But I may have “Beasts of No Nation” all wrong. The promotion is sexy Idris Elba, but the plot is about child soldiers, the back story for the Elba character. Here’s the beginning of “Beasts of No Nation”:
“I am tasting blood. I am feeling like vomiting. The whole place around us is shaking, just shaking rotten fruit from the shelf, just sounding like it will be cracking into many piece and falling on top of us. He is grabbing my leg, pulling it so hard that it is like it will be coming apart like meat, and my body is just sliding slowly from the stall out into the light and onto the mud.
In the light, my breath is coming back and using force to open my chest to make me to coughing and my eye to watering. The whole world is spreading before me and I am looking up to the gray sky moving slowly slowly against the top leaf of all the tall tall Iroko tree. And under this, many smaller tree is fighting each other to climb up to the sunlight. All the leaf is dripping with rainwater and shining like jewel or glass. The grasses by the road is so tall and green past any color I am seeing before. This is making me to think of jubilating, dancing, shouting, singing because Kai! I am saying I am finally dead. I am thinking that maybe this boy is spirit and I should be thanking him for bringing me home to the land of spirits, but before I can even be opening my mouth to be saying anything, he is leaving me on my back in the mud.
“I can see the bottom of truck parking just little bit away from me. Two truck is blocking up the whole road and more are parking on the roadside. The piece of cloth covering them is so torn up and full of hole and the paint is coming off to showing so much rust, like blood, making me to thinking the truck is like wounding animal. And around all the truck, just looking like ghost, are soldier. Some is wearing camouflage, other is wearing T-shirt and jean, but it is not mattering because all of the clothe is tearing and having big hole. Some of them is wearing real boot and the rest is wearing slipper. Some of them is standing at attention with their leg so straight that it is looking like they do not have knee. Some of them is going to toilet against the truck and other is going to toilet into the grasses. Almost everybody is carrying gun. . . .”
drawing by a child soldier
The author, Uzodinma Iweala, comes from a professional family and is well-educated himself, having earned an MD. He interviewed only one girl, aged 9, who had been a soldier and somehow escaped -- if you can call it that, since she is changed forever. The rest he found through reading. The book was his pre-med doctoral thesis at Harvard.
The girl was at the age of latency, pre-adolescent, a stage of exceptional “plasticity” in both body and brain. The protocol for converting an ordinary child from an ordinary family into a “beast” is to force them to violate every belief and attachment they have, including the love of their own mothers. This is done by defiling, maiming, destroying loved ones in the child's sight, possibly by the child, so that they dissociate from their former selves, become a sort of zombie, and then rebuild or die.
This is not quite the same thing as late adolescents who volunteer for military service because of poverty, delinquency (forced enlistment used to be offered as an alternative to jail), isolation, patriotism, seeking adventure, hero worship, and other tangled motives. Both my brothers enlisted in the Marines when they were 17. I think to them it was a coming of age but they were thinking about having graduated from high school, not their age. Some groups consider the age line to be 18. Some people consider service a sort of alternative to college for both men and women. Like college these days, it is an environment that offers opportunity for rape. This post is not about that.
I want to think in print about traumatized latency and how to resolve it. Consider this announcement from a professional psych and art website run by Norman Holland. I’ll leave the date and place since at this point you could attend, but I often learn as much from the announcements as I do from the actual talks.
Two Hobbits, One Improbable Journey:
An Analysis of a Traumatized Boy with an Autism Spectrum Disorder
Sam Roth, Ph.D.
Monday, March 23, 2015
8-9:30pm
Cambridge Hospital, Learning Center C/D
I will talk about a four-year psychoanalysis of an 11 year-old boy with an Autism Spectrum Disorder and a history of traumatizing impingement and neglect. I had to make numerous adaptations of frame and technique to ensure an alliance and protect the play space for treatment to take root and endure. One parent or the other was present for every analytic hour in the first two years. The child's non-verbal communications conveyed more about his internal states than did his spare use of words. Board games with thick rule books provided vital scaffolding for efforts the young man and I made to relate to each other and, later, meaningful symbols and shared references for fantasy play, when it eventually emerged.
When we began, it seemed vital that I distinguish between trauma and Asperger's Disorder (now Autism Spectrum Disorder). By the time the analysis ended, I saw the young man as having both. I hope this talk will convey what I learned about the particular vulnerabilities of children with Autism Spectrum Disorders and trauma, as well as the particular benefits and challenges of working with them in intensive analytic treatment. |
__________
Drawing by a child soldier
What Roth means by a “play space” is a sort of shared working platform like the one that is presumed to keep order in the brain, except that meant to be “playful” in the sense that it is pure experiment: no pressure, no goal except exploration. Art therapy. The idea is that the adult goes to the child to listen and learn while they move objects or draw or whatever might get them in tune with each other. It must be safe. The adult tries to be “with” the child emotionally and mentally to suss out very early structures of belief and attachment and to support the child through the terror and blankness that are bound to occur. Then to offer from an adult point of view some options, some "re-framings" as we have come to call it.
But who wants to enter the world of a maimed child from a different culture forced to watch or perform atrocities against his family? How can an ordinary person, even with special training, understand? This boy had “autism” which means his brain was not functioning properly in the first place, with his unresponsiveness or inappropriate responses possibly triggering abuse and preventing the seeking of help. Everywhere in every time there are among us children in this state. It’s not only in the extreme and ungraspable context of African jungle terrorism, but also in suburbia, in drug nests, in poverty holes, and so on -- even in high-end luxurious surroundings. Remember that boy whose mother tried to protect him -- until he went to a school and shot children? He shot her first, a self-generated atrocity.
Play therapy
Roth says, “the child’s non-verbal communications conveyed more about his internal states than did his spare use of words. Board games with thick rule books provided vital scaffolding for efforts the young man and and made to relate to each other. . .” Judging from the mention of hobbits, they were playing something based on “Lord of the Rings.” When Roth speaks of “frame” and “technique” he means what he has learned some formal protocols for guiding what happens, but the truth is such things really have to be done with empathy, heart and courage on the part of both participants. As he says, when they don't work, they should be dumped.
Who has the skills and the desire? Who has the time if the parents are both working or one is missing or the remaining one is struggling? Who has the money to pay for such things when there are elements in our government who would not even pay for a kid’s school lunch if they could help it. They would line up all the faulty underachieving fat asses lounging around the world and just shoot them. That is, they think a civilized country is the same as a terrorist army in the jungle. What traumas made them so fearful? How do we reframe them? Who even wants to? Elected officials are not latency children between 6 and 12. This is a social and political spectrum disorder.
Another drawing by a former captive child.
If you can stand it, this is a pretty good article about one of Kona’s captives who escaped, made it home, and grew up. It IS possible.
Good post.
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