Introduction

Spatial belonging is one of the key features defining human experience. The question of one's belonging becomes ambiguous when forced displacement, due to war or conflict, occurs.

Daily practices of displaced people are often in fact part of wider transcultural tactics of belonging, and for example, transnational geopolitics becomes manifested in and through the body (Carter 2005; Puumala and Pehkonen 2010). Whereas contemporary psychosocial interventions and research focus much on the handling of violence-related memories and mental health of the forcibly displaced (e.g., Reed et al. 2011), less is known about the psychological effects of war on children and youth (e.g., Gabarino and Kostelny 1996; Goldstein et al. 1997; Dybdahl 2001, p. 1214; Peltonen and Punamaki 2010) and even less about the meaning of spatial fractures in the subjective life span (Kuusisto-Arponen 2008, 2009, 2011a, b). This chapter discusses the memories of displacement among Finnish and British war children and how these fragmented emotive-spatial experiences evolved into spatial trauma. It looks at how displacement experiences and partial effacements of memories affected war children's sense of belonging. What kinds of socio-spatial coping mechanisms were deployed during the displacement? How and what do former war children tell about their experiences, and how does spatial trauma practically manifest itself in their childhood memories and their overall life course? By tracing existential spatial practices, this chapter provides new insights into postwar and post-conflict literature on the experiences and aftercare of displaced people.

Empirically, the chapter is based on 32 narrative interviews with Finnish war children, conducted by the researcher between 2005 and 2007, and on written accounts of British evacuee children's experiences. The book by Schweitzer et al.

(1990), Goodnight children everywhere: Memories of evacuation in World War II, includes 80 stories, of which 63 are stories by war children evacuated from London. Out of these, 61 children were evacuated within the country and two were sent abroad. Some of the children sent to the countryside traveled with their mothers, and sometimes, entire school classes were also evacuated. British overseas evacuation experiences are analysed also from the findings of Michael Fethney's (1990/2000) book “The Absurd and Brave” which is based on survey of 90 former war children. All empirical accounts have been collected several decades after the war, and therefore, it is adults or now elderly people who tell about their experiences. The Finnish research data is presented anonymously: only the war child's gender is stated in the citations. The British recollections give the name and the age of the person, as in Schweitzer et al. (1990). Narrative analysis was applied to the entire data (Wiles et al. 2005). Particular attention was paid to how these former war children describe their childhood evacuation, what they remember, what emotions and bodily memories they report, and when and where the fragmentation of memories occurred. Experiences of children evacuated within their home country were compared to the experiences of those sent abroad.

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Source: Harker C., Horschelmann K. (Eds.). Conflict, Violence and Peace. Springer,2017. — 456 p.. 2017

Introduction

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