June’s Childhood is an investigative journey into
Arab children’s literature. It offers a certain
perspective for reading the histories and
positionalities of this literature as an arena into
which many irresolvable conflicts were channeled.
The journey explores the manners through which the
Arab ‘grown ups’ exported/translated their own
tragic sense of collective ‘defeats’ into a literary form
directed to the Arab children as a reading public.
Their aim was to ‘educate’ and to ‘equip’ the Arab
children, the ‘grown ups’ of tomorrow, with the right
skills, attitudes, sensibilities, and strategies that will
enable them to overcome the conflicts, which their
fathers could not cope with successfully. But these
exportations and translations did not operate as a
mirroring linear one-way, rather it seems that literary
forms have their own manner of treating historical
matter(s). By focusing on the publications of Dar el
Fata al Araby (1974-1993) as a case study, June’s
Childhood explores the specific literary apparatuses
that were developed in order to conduct the
exportations and translations in the context
of the aftermath of the war of June 1967
and its tragic consequences.