Alice König, October 2024
This blog connects to Alice König’s wider work on the forces that shape children’s habits of visualising war and peace, and the impact that young people’s voices can have in questioning, stretching and deepening adult conceptions of conflict.
A Boy Builds a Cheetah
Tom Nalder, New Zealand[1]
The boy was tired of conflict
so he built a cheetah.
To yellow fur he added dots,
so he could take shelter
and know warmth.
He added strong eyes,
so he could see danger.
He pasted on round, circular ears,
so he could hear the cheetah’s warnings.
He filled four legs with energy,
so he could escape with speed.
He striped half the tail,
so he could hold the rudder
in tough times.
He built permanent claws
on paddy paws,
to help protect himself.
The boy rode the cheetah
into warzones, and stole
bombs, guns and despair.
The boy rode the cheetah
into borders, and let people
live where they needed to.
The boy rode the cheetah
to unhappy places, and left
baskets of peace and joy.
The cheetah ran so fast he flew,
and if you look carefully at the sky,
you will see a striped tail
and the sandals of a boy.
The boy’s cheetah is a product of war: it springs from an exhaustion with conflict. It is the legacy of militarism: it has eyes and ears attuned to threats, legs designed to outrun danger, and claws for self-protection. But it also dismantles and transcends armed violence, boldly and compassionately: it removes weapons from warzones, re-orders borders, gives peaceful gifts, and invites us to be similarly inspired. Can we follow? it asks. Can we go where the boy and his cheetah now soar – or at least raise our eyes in their direction?
Tom Nalder’s evocative poem combines two (seemingly paradoxical) phenomena which are visible throughout the archive of work submitted to Never Such Innocence’s annual competition by children from all around the world: first, a resistance to militarism that contains traces of militarisation; and second, a sense that resisting militarism is both a marginal position and an act of privilege. It takes super-human powers to rid the world of bombs and override anti-migration policies – powers which ordinary people (unlike magical creatures) do not typically possess. You might fly high in the process and become a symbol of hope that others can look up to; but you will be pushing at the boundaries of possibility, going out of this world – perhaps beyond sight. The boy and his cheetah are the exception, not the norm; in fact, they exist in a realm of fantasy, not reality.
And yet that is the point: a child’s imagination (the author reveals[2]) can take us to places we might not otherwise go. It can conjure shelter and warmth in the wake of violence; it can displace unhappiness with visions of peace and joy. While the super-powered cheetah might out-run us, we can follow in both boy and author’s footsteps by visualising an alternative to militarism – and, crucially, by not infantilising that alternative vision as ‘child’s play’. The author ends the poem by encouraging us to look skywards; not to lose sight of the striped tail that can steer us through tough times or the sandals of the boy who dreamt that tail/tale up. The cheetah is a product of war but also a metaphor for a different, more creative, visionary way of addressing conflict. The boy’s placement in the final stanza, nearly out of sight, reminds us how frequently unseen and unfollowed such blue-sky thinking can be; how marginalised it often is.
Tom Nalder’s poem is just one of many submissions to Never Such Innocence (NSI)’s annual competition which can help us understand how young people both absorb and respond to the everyday militarisms in the world around them. As scholars like Catherine Lutz, Cynthia Enloe, and Marshall Beier (among others) have outlined, militarisation is ‘a discursive process, involving a shift in general societal beliefs and values in ways necessary to legitimise the use of force’.[3] Or, in Laura Shepherd’s words, it brings about:
… a positive public disposition towards the military and towards militaristic ideas… A militarised society is one in which people have come to believe that a military solution to a problem is the best solution; it is the production of a set of ideas and beliefs about how the world works. Militarism is an ideology, a way of thinking about political issues that structures a society’s understanding of violence through a prism of acceptance of the use of force and the valorisation of military institutions. In short, militarism as an ideology works – as most ideologies do – to shape the parameters of what is considered to be ‘common sense’ in a society.[4]
Crucially, as Victoria Basham underlines, militarisation is not ‘simply imposed on society unidirectionally’ by military institutions or the state.[5] A host of different forces play a part, from memorial practices and war literature to educational curricula, museum spaces, tourist attractions and toys – forms of war-visualisation which not only reinforce each other but which encourage interaction with them on the part of consumers.[6] It is through such interactions with everyday war-visualisations that militarisation becomes ‘embedded, embodied, emotional and woven into the fabric of our societies’, with the result that ‘war and preparing for it become desired and desirable in everyday life.’[7] As Enloe stresses, ‘[m]ost of the people in the world who are militarized are not themselves in uniform. Most militarized people are civilians’.[8]And militarisation goes well beyond merely socialising us into accepting armed violence as necessary and normal, as Laura Shepherd outlines:
…militarisation is linked not only to direct violence, as exercised by the police and military, but also to beliefs about other forms of political activity: the exercise of authority, the concept of legitimacy, and the experience of civilians. Militarism informs how we think of ourselves as citizens of a particular state, how we relate ourselves to formal politics, and how we engage with others both inside and outside our own territorial boundaries…[9]
In short, militarisation structures a plethora of social, cultural and political encounters, shaping personal as well as collective identities, belief systems and behaviours well beyond obviously military spheres. As Enloe puts it, it is ‘driven deep down into the soil’, informing much more of our lives than we realise; and (in Beier and Tabak’s words) it can be ‘at its most potent when it recedes into the quotidian’.[10]
It would be wrong to imply that we are mere passive recipients of militarisation; on the contrary, we ourselves are active agents in the process – ‘subjects in the meaningmaking’ who interpret, sometimes resist, and often reproduce the militarising visualisations around us.[11] As I discuss in a forthcoming article for a volume edited by Marshall Beier and Jana Tabak, on Militarism in the Lifeworlds of Children, the archive of works submitted to Never Such Innocence’s annual competition contains a wide array of young people’s responses to militarisation and everyday militarisms. One recurring theme is young people’s awareness that speaking out for an end or alternative to conflict (as distinct from simply lamenting conflict’s impacts) is a minority position, unlikely to gain traction with ‘the powers that be’. In their resistance, in other words, they reflect and sometimes reproduce a dominant worldview that understands militarism as the default mentality and adulthood as the necessary qualification for policymaking. However, they also disentangle their own voices from the narratives and registers of war/peace-storytelling which they have been socialised into and challenge us to rethink the complex (and often blurred) relationship between adults’ and children’s war-knowledge and input in conversations on conflict. Above all, through the diversity of their reflections, the voices in the NSI archive give us valuable practice in listening to and not homogenising a multiplicity of young people’s perspectives which respond to militarisms and militarisation in instructive, world-changing ways.
Tom Nalder’s poem challenges us to follow their gaze – to look skywards and fix our eyes on a peace-bearing cheetah who has been conjured into this world by a child.
[1] This poem won the age 9-11 poetry category in Never Such Innocence’s 2019-20 competition, on the theme ‘The impact of conflict on communities’. Winning booklets for all of their annual competitions can be found here: https://www.neversuchinnocence.com/past-competitions.
[2] I take my lead here from the author himself, aware of how important it is – if we are to take young voices seriously – not to romanticise or infantilise ‘imagination’ as a distinctively ‘childlike’ capability.
[3] Lutz 2002: 723; also e.g. Enloe 2007; Beier 2011a.
[4] Shepherd 2018: 209.
[5] Basham 2020: 3.
[6] Beier/Tabak 2020: 283-6, esp. 285 on children’s cinema, aspects of play, militarized pedagogies, and wider socio-cultural phenomena such as war remembrance.
[7] Basham 2020: 2-3.
[8] Enloe 2004: 7.
[9] Shepherd 2018: 210.
[10] Enloe 2004: 220; Beier/Tabak 2020: 286.
[11] Beier/Tabak 2020: 285-7 (reflecting specifically on children’s agency and resistance in the reproduction of militarism).