‘The child that I left behind’: memory, trauma, and the reconstruction of childhood in Nakba narratives

TL;DR

The paper explores how Palestinian refugee childhood memories are shaped by displacement and trauma, using these memories as a form of resistance against ongoing violence.

Contribution

The study introduces the concept of 'unchilding' and challenges Western trauma frameworks by centering Palestinian perspectives on memory and survival.

Findings

Palestinian children experience sociogenic trauma from colonial structures, not individual pathology.

Refugees use childhood memories as a cultural-political tool to resist displacement and erasure.

Survival strategies include selective sensory silencing and strategic memory suppression.

Abstract

This article analyzes Palestinian refugee childhood memories, focusing on how displacement and survival intersect within the context of ongoing settler-colonial violence. Challenging conventional Western trauma frameworks that view trauma as discrete, time-bounded events amenable to therapeutic resolution, this research conceptualizes Palestinian children’s experiences as sociogenic trauma emerging from colonial structures rather than individual pathology.

Drawing on 34 interviews with Palestinian refugees from Lydda who experienced the 1948 Nakba as children or were born shortly after, the study uses the child as method framework to analyze childhood memories as complex and dynamic sites where trauma and adaptive survival mechanisms coexist and shape individual and collective experiences.

Findings reveal systematic processes of “unchilding”—the deliberate eviction of Palestinian children from childhood through invisibilization, dehumanization, and forced premature maturation—alongside survival strategies such as selective sensory silencing and strategic memory suppression. The study demonstrates how Palestinian refugees mobilize childhood memories to position themselves within ongoing displacement, deploying childhood as a cultural-political category to navigate present conditions of ongoing Nakba and resistance.

This study contributes to scholarship that centers Palestinian perspectives by illuminating how childhood memories function as sites of resistance that protect Palestinian knowledge from appropriation. It calls for fundamental changes in academic and professional practice, advocating approaches that honor Palestinian epistemologies while challenging Western frameworks’ claims to universality in understanding trauma and survival.