Memory and Narrative in Uwem Akpan’s Say You’re One of Them and Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner

The literary representation of childhood in contexts of extreme political violence raises urgent questions about how narrative can preserve experience while simultaneously processing collective trauma, and a comparison of Uwem Akpan's Say You're One of Them and Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner reveals how writers from Nigeria and Afghanistan construct child perspectives as moral lenses through which adult political failures are exposed and judged. This study examined how both texts use the innocence and vulnerability of child narrators to heighten the moral indictment of the adult worlds that surround them. A trauma narrative methodology combined with postcolonial and comparative literary criticism was applied. Akpan's collection of stories depicts children caught in ethnic and religious violence across various African countries, while Hosseini's novel uses two Kabul boys' friendship as the vehicle for examining Afghanistan's political convulsions. Both texts deploy a gap between the child's limited understanding and the reader's full comprehension to produce emotional and political meaning. The analysis revealed that both authors rely on the child narrator's unsentimental observation to make political violence more confronting than it would be in an adult perspective. The study concludes that both texts exemplify a global literary trend of using childhood as a narrative strategy for humanising the victims of large-scale political violence and recommends the pairing for undergraduate seminars at institutions in the South South geopolitical zone, where Akpan's Nigerian Catholic perspective is regionally resonant.

Keywords: memory, child narrator, political violence, Akpan, Hosseini