C H I L D R E N I N V I E T N A M
REDRAWING THE GIVING
DESPITE REPRESENTING A DIVERSE RANGE OF EXPERIENCES AND THEORIES, THE TEXTS OF THE LITERARY TEXTS AND CRITICAL METHODS SYLLABUS SHARE A NOTABLE SIMILARITY: ALL ARE “ADULT” TEXTS THAT PROVIDE “ADULT” PERSPECTIVES. EVEN WHEN THESE TEXTS PROVIDE A COMMENTARY ON YOUTH, AUTHORS SUCH AS JUSTIN TORRES IN WE THE ANIMALS EMPHASIZE THE POWER OF CHILDHOOD IN RETROSPECT AND THEIR PERCEPTIONS OF ADOLESCENCE UPON EXITING IT. THIS NOTION IS NOT LIMITED TO THE LIT CM COURSE, AND MAY BE APPLIED TO LITERATURE IN ACADEMIA WRIT LARGE.
Consequently, two central questions may be asked. Firstly, what texts are worth theorizing within an academic setting? And, if scholarly discussions are to transcend the sole perspective of adults, then what is the literary lens, perspective, and significance of a child? In approaching these two questions, I attempted to challenge strictly adult perspectives by analyzing children’s literature within an academic context By theorizing with children’s literature, I attempted to identify the lens of a child within contentious environments and contexts
For this project I examined The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein, a book which was published in 1964 at the precipice of the War in Vietnam and gained popularity as the conflict progressed By treating The Giving Tree as a case study, I attempted to assess how a child may have viewed the text in relation to an abnormal environment, and ultimately consider if “childhood” may be deemed a literary theory in itself
In order to accomplish this, it was necessary to establish with some precision what the perspective of a child during the Vietnam War years encompassed. Consequently, much of the research conducted for this project was placed within the archive of a “mindset” and specifically considered how the lens of a child may be shaped in reaction to shifting environments.
A first component of this research was the book The Vietnam War in American Childhood by Joel P Rhodes which analyzes childhood reactions to Vietnam through a set of published letters to President Lyndon B Johnson that were written by elementary school students Additionally, Rhodes examines Vietnam’s status as the first “televised war” in American history
To further establish a benchmark for a child, I analyzed a repository of hand written, kindergarten book reports published on a blog for elementary school teachers By reading these reports, I attempted to uncover the language of a child, limitations that might exist in the way which a child communicates, and how children might interact with complex ideas without actual words
Developing upon the language of children within school, I additionally researched the pedagogy of elementary school teachers during Vietnam, and how teaching plans revealed certain extents of a child’s knowledge of the War I specifically incorporated the work of Stephen Potts from his article Teach Your Children Well: Raising the Next Generation on the Vietnam War and Literary theory and children's literature: Interpreting ourselves and our worlds by Theresa Rogers.
Ultimately, this research culminated in an alternative view of The Giving Tree where select pages from the book were drawn over to reflect the environments and perspectives of an American child during Vietnam
In order to develop a representation of a child’s mind during the War, it was essential that I placed boundaries on the language and symbolism of the work As argued by Rhodes, “pre and early elementary school age children (during Vietnam) were not equipped developmentally to understand the complexity of war issues.” This concept of limited understanding is further supported by the kindergarten book reports from the teaching blog which contained simple wording and illegible writing. In order to be consistent with the development of a child, I employed a “method of limitation” which included restricting the amount of complex language I could use, relying heavily on the use of pictures over written annotations, and using my non-dominant hand when drawing certain portions of the work to mimic the fine motor skills of a young child.
Developing upon the “limited” drawings of the work, the use of visual representations of Vietnam and childhood as opposed to written annotations or close readings of The Giving Tree’s language further restricts the methods of the work to the capabilities of a child. While the aforementioned book reports were not linguistically complex, it is important to note that they contained numerous drawings where students conveyed their physical “views” of the subject matter in detail. The concept of the “visual” may even be extended to the findings of Rhodes who argued that because Vietnam was America’s first “TV war,” the images that children were exposed to through television “provided the background context to everything.”
Moreover, these “visual introductions” are further complicated when one considers the educational material on Vietnam available to children at the time. As explained by Potts in his article, while discussions of Vietnam were regularly integrated into middle and high school classroom curricula, Vietnam was scarcely mentioned at the elementary school level. Potts contends that this discrepancy has persisted to the present, and that for “teachers in these classrooms, merely finding resources that are appropriate to the age and abilities of their students is a challenge.”
Thus, while the children of the Vietnam era were aware of the war to a certain extent, a sense of confusion developed when attempting to navigate the landscape of the homefront and the realities of violence abroad. In turn, younger children were more likely to blend familiar TV shows and books (such as The Giving Tree) with imagery of the war in order to fill an educational void. To reflect these gaps of understanding, I incorporated an additional “limitation of understanding” into the method of this work
When applying this “limited method” to both The Giving Tree and the project, a tension developed between the contents of the story and the reality of the war; while The Giving Tree largely follows the aging of a young boy, many American children during the war years equated “growing up” with “going to Vietnam.” As observed by Rhodes in a letter to LBJ, a child in California wrote that “I wish there wasn’t a war,” because “in a few years I will be going to Viet Nam ” In the project, this troubling perception of “growth” may be viewed in a redrawing of one of the final pages of the book where the aged boy is depicted in military gear, alongside a gun.
Additionally, typical “dream jobs” of a young boy are written in a childish font that imitates the text of the kindergarten book reports, but are crossed out to represent the mood of inevitability many children held. This theme is also portrayed in a redrawing of an earlier page where the younger boy is depicted playing “king of the forest.” However, this page is redrawn to depict the Vietnamese jungle, and the boy is shown walking towards it wearing a military helmet that has replaced his flower crown. This is further juxtaposed by a scribbled drawing of a nature scene behind him, representing a childhood left behind.
In another portion of the project, the text “grew old” from the initial publication is even crossed out entirely and replaced in childish font with “went to Vietnam.” However, this page also draws inspiration from another letter written to LBJ where a young student remarked, "I think you are doing the best you can to stop the war in Vietnam. I am sorry we have to go on living with wars. I hope this will be our last war.” It is notable to consider that this letter places an emphasis on “stopping” war, rather than reaching temporary peace or winning–in this case, the child seems to challenge the notion of war as a “lived reality” that may persist as he ages.
This page highlights this “wish” via another handwritten annotation in a “book report style,” alongside a more harsh expectation for the future shown by the deletion of “grew older.” Furthermore, a doodle of a son and his father are shown which symbolizes a childhood sense of “inheritance” in regards to the war that would carry on as one “grew older” and “went to Vietnam.” The confusion and tension this contrast may have potentially caused is additionally symbolized by a set of question marks in the leaves.
The clash between the innocence of childhood and the violence of the War is perhaps most prominent in a redrawing of a page originally depicting the young boy playing hideand-go-seek with the tree. In the redrawing, while the tree reaches over to find the boy, headlines of the war lurk behind the trunk as they slowly enter the child’s world. However, the headlines are presented in a scrambled mass indicative of the childhood confusion of the war
The presence of media is further examined in this page and is presented as heavily permeating the young boy’s youthful bliss Rhodes specifically examined this infiltration through the war’s TV presence, and in an interview published in his book, a man who grew up during the War mentioned that “I definitely had an awareness of the war on TV every night, if only the scattered snapshot images and understanding that it was a topic covered a lot by the news ”
On the redrawn page, a TV antenna reaching towards the boy alongside the tree branch represents the war reaching children through television, and Fred Flinstone and the Jetson’s UFO are shown holding a gun and dropping a missile, symbolizing the mixing of “kid-friendly” media with the ubiquity of violent imagery As stated by another of Rhodes’ interviewees, the constant imagery of the war “became part of normal life” and children became desensitized, just as the normal “play” of the boy is redrawn to convey the brutality he was normally exposed to
Ultimately, each page culminates to show the deterioration of childhood amidst the horrors of a war, and the abnormal nature of childhood “growth” and “aging” at the time of The Giving Tree’s publication. The redrawing of the book serves as a representation of a child’s perspective that is physically imposed on a war era text. While the lens of a child is certainly limited at a technical level, the linguistic simplicity of a child is replete with emotional traumas and singular understandings of an adult world. The literary theory of “childhood” is thus a reckoning of certain limitations with the broad ambiguities of innocence and the even broader notion of “growing up.”
References
(3, 6) Anisnest. 2011. “Kindergarten book reports.” Anisnet. https://anisnest.wordpress.com/books-we-read/kindergarten-book-reports/.
(5) Potts, Steve. 1992. “Teach Your Children Well: Raising the Next Generation on the Viet Nam War1.” Vietnam Generation Journal 4 (Number 3-4). http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML docs/Texts/Scholarly/Potts Teach Children.html.
(2, 4, 7, 8) Rhodes, Joel P. 2019. The Vietnam War in American Childhood. N.p.: University of Georgia Press.
(1) Rogers, Theresa. 2009. “Literary theory and children's literature: Interpreting ourselves and our worlds.” Theory Into Practice. 10.1080/00405849909543845.
