Am I not a child? Palestinian child rights’ violations in Cathryn Clinton’s A stone in my hand (2002)

Abstract

Taking the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) as a framework, this article tackles the numerous violations of children’s rights in Palestine that are reflected in Cathryn Clinton’s young-adult (YA) novel, A stone in my hand (2002). The article aims to illustrate how Clinton’s novel, like other contemporary YA fiction, explores major child rights violations in Palestine, such as arbitrary death, violent treatments, mental violence, illegal detention, torture of children, restrictions of movement, lack of health insurance, denial of good education, and poverty and unemployment. For this purpose, the article is divided into two parts. The first sheds light on the genre of YA fiction and the reasons behind its present interest in children’s rights worldwide, in general, and Palestine in particular, with examples of such literature. The second part discusses several articles of the UNCRC including, but not limited to 6, 19, 24, 27, 28, 31, 37, 38, and illustrates how Clinton’s novel elucidates the ways in which these articles are clearly violated.

Notes

1 The literature of human rights is not a new phenomenon. Many classical texts, such as Homer’s Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid, are full of examples of how conquered people’s rights (especially those of women) are violated; they are treated as property or trophies, and even tortured or killed. In Classical and Middle Ages literary texts, the representation of Lucretia’s rape has continually attracted readers’ attention to the violations of women’s rights. With the emergence of the novel in the eighteenth century, narrative texts played a critical role in exposing violations of human rights. An excellent example of this type of narrative is the slave narrative written mostly between the mid-1700s and the late 1800s by African slaves in America expressing their struggle for freedom. Examples of such works are Incidents in the life of a slave girl (1861) by Harriet A. Jacobs and Uncle Tom’s cabin (1852) by Harriet Beecher Stowe. These works are accounts of some slaves’ lives and the decisions and choices they made to gain freedom for themselves and their children. These works helped to enlighten readers’ minds about the sufferings of slaves and their rights for freedom.

2 Like Joseph Conrad, William Golding, Chinua Achebe, Toni Morrison, and many other writers, George Orwell (1953) tried to “see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.” (p. 4)

3 The UNCRC has 54 articles that articulate children’s rights in four main ways: survival rights, development rights, protection rights, and participation rights (Saguisag & Prickett, 2016, p. v). In addition, the Convention explains how adults and governments should work together to make sure all children can enjoy all their rights.

4 The list of this type of fiction is endless: For example, Isabel Allende’s The house of spirits (1985), a novel about Chile’s history of oppression and atrocity describing the possible allegory of the past, present, and future of that country; The glory field (1994) by Walter Dean Myers, the story of one family who saw its first ancestor captured, shackled, and brought to the United States from Africa; First they killed my father: A daughter of Cambodia remembers (2000) by Loung Ung, a novel about a childhood survivor of the Cambodian genocide under the regime of Pol Pot, which violated the rights of a small girl and her family, and their triumph of spirit; The librarian of Basra: A true story from Iraq (2005) by Jeanette Winter, a true story about a woman’s fight to save her community’s thousands of books from violence and war; Ask me no questions (2006) by Marina Budhos, a story of how the trauma experienced by immigrant children affects their personalities and the way they view their own world; The hunger games (2008) by Suzanne Collins, a fictional story of how young people’s rights are violated and completely disregarded by the government of Panem; The breadwinner trilogy (2009) by Deborah Ellis, the story of 11-year-old Parvana, who suffers and lives with her family in the war-torn city Kabul, Afghanistan; Sunrise over Fallujah (2010) by Walter Dean Myers, a story about young American soldiers in Iraq who witnessed the violations of Iraqi children’s rights by members of the American army; Between shades of gray (2011) by Ruta Sepetys, the story of Lina, a 15-year-old Lithuanian girl in 1941 whose rights are violated by the Soviet officers who invade her home, tearing her family from the comfortable life they have known; and Have the right to be a child (2012) by Alain Serres, which uses pictures to bring the Convention on the Rights of the Child to life and help young readers understand their rights.

5 Examples of fiction written by Israelis themselves are The girl who stole my Holocaust (2013) by Noam Chayut, deeply moving memoir of a young Israeli soldier who sends a message to the Israeli Jews that the Holocaust and their policies in Palestine will always be interconnected and inseparable; Palestine speaks: Narratives of life under occupation (2014), edited by Mateo Hoke and Cate Malek; If I am not for myself: Journey of an anti-Zionist Jew (2008) by Mike Marqusee, a personal narrative of a Jewish author who is a pro-Palestinian activist calling for Palestinian rights; If you could be my friend: Letters of Mervet Akram Sha’Ban and Galit Fink (1998) by Litsa Boudalika, the story of the correspondence between a Palestinian girl living in a refugee camp in the West Bank and an Israeli girl living in Jerusalem; and Samir & Yonatan (1994) by Daniella Carmi, the story of a Palestinian boy who injures his knee and is sent to a Jewish hospital for surgery, where he meets Jewish kids in Room 6, all of whom he gets to know.

6 Ghassan Kanafani has been credited with coining the label “resistance literature” in 1968. His novella, Men in the Sun (1999), shows the story of Palestinians’ sufferings and struggle for life due to the Israeli’s occupation. In addition to Kanafani’s novella, other examples of literary texts illustrating Palestinian sufferings include Tasting the sky: A Palestinian childhood (2007) by Ibtisam Barakat, a memoir of a young girl and her family who suffered in the occupied West Bank; Where the streets had a name (2008) by Randa Abdel-Fattah, a story narrated through the eyes and experiences of 13-year-old Hayaat, who lives under occupation in the West Bank; and Mornings in Jenin (2006) by Susan Abulhawa, a powerful story of one family’s endurance through 60 years of the Palestinian–Israeli conflict.

7 See Sari Nusseibeh’s Once upon a country: A Palestinian life (2008), a memoir told from a Palestinian perspective about the possibilities for both Palestinians and Israelis to be natural allies rather than enemies.

8 See, for example, Elizabeth Laird’s A little piece of ground (2006); Dreaming of Palestine (2003) by Randa Ghazy; Habibi (1997) by Naomi Shihab Nye; Dancing Arabs (2002) by Sayed Kashua; and The people of forever are not afraid (2012) by Shani Boianjiu.

9 Similar to Elizabeth Laird’s A little piece of ground (2003), the young Palestinian characters in Clinton’s novel share one hope: “Just to be ordinary. … To live an ordinary life in an ordinary country. In a Free Palestine” (Laird & Nimr, 2003, p. 129).

10 The fictional scene in the novel is similar to a real incident that sparked the Second Palestinian Intifada (Uprising). On September 30, 2000, 12-year-old Muhammad Al-Durrah was killed by Israeli soldiers as his father desperately tried to protect him from bullets. The footage was aired around the world and became the defining symbol of the Second Intifada.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mohammad Shaaban Deyab

Mohammad Shaaban Deyab is professor of English literature at the School of Linguistics and Literature, Badr University in Cairo, Egypt. His research interests include human rights literature, pandemic literature, and ecocritical, eco/womanist, postcolonial, and comparative studies.

Ebtihal A. Elshaikh

Ebtihal Abdulsalam Elshaikh is associate professor of English in the Department of Foreign Languages, Faculty of Education at Tanta University, Egypt. Her research interests include human rights literature, children literature, and modern and contemporary poetry.