We’re back after some technical difficulties, and as promised, I’m following up Ann’s eloquent review of Never Fall Down with a report on the Children’s Rights Panel from this year’s PEN World Voices Festival, which featured Patricia McCormick, Arn Chorn-Pond, Debby Dahl Edwardson, and Wojciech Jagielski. The moderator was PEN Children’s Committee chair Susanna Reich
McCormick set the tone of the panel by observing that, in the years since the publication of her award-winning YA novel Sold about child prostitution in Nepal, she has seen a tremendous response among teens who want to hear about their peers around the world. (As the author of a historical novel set during the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, I second her observation about the natural curiosity of teens and their willingness to think about issues outside their immediate experience.) Edwardson, author of My Name Is Not Easy about indigenous children stripped of their language and culture at a boarding school in Alaska in the early 1960s, connected the issue of children’s rights around the world to the right of parents in the United States to have control over their children’s education. Arn-Pond spoke about being relocated from war-torn Cambodia to Lowell, Massachusetts, where he saw children carrying guns as part of gangs. At that point he decided to devote his life to becoming a peacemaker and to healing the effects of war.
In writing about children’s struggles, Jagielski, McCormick, and Edwardson are cultural outsiders to various degrees, and they talked about trust and their responsibility as an outsider to “getting it right.” Jagielski described his conversations with child soldiers in the Congo and Uganda, his coming to realize that a warlord’s personal guard, who asked him for a cigarette, was only 11 years old—the same age as his own son. As a journalist, he has to gain peoples’ trust, including people who may be perpetrators of atrocities. The child soldiers he interviewed are both victims and oppressors. The warlords who employ them claim that the children join voluntarily, but even the children who haven’t been kidnapped outright act out of economic necessity and/or the desire to protect their families. McCormick talked about the pain she feels when listening to stories of suffering. Both she and Jagielski emphasized that, while they may not be able to help those who have suffered, they can put their stories out into the world. It is a powerful thing to know that the world is watching, and the world cares. As Jagielski said, journalists and writers “may be the only proof that they exist. We can end their isolation….They are given a presence and can tell their stories.”
Arn-Pond emphasized the power of story to heal. As the founder of Children of War and Cambodian Living Arts, he uses story as a way of connecting generations and communities torn apart by a brutal genocide that killed a third of his country’s population. Through story, Cambodian children today understand what their parents went through and how it affects them decades later.
Edwardson is married to an Inupiaq tribal leader, the mother of seven children, and the president of the school board in Barrow, Alaska. My Name Is Not Easy is her husband’s story of his experience flown from his home on the Arctic Ocean to a harsh Catholic boarding school in the interior of the state. Having attended the boarding school from age 12 to age 18, he lost much of his ability to speak his native language, because the indigenous children (both Inupiaq and Athabascan) were physically punished for speaking anything except English. Not only did his language ability not developed during those years, but his experience of his native language was bound up as well with his experience of pain and humiliation. The indigenous parents believed they were helping their children to succeed by sending them to the schools. Little did they know that their children would have their language and culture taken away from them. In some cases, children were stolen from their indigenous families and sent to the Lower 48 to be adopted by white families.
The United States is one of two countries that has failed to ratify the UN Declaration on the Rights of the Child. Several questions from the audience touched on this issue. The speakers also addressed the role of Polish child psychologist Janusz Korczak, who chose to die in the Holocaust along with the Jewish orphans for whom he cared. Jagielski urged the audience to study Korczak’s advice to parents and educators, to remember his pioneering work as well as the way he died.
In addressing the plight of child soldiers, child prostitutes, and child sweatshop workers around the world, Arn-Pond emphasized the need to address the problem of greed. Both he and members of the audience pointed out the role of corporations in creating sweatshops that employ children, selling guns to both sides in wars, and supporting repressive governments that destroy indigenous cultures and use child soldiers. Greed extends to individuals who keep the sex trade going and who purchase conflict diamonds. He urged us to teach love and peace, not greed.
Children’s rights has been the subject of several panels at past World Voices Festivals. Members of the audience agreed that this was perhaps the strongest, most informative panel yet on this topic. Kudos goes to PEN for inviting the talented and passionate writers and activists who made up the panel, and for including those who write books directed to young people..