The conceptual dimension of memory work
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In Liberia for example, some of the child soldiers fighting in Taylor’s rag-tag army were as young as nine-years old. But not all were press-ganged into service. Many joined the government militias as volunteers eager to avenge the killing of their parents by rebel fighters, or for survival. Every day, child soldiers could be seen riding around the streets of the capital Monrovia in pick-up trucks proudly toting their automatic rifles, or at the forefront of the fighting. Relief workers in Monrovia testified that on several occasions during the conflict, forces loyal to President Charles Taylor raided schools and camps of displaced people in search of young recruits to fight two rebel movements. Liberia was wracked by fourteen years of intermittent warfare and chronic government neglect. So with most schools closed and few other job prospects available, picking up an AK-47 rifle and lurching off to the front line in a battered pick-up truck all too easily seem a glamorous prospect. Approximately 5,000 child soldiers participated in the conflicts between 1989 and 1996; but the children’s rights group Child Peace Liberia Inc., posited that 20 per cent of all combatants in Liberia’s first civil war were under 18-years-old.
The universe of victims is heterogeneous and their ways of addressing the violence or processing losses and damages are varied according to gender, race, age, class or social networks. Some want to speak and others do not. Some need language interpretation to do so, and may or may not have that available. Some want to talk in the first-person and others, out of modesty, fear, or because they do not want to exert pressure through their position as victims, prefer third-person narration. Some may be willing to speak only in private and refuse to testify in a more public manner, while others may opt to go public with their experience. The same victim, at different times, can tell very different versions of the same events, which can sometimes emphasize certain episodes and at other times minimize them. Memory works through analogy, metaphor,