Child Soldiers in the Memoirs of Ex-Combatants: Loung Ung’s First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers (2000), Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier (2007) and Emmanuel Jal’s War Child: A Child Soldier’s Story (2009)

Abstract

The crisis of child soldiering is considered one of the most serious problems in the world nowadays. It is a result of the effects of globalization and the appearance of new conflict groups, which make the use of weapons easy for children. As the best way to know the real events of war is to listen to true stories narrated by people who own the first-hand experience, this thesis probes into three memoirs written by former child soldiers from different countries and cultural backgrounds: Loung Ung’s First they Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers (2000) from Cambodia, Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier (2007) from Sierra Leon, and Emmanuel Jal’s War Child: A Child Soldier’s Story (2009) from South Sudan. The thesis explores the way the child soldier’s identity and ideology are constructed through the theories of the French philosophers Louis Althusser as well as Michel Foucault. In addition, the thesis aims at investigating the trauma of those abused children and its effects on the writing process of the three writers, reaching recovery in the end. This is based on the views of contemporary trauma theorists such as Cathy Caruth, Dominic Lacapra, and others.