Editors’ Note

On October 10, 2014, Malala Yousafzai and Kailash Satyarthi were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize “for their struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to education” (NNC 2014). Sharing the award with Satyarthi, an Indian advocate for the end of child labor, Yousafzai became the first Pakistani to win the Peace Prize. At seventeen, she was also the youngest-ever recipient. Yousafzai had been a local and then national figure since she was twelve and began blogging under a pseudonym (for the BBC’s online news service in Urdu) about her experiences as a girl living under the oppressive rule of the Taliban in Swat, Pakistan. Though she won the 2011 International Children’s Peace Prize, Yousafzai’s full entrance onto the international stage came after an assassination attempt by the Taliban in October 2012. That shooting left her with a grave head wound but did not derail her political work. Known best as Malala—her 2013 memoir is titled I Am Malala—the young activist calls to mind the power of children to articulate a world-changing vision.

The exceptional child who carries an ostensibly adult message occupies an important place in the cultural imaginary. But narratives such as Malala’s also raise the thorny question, to adapt Tim O’Brien’s phrase, of how to tell a true child’s war story—or any true child’s story. What does it mean for children to be global peacemakers even as they remain uniquely vulnerable to violence, as the recent mass kidnapping of girls in Nigeria, the police shootings of black children in the United States, persistent bullying and bashing—much of it familial—that targets LGBTQ youth, and the murder of 132 schoolchildren in Malala’s Pakistan tragically attest? A recent report from UNICEF documents unprecedented numbers of children directly impacted by armed conflict in dozens of nations, as casualties of war, as refugees, and as child soldiers; in war-torn areas, hundreds of thousands of children suffer from homelessness, malnutrition, and preventable diseases (UNICEF 2014). Malala advocates eloquently for herself and for children, but does the very act of speaking out as a child change the truths spoken? Further, how has Malala’s story been re-narrativized by and for adults to whom she appeals so compellingly for peace and justice? Even before the Nobel Peace Prize was bestowed, the blogosphere and the mainstream media roiled with speculation about the extent of Malala’s agency—and her deployment as a symbol with a cacophony of meanings by adult advocates with far-ranging agendas.¹

If adults at times privilege the figure of the child messenger, they also reshape—and therefore often misrepresent or obscure—the child’s message. The well-documented history of censorship of sexual subject matter from The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank preserves an innocence for the author that is, precisely, childlike: an imagined version of acceptable girlhood that corresponds to the “goodness” of her message. Likewise, the child preacher in the work of James Baldwin becomes a vessel in which adults deposit and then extract their own religious language and ideology in a process rendered invisible, and thus successful, by the association of the child preacher’s youth with the transparency of Truth. Perhaps nowhere is the dissonance between children’s language and adults’ language theorized more pointedly than in psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi’s 1932 paper “Confusion of Tongues between Adults and the Child,” which posits childhood trauma as the result of an adult sexual aggressor mistaking the child’s “infantile tongue” that expresses tenderness for the “passion tongue” of adult eroticism. As these examples suggest, when children speak, the adult ear filters their voices in complicated and contradictory ways.

Child, the spring/summer 2015 issue of WSQ, is implicitly framed by the question of the legibility of children. In its various responses to this question, the issue advances the scholarly and artistic investment in the stories, messages, and meanings of children, even as it reflects on its own acts of critical re-narrativization. The meta-story here, as the...