Day 21: Breaking the Cycle of Violence Through Truth Telling Picture Books by Leila Boukarim

This April the 24th will mark 110 years since the start of the Armenian Genocide, a heavily documented mass slaughter that is still only recognized by 33 countries and viciously denied by the perpetrator. 

I first heard about the Armenian Genocide in 1998 in my first year of college and was shocked at scale of the brutality that had taken place in 1915. I remember immediately wondering: how had our history books told us about WWI in such excruciating detail and still somehow managed to skip over the extermination of 1.5 million Armenians? Which then naturally led to the question: how could humanity witness violence of this scale at the start of the century, and then proceed to do it again? 

It was in this moment that my eyes were opened to the real world, very different from the one I had constructed in my mind, the result of all that my parents had told me, and kept from me, with the best of intentions. My parents did the best they could. I know this. They themselves fled war, married young out of necessity, and moved around the globe in search of “home” before jumping at the opportunity to move back to Lebanon when the civil war ended. I get it. There was no room for much else, and I would later understand, there was also a desperate need to look to the future with hope, rather than dwell in the shadows of the past. 

Learning about Armenians and their history tore down all preconceived notions that peoples, nations, and even individuals are protected under international law; that justice and common decency and humanity would always force us to pause and ask ourselves what we're doing, and what we’re turning a blind eye to. Between 1915 and 1923, just over 80% of the Armenian population in the Ottoman Empire was wiped out despite the many warnings and desperate calls for help. 

But, naïve as I was, I blamed the speed at which information traveled then, and the perhaps unreliable ways in which it travelled, which surely led people to question the legitimacy of the unthinkable news they were receiving. People forced to walk through the desert without food or water? Women rounded up, forced to dance, and then set alight in front of their children? Families dragged out of their homes, marked with a Star of David, and shuttled off to gas chambers to die? Impossible. If only the masses had seen this with their own eyes, I thought, they would have spoken up. Had the internet existed then, surely they would have risen up to stop these genocides from happening. 

This could never happen today, so many of us believed. Not in the age of social media. Not with all that we know. Impossible.

When my eldest was six, he asked me where he was from, and it was that simple question that led me to write LOST WORDS: AN ARMENIAN STORY OF SURVIVAL AND HOPE, (beautifully illustrated by Sona Avedikian, published by Chronicle Books). I didn’t know in that moment how I would tell my kids about their ancestors, about their great grandfather who had survived a genocide, about how he ended up in Lebanon after having lost most of his family. They were so little, and my instinct as a parent was to protect them from the horrors of the world. But I knew that in order to do that, I’d have to keep the truth from them. There were two problems with this: I couldn’t keep it from them forever, and I didn’t want to. And so I started writing about genocide for children, because I believed with my whole heart, and still do, that if our little ones are exposed to the truth, they will do better than we did. The book came out eight years later in May 2024, after we had collectively witnessed the killing of over 40,000 Palestinian civilians, half of them children. The videos and images of people being bombed, shredded, burned alive, buried under the rumble, flooded the internet for all to see. It’s been 18 months of this state sanctioned, live streamed horror, and no number of cries for help or global protests could stop it. 

If only they had seen this with their own eyes, they would have spoken up.

I realize now how wrong I was, how wrong we were, to believe this. Because people have always known. They witnessed their neighbors being dragged out of their homes. They saw them rounded up in public squares, beaten and humiliated. They watched them march through the desert, starved and exhausted, their deaths imminent. And still, they did not rise up. 

Today, nothing has changed. We now know that people can receive the news live, on their phones, 24 hours a day, and they still would make the conscious decision to look away. They could see half a child dangling from the ruins of a building, and sip their oat milk cappuccinos unperturbed. They could see newborn babies left to rot in their incubators, starved toddlers standing in long lines for food, and tiny bodies charred or beheaded on the ground, and insist this has nothing to do with them. Children’s book creators can hear from human rights organizations around the world that the estimated number of children killed so far exceeds 100,000 and continue writing and illustrating and advocating for children’s rights without even mentioning Palestinian children. We know this now. We know that this is who we are. We know that knowledge, that fact, that bearing witness will not move us into action if we risk losing something. 

Is there still hope? Hope for us as a species? My dear friend in Gaza, Shahd Alnaami, reminds me every day that there is. “As long as we are alive,” she says in her #30DaysOfArabVoices piece, “things will continue to change. We won’t stay in the same place forever, and neither will our circumstances. This is my source of hope: nothing remains the same — neither do our struggles, nor do we.”

In these dark times, I look to young Shahd for hope. I look to the college students and their encampments. I look to the students in Berlin who protested when their teacher was fired for standing up against genocide, and managed to bring her back. I look to my own children, my teenager who educates his friends and implores them to take action against the injustice, completely undeterred by their disapproval, by their discomfort, by threats of suspension and police intervention. To them, the injustices perpetrated and financed by our governments are as clear as day. To them, it’s not complicated, and they are baffled by the grownups who claim it is. 

I have always believed in the power of children's books and the role they play in shaping people, communities, and the future. When we offer young children access to different perspectives, we help them see themselves as part of a whole, and not the whole. Ensuring picture books act as both mirrors in which they can see themselves, and windows through which they can see others, helps to nurture empathy and compassion for others. This helps to prevent the germination of a sense of entitlement that leads to our centering ourselves over community; that gives us the imagined right to take – to take up space, land, freedom, and life from others. It is only when we see each other, when we see the human in one another, that we can even begin to hope to prevent these horrific histories from repeating.

It’s hard not to despair as the genocide in Palestine rages on. But on the days when I manage to breathe a little deeper than usual, I am reminded of how urgently we need picture books that tell the kinds of stories that will shape little ones into humans who will have the courage and moral backbone to speak out against cruelty, swiftly, firmly, and no matter the cost. As much as we want to shield our children from the horrors of our world, we have a responsibility to be honest with them. Only through telling them the truth about our past (and present) can we ever hope for a better future.