BEYOND INNOCENCE: TRAUMA REPRESENTATION AND NARRATIVE TECHNIQUE IN AFRICAN ADOLESCENT WAR STORIES

Abstract

This study, Beyond Innocence: Trauma Representation and Narrative Technique in African Adolescent War Stories, interrogates four African and diasporic war narratives: The Other Side of Truth by Beverly Naidoo, A Long Walk to Water by Linda Sue Park, Beasts of No Nation by Uzodinma Iweala, and The Seine Was Red, Paris, October 1961 by Leïla Sebbar through the combined lenses of trauma theory and Russian Formalism. The study argues that these texts stage trauma not merely as thematic content but also as a formal problem that destabilizes narrative coherence and mimetic representation. Conceptualizing trauma as both a psychic rupture and a narratological crisis, the study foregrounds formal devices such as temporal fragmentation, limited focalization, linguistic defamiliarization, and generic hybridity. It pays particular attention to narrative belatedness, repetition compulsion, syntactic disruption, and the oscillation between silence and expression as structural inscriptions of trauma’s resistance to representation. These strategies displace linear temporality and coherent subjectivity, positioning the adolescent figure as a site where epistemological and ethical uncertainties converge. Through comparative analysis, the essay demonstrates how fractured first-person voices, bifurcated temporalities, and testimonial modes function as formal analogues of traumatic experience while simultaneously mediating between individual memory and collective histories of colonial violence, dictatorship, and forced migration. In doing so, these narratives challenge Western universalist models of trauma by foregrounding historically specific configurations of suffering and memory. Ultimately, the study contends that African adolescent war fiction reconfigures the child not as a passive victim but as a witnessing subject and narrative agent. It concludes that trauma is formalized as a recursive, ethically charged disruption that compels innovative narrative strategies and redefines the limits of literary representation.