PORTFOLIO – Children’s drawings and mass violence.
Drawing by a 12-year-old Rohingya boy in Myanmar (Burma), in Balukhali refugee camp, Bangladesh, in late 2017. He had just fled Boli Bazar, his village, with his family. “I remember the soldiers who came into our village and set light to everything. They were killing and raping people,” says the boy. Source: UNICEF Bangladesh & COPEC / Déflagrations.
“Blood of the martyr”. Drawing by Amar, 6, in Raqqa, Syria, in 2012. The little boy lived through attacks by the Bashar Al-Assad regime before fleeing with his family to Turkey. Source: Alwane / Déflagrations.
Drawing by Mouhammed Ibrahim, 9, in the Shia district of Beirut in the early 1980s. Source : Seta Manoukian, Les Enfants libanais et la Guerre, éditions Dar Al-Farabi / Photo Déflagrations
Drawing by Ezair, 9, New York, 2002. She was at school in Manhattan when the planes hit the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001. A year later, before doing this drawing, she had cried: “I don’t want to talk about the World Trade Center and I don’t want to think about it, or I will think that it could happen again.” Source : Loyan Beausoleil et Gabe Kirchheimer, « The Youngest Witnesses Project ».
Drawing by Svetlana Levitskaya-Chulkova, sent to her mother in Siblag camp in Siberia, Russia, in 1941. It portrays Vassilli Tchapaïev, a legendary hero of the Russian civil war who died in 1919. Svetlana’s parents were victims of the repression in 1937 and she spent several years in orphanages. Copyright : Memorial International.
Drawing by a Polish child deported to the Soviet Union in 1942. It includes written inscriptions: bottom left, “The Bolsheviks chase civilians from the train carriages in which the Polish are transported”; and bottom centre, “We saw this scene from our carriage!” Source : Poland. Ministerstwo Informacji i Dokumentacji records, Hoover Institution Library & Archive.
Drawing by a 13-year-old boy in Darfur, 2005. He says: “I am guarding the sheep in the wadi (river bed or oasis). I see the Janjaweed arriving fast on their horses and camels, armed with Kalachnikovs. They are shooting and shouting ‘kill the slaves, kill the Blacks’. I saw people falling bleeding to the ground. They went after the children.” Source : Human Rights Watch.
Drawing by a Tutsi child in Rwanda, 3 October, 1997. The written inscriptions say: “The events of 1994”; “Sorry, the Interahamwe cut off my arm”; “Habyarimana supporters”. Source : Witness to Genocide : Drawings by Child Survivors of the Rwandan Genocide of 1994, Richard A. Salem, avec l’autorisation de Friendship Press, National Council of Churches of Christ in the USA © 1994
Drawing by a 16-year-old boy in the Mugunga displaced people’s camp near Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo, 2012. Source : Unicef Goma, Est RDC / Déflagrations.
Drawing by a 15-year-old refugee Eritrean boy in a migrant detention centre in Libya, October 2019. “From Ethiopia where his family had fled, he set out for Europe at 12 years old, after his father died,” according to the medical team of Médecins sans Frontières. “After arriving in Libya in 2017, he was sold to human traffickers and spent two years in secret prisons. After being freed, he tried to cross the Mediterranean in summer 2019. Their boat capsized. More than 130 people died. He saw many of them drown before his eyes, including a father holding his two children against him.” Source : Médecins sans frontières / Déflagrations.
These drawn testimonies, free from the filter of adult judgment, seem to wipe away the hierarchy of wars and of time. They document mass violence with an almost forensic fidelity. The exhibition “Déflagrations“, just closed in Fort Saint-Jean of Marseille, Southern France, only showed “a tiny constellation of just over 150 drawings spanning a century” says its curator Zérane S. Girardeau. “Scenes of looting, murder, desecration, are as if written on the retinas of children,” continues Girardeau, who started to collect them methodically in 2012 with her association. These drawings, she says, allow us to look the unspeakable in the face, “to enter the scene and approach the intimate experience of the worst violence”. In this portfolio, Justice Info reproduces a selection of ten drawings presented in this exhibition organised by the Mucem.
« Dessins d’enfants et violences de masse »
The exhibition catalogue is available in French online on the Mucem website and in bookstores (France).
*Yusra Ahmed, Palestinian, Bak’a camp, Jordan. In M.Soudi’s “Times of war: testimonies of children”, 1970.
