Trigger Warning: mentions of war, Nazism
“النوم تعال Things I Knew When I Was Young,” is a solo exhibition by Sudani visual artist and sculptor Amna Elhassan. The title translates to “Sleep Come, Things I Knew When I Was Young”. Last year, her exhibition was curated by Larissa-Diana Fuhrmann and shown at Sakhile & Me, a German art gallery. The collection is a memory of Elhassan’s childhood. The in-person experience was complete with sounds of lullabies, toys, and pillow fights. Eyes, ears, and minds were slightly soothed and mostly disturbed as her art forced viewers to rethink ideas of childhood innocence, play, violence, and the perpetuation of war amid the proxy war happening in her country, Sudan.
Her childhood is consistently in her thought since she lives in her childhood home with her family in Shambat Elhila. She only left for her master’s program in Rome.
I like how the focus is childhood, but it is not infantilizing. Elhassan exposes that much of our play was intertwined with violence. Musical chairs, pushing one another, grabbing seats to be the last standing. Melted water guns. Trying not to kill, but at least irritate each other, to win, like plastic irritates the Earth but we still use it for profit. Water guns melted by climate change no doubt. War is detrimental to societies, but we still practice it, usually for profit, to win.
Violence was integral to childhood play when you were young. The two emotions have shared your face like in “Watergun”, where an upset girl Elhassan blasts her water gun off-screen. Elhassan intertwines this with the other aspects of her childhood too. Girl Elhassan smiling on her way to school with a lollipop in her hand. A pink girl Elhassan looking up during class while her classmate studies and possibly judges her. She does not ignore violence among the other aspects of childhood, she blends them in the collection.
She properly confronts, deconstructs, and reconstructs narratives of childhood innocence. She confronts the idea of childhood innocence, deconstructs it by revisiting her childhood and discovering the truth of violence, and reconstructs it by owning and presenting the truth in her art. This process is necessary because childhood does not end in childhood. Its values follow us into life. As children, we played competitive, violent childhood games, and now there are competitive, violent adults who practice and continue war.
The idea of childhood innocence should not be used as an excuse to avoid confronting hard childhood truths. The danger of this is shown in Susanne Baackmann’s academic article, “Undoing the Myth of Childhood Innocence in Gisela Elsner’s Fliegeralarm”. Elsner’s “Fliegeralarm” is a book about kriegskinder, German children who grew up during World War II. Elsner was a kriegskinder herself. In her book, a group of kriegskinder kill a neighborhood German boy whose father was a communist; They considered him “Jewish”, and racially tormented him until they murdered and buried him.
After the war ended, kriegskinder and older German citizens had to confront fascism and Nazism in themselves, and their communities. Confronting Nazi Germany, deconstructing, and reconstructing it would lead to the end of Nazism’s creator, capitalism. German officials did not want this, so they ensured German citizens would not have to confront their guilt; They said Germans were guiltless.
Kriegskinder played a big role in the push for innocence because of their supposed “childhood innocence”. Kriegskinder were children disenfranchised by the war, without family members and school, and often did disturbing tasks like clearing out bodies after bombings. German officials reduced them to what they supposedly did not know, the effects of their actions, to paint German people as victims of Hitler that did not have to take full, historical responsibility for their role in perpetuating Nazism during the war, and after the war. Also, the focus on German pain repressed the pain of Hitler’s Jewish victims, who suffered the most.
German officials ignored that many kriegskinder were aware of the harm they were causing, and were proud to worship Hitler. This is what Elser’s book exposes. It refutes the idea that people are innocent simply because they are children. The belief that anyone who was not old enough to kill in the war was innocent, meant Germans were denying any guilt they felt. Since the guilt was repressed, it is undying and passed down through generations. Remnants of Nazism, like capitalism, are undying as well.
With these truths, Baackmann refutes the idea of childhood and historical innocence. She proves we simply claim innocence to excuse and normalize horrible pasts.
The destruction of childhood and historical innocence means people will confront and deconstruct the traumatic experiences of their childhood and history while assuming responsibility for reconstructing the past for the truth, so the trauma does not continue. It is the path to genuine healing.
When people look at Elhassan’s collection, I hope they go through this process with their childhood “innocence” and play.