I wanted to make a couple of remarks about Sold, because I missed the discussion last Thursday. The power of this work is undeniable. The narrative style is impressionistic, rather than naturalistic, creating a sense of individual experience. At the same time, I think there is a breaking down of the space between the narrator and reader because the reader is forced to confront the trauma of those experiences directly. There is no safe distance from this child's hell. Her voice is direct, relentless, present. Her tragedy is so clear and affective because we must be there in the moment of her fall. We bear witness to the terrible truth of her life, rather than recieve that truth second hand.
I think about our problematic discussion of Rules for Survival when I am writing this, because I think this touches on where I found Rules to be a failure. Both novels deal with issues of child abuse; both are extreme cases of the worst kind of betrayal and abuse imaginable. But there is in Sold such an immediacy to the narrative voice that the reader is directly affected by the action. The innocence of the narrator's voice, the trust in her "family," seem so authentic and so tragic in relation to the life she is forced into. There is a depth to the narrator, even if she does not come out and define the paradoxes of her experience. Werlin fails to create the same authenticity in her narrator, focusing on surface observation and the immediacy of reaction. Even though the epistolary convention she uses is reflective, there is no sense conveyed of the deeper conflicts that inform his overall experience. If Werlin wanted to convey the "in-the-moment" action-reaction life of her character, she would have been more successful using narrative conventions similar to McCormick's.
Student's need to be aware of the world they live in. That children must bear today should be a signal about the failure of human rights policies in the world. Where is the moral power of U.S. foreign policy in India, or Southeast Asia, where child slavery and prostitution are rampant? Our righteous indignation is buried under economic initiatives to open markets and the billions of dollars in American debt held by countries in the region.
And let's not be naive; this is not a "them" problem. I don't think anyone would disagree that child exploitation occurs here. How do we spend our resources in the justice department? Prosecuting bogus corruption cases in Wisconsin? How are communities mobilizing in our country? Organizing groups of armed "minutemen" to "help" patrol the borders for illegal immigrant workers (and Al Qeada terrorists)? When I hear about the attention being paid to Anna Nicole Smith and the custody scandal over her child, I cringe. What great injustice is going unrecorded, unvoiced, so we can have our daily hit of lascivious voyeurism? Sold calls attention to an unspeakable tragedy in the world that continues to go unspoken. Experiencing this life is a step toward truly empathizing with a tragedy that remains faceless (facelessness is, after all, a comfort). Empathy, perhaps, could be a second step rather than the final.
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