questions. I work with representations of childhood in novels, memoirs, films, and spoken word performances that feature narrators who are children. This project also considers the ways that the aftermath of the colonization of the African continent has created specific circumstances for the communities depicted in these works: poverty, disability and disease, political corruption, and strife between ethnic and cultural communities complicate the experiences of the juvenile characters. In my conversation about the ways that children are imagined—as different from adults; as both socially restricted and yet escaping social rules; often as a source of hope or future growth; and as carrying potential to heal and change their communities—I hope to shed light on the ways that these attitudes toward juveniles are often reflections of real-world attitudes toward children.