Reading Genocide Novels with Teens: A Rhetorical Approach

At the International Literacy Association’s recent conference in Boston, I had the opportunity to talk about genocide novels and how we can support our students in confronting the unimaginable human suffering of genocide but also humanity’s resilience to survive and bravery to tell and read stories about that survival.  In this post, I share some book suggestions, an overview of rhetorical reading, and a sample book discussion from my 7th grade ELA class.

Teaching was not my first career. I was a social worker in a jail for nearly a decade before becoming a teacher. My job was to listen to lives lived,  and I heard too many stories of childhood trauma, many stories that were, before I asked, silenced. I became an English  teacher because I believe that when we listen to and read stories, each story makes an imprint on our hearts and minds and has the potential to promote compassion and understanding – I just wanted to do that work face to face with kids rather than across bullet  proof glass.

For thirteen years,  I have had the privilege of reading countless stories written by our oldest and newest story tellers, but my greatest privilege has been to hear the stories of students. I figure I’ve read alongside close to 2500 teenagers. Imagine the stories. Imagine the countless stories you’ve read and listened to with your students.

Our work as teachers is to bring these stories together – stories from our students lives and stories beyond their lives – to promote greater compassion and understanding of our world, our place in it, and what we can do to make it a little bit better. Understanding stories can help us and our students talk about the broader story of humanity, and genocide is part of that story.

If it were up to the  Young Turks, Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Rios Montt, Milosovic,  the Interahamwe, and al-Bashir, stories of surviving genocide would not exist first because there may not have been genocides in Armenia, Ukraine, Cambodia, Guatemala, the Former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Sudan, and second because their intent was to silence, cleanse, exterminate entire groups of people. Genocide novels ask: How and why is this story even possible? And what are we to do with this knowing?

How a story is possible, how a story is written, and how we are to read these stories about lives beyond our own lived experiences is central to genocide education and the promise of “never again.” Because a story is no solitary act, the reader, our student, enables the story. With genocide stories, the story is a testimony, and the reader is a witness who has a role in the production of memory. So how we read and remember matters to how a story persists in our world. We are teaching the future leaders of our world, and I want them to remember so that they can imagine a better 21st century.

English teacher do not have to be historians (though we are in a way) to read young adult genocide books with students. We are English teachers, so our role is to support students in their reading experience of genocide.

Finding Young Adult Novels about Genocide

War author Marsha Skrypuch told me that before 9/11, it was very difficult to get her books about the Armenian genocide published, but after 9/11, publishers had an audience for young adult novels featuring international conflict and world history. Around 2004, when the world was re-introduced to genocide through Hotel Rwanda and Colin Powell publicly used the word “genocide” to name that atrocities in Sudan, more and more books were published about genocide. Many young adult authors found ways to make the unimaginable accessible to teen readers.

As I discovered young adult novels that tell stories of genocide, I learned to trust literature more and more and recognized that ELA teachers are in a unique position to illuminate just how literature imagines the unimaginable. We are in a position to not just teach “what happened” but how authors construct what happened and how that impacts the way readers (and the world) remember what happened.

Reading Genocide Rhetorically

Genocide stories come from unimaginable experiences that defy language, and yet people feel compelled to tell their story so that never again will such atrocities occur, so that there can be evidence, documentation, so that we can learn and perhaps love a little better. When we read these stories, we have to recognize that they were written, constructed sometimes by survivors and sometimes by professional authors, so we will feel and learn through the reading experience, but we have to attend to the gaps in the narrative.

One way that I support readers in reading about genocide  (and all mediums) is with rhetoric. Right. We are English teachers, so we will use what we know about how a story is constructed to help students make sense of this world. Rhetoric helps us recognize that stories are constructed by a writer, with an intended audience and message. Rhetoric unveils the alignment between the writer and reader. The reader’s responsibility is to hear what is said but to consider how that story is possible, how the writer is appealing to the reader’s heart and mind, what gaps the writer might be filling in or pushing to the margins, and then what other stories might exist. Here is a graphic of how a reader might attend to the rhetorical appeals in a genocide novel:

Here is an example of rhetorical reading notes for Dana Walrath’s Like Water on Stone:

Ethos: Multiple narrators of family members and an eagle, which serves as a protector of children; the author’s grandparents were survivors of the Armenian genocide. We are witnessing different perspectives of a family and a “bird’s eye” perspective of “what happened,” which was informed by the author’s family experiences. Lots of attempts to offer credibility to the story.

Pathos: As a reader, I was confused because of the many characters – even overwhelmed, which added a sense of the chaos of what happened. I feel a a little detached  from the characters, almost too much like I am in a bird’s eye observing because of the verse style and staccato telling.  I feel torn, pulled by the different experiences and emotions of parents, children, eagle.

Logos: Many ethnic groups living together yet only some are targeted; long journey to safety shown in maps; research: during and after WWI (1915),  Indigenous and Christian ethnic groups including Assyrians, Ottoman Greeks, Turks (Muslim), Arab; now Armenian diasporas world wide; ongoing denial, Pope visiting, Kardashians visited;  Obama refusing to use the word “genocide” because Turkey is a key partner against ISIS, realities of diplomacy.

Rhetorically Reading in Book Groups

Trust students to trust the literature. The author has done the hard work of constructing the story for teen readers. You do not have to read aloud or do a guided reading with these books. Students can make meaning on their own and, even better, with a book group. There are many YA genocide novels under 200 pages. Junior high students can read these books in two weeks if you make time for them to read and discuss these books in class. Below is a sample procedure and an excerpt of a discussion three 7th grade boys had about and with Broken Memory.

1. Students choose a group and a book from several options.
2. Students chunk the book for their book group meetings.
3. Lead students through a mini lesson of ethos, pathos, logos of their books.
4. Students read individually using sticky notes to mark the following: narrator and new characters (ethos), unfamiliar words, powerful scenes that moved them (ethos), confusing parts (logos), interactions with older/wiser characters (Beers/Probst), parts to discuss. Monitor this individual reading and support students with brief conferences. This is the time and space for “teaching.”
5. When the group meets, offer a flexible guide for the students: summarize the chunk in four sentences (a review of what happened and a review of summarizing); go to the pages of unfamiliar words and make meaning together (using context clues, do research if needed); identify and describe the characters and how they are similar/different/need each other; talk about scenes that moved you.
6. Make time the next day for students to do research into questions that emerged from their reading while you confer with students about their rhetorical reading.

Discussion

Reading rhetorically acknowledges the aesthetic of the text and the aesthetic response of the reader while giving young readers a productive way of engaging with what happened and how a writer translates what happened into writing so that others can remember.

I’d love to hear your thoughts and questions about reading genocide novels and trying out the rhetorical reading approach.

• How do you use rhetoric in your reading instruction?
• How might a rhetorical approach to reading impact the way you thought about the narrative, the story?
• What additional questions might you add to prompt critical thinking?

 

Genocide Texts for Your Classroom Library

Bosnia Herzegovina

• Filipović, Zlata. Zlata’s Diary: A Child’s Life in Sarajevo . New York: Viking, 1994.Nović, Sara.Girl at War: A Novel. Random House 2015.
• Galloway, Steven. The Cellist of Sarajevo . New York: Riverhead Books, 2008.
• Mead, Alice. Girl of Kosovo . New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2001.

Cambodia

• Ho, Minfong. The Clay Marble . New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1991.
• Ho, Minfong. The Stone Goddess . New York: Orchard Books, 2003.
• McCormick, Patricia. Never Fall Down. New York: Balzer and Brey, 2012.
• Ratner, Vaddey. In the Shadow of the Banyan . New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012.
• Smith, Icy, and Sopaul Nhem. Half Spoon of Rice: A Survival Story of the Cambodian Genocide Manhattan Beach, CA: East West Discovery Press, 2010.

Armenian Genocide

• Bagdasarian, Adam. Forgotten Fire . New York: Laurel-Leaf, 2002.
• Bohjalian, Chris. The Sandcastle Girls: A Novel , 2012.
• Skrypuch, Marsha F. Nobody’s Child . Toronto: Boardwalk Books, 2003.
• Walrath, Dana. Like Water on Stone . New York: Delacorte Press, 2014.

Iraqi Kurds

• Ellis, Deborah. Children of War: Voices of Iraqi Refugees. Toronto: Groundwood Books, 2008.
• Laird, Elizabeth. Kiss the Dust. New York: Dutton Children’s Books, 1992.

Guatemala

• Brown, Skila. Caminar . Somerville, MA: Candlewick Press, 2014.
• Cameron, Ann. Colibri . New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003.
• Mikaelsen, Ben. Red Midnight . New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2002.
• Mikaelsen, Ben. Tree Girl . New York: HarperTempest, 2004.
• Pellegrino, Marjorie W. Journey of Dreams. London: Frances Lincoln Children’s Books, 2009.

Middle Passage

• Draper, Sharon M. Copper Sun. New York: Athenaeum Books for Young Readers, 2006.
• Fox, Paula, and Eros Keith. The Slave Dancer: A Novel . Scarsdale, NY: Bradbury Press,1973.
• Hendry, Frances M. Chains. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Rwanda and Burundi

• Combres, Élisabeth, Shelley Tanaka, and Michael Solomon.Broken Memory: A Novel of Rwanda. Toronto: Groundwood Books/House of Anansi Press, 2009.
• Cornwell, Nicki, and Karin Littlewood. Christophe’s Story. London: Frances Lincoln Children’s, 2011.
• Jansen, Hanna. Over a Thousand Hills I Walk with You. Minneapolis, MN: Carolrhoda Books, 2006.
• Stassen, Jean-Philippe. Deogratias, a Tale of Rwanda. New York: First Second, 2006.

Native Peoples of North American

• Alexie, Sherman. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. New York: Little, Brown,and Co., 2007.
• Bruchac, Joseph. Hidden Roots . New York: Scholastic, 2004.
• Edwardson, Debby D., Alex Ferrari, and Melanie Kroupa. My Name Is Not Easy . New York: Marshall Cavendish, 2011.
• Gansworth, Eric L. If I Ever Get Out of Here: A Novel with Paintings . New York: Arthur A.Levine Books, 2013.
• Tingle, Tim. How I Became a Ghost: A Choctaw Trail of Tears Story. Oklahoma City, OK: The RoadRunner Press, 2013.

Ukraine

• Mak, Ol’ha. Stones Under the Scythe . Bloomington, IN: iUniverse Inc., 2011.
• Skrypuch, Marsha F., and Michael Martchenko. Enough. Toronto: Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 2000.
• Watts, Irene N. Touched by Fire . Toronto: Tundra Books, 2013. .

Sudan

• Bassoff, Leah, and Laura DeLuca . Lost Girl Found. Toronto: Groundwood Books/House of Anansi Press, 2014.
• Farish, Terry. The Good Braider: A Novel . Las Vegas, NV: Amazon Children’s Pub, 2012.
• Mead, Alice. Year of No Rain. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003.
• Park, Linda S. A Long Walk to Water: Based on a True Story . Boston: Clarion Books, 2010.
• Pinkney, Andrea D., and Shane Evans. The Red Pencil . New York: Little, Brown and Company,2014.