Everyone has a moment (or several) in their adolescence where they experience the feeling of “coming out of the mist” of childhood and into the “real world,” stepping out of a kaleidoscope of sensations and into a more definitive shape of self. It can be painful, harsh, exciting.

For those who spend their childhood in a war, only to realize there is an entire world full of children who don’t have their playmates blown to pieces by artillery shells moments after they say goodbye, this shift has a whole other dimension.

For Mazen Maarouf, coming out of the mist was like a cruel prank. “It was like, ‘What the heck!? Who trapped me here?’ You feel cheated, you know? You feel deceived.”

The Palestinian author, born in Beirut, spent the first 12 years of his life in the middle of Lebanon’s Civil War and the rest of his childhood in its aftermath. His family fled the Tel al-Zaatar refugee camp massacre, lived in Shatila and then ended up in Hamra, in an apartment with the dystopic irony of a beautiful view of the sea and the constant presence of gunmen who held their weapons “like cups of coffee.”

Maarouf didn’t begin writing about war from a child’s perspective until he moved to Iceland in 2011 and started having nightmares in which crystallized memories of living among the tanks rose to the surface.

‘Nobody asks children about war’

Maarouf sits under the towering trees in the courtyard of Cafe Younis in Hamra, a few blocks from where he grew up, waving a pen he borrowed in case he thinks of something he wants to write down.

“Nobody asks children about war, about what happened. Nobody takes them seriously,” he says. “[Children] are victimized as well, but we were not just victims! We did horrible things. I wanted to reflect, as much as I could, the spectrum of behavior of children in the war.”

Palestinian author Mazen Maarouf at Cafe Younis in Hamra, close to where he grew up during the Civil War. (Credit: João Sousa/L'Orient Today)

In the titular story of his award-winning collection, Jokes for the Gunmen, the main character, a young boy, tries to acquire a glass eye for his father – who has two perfectly functional eyes. He goes so far as offering to sell his twin brother to soldiers he thinks will pay for his organs. The glass eye, the boy has decided, is what will make his father tough enough to avoid daily beatings from the gunmen.

The emotional straightforwardness in how a child views the world offers important insight. Maarouf talks about the “mist” of childhood as providing, paradoxically, a clarity that is often lost in adulthood.

Adults want explanations for everything and go to great lengths to justify things that are inherently absurd or horrible. Layers of ideology separate people and dominate the narrative.

“Children’s voices are always absent, and they could give you a really wonderful perspective about things because the way they feel things is very innocent, very primitive — it’s a very pure feeling,” Maarouf says.

“They don’t care for ideology. What is left is the human feeling, which we [as adults] often lose, because they are blurred by some ideological point of view or opinion. Children just have the feeling. This is the most precious thing.”

Reading the room

Maarouf’s memories of the war flicker with moments of pain, humor and  — perhaps odd to some — appreciation. He says something about the war evoked people's honesty — for better or for worse.

“I appreciate even when they hit me because they were very clear. They did not go behind your back. But when I grew up, I found that it’s very difficult to find an honest person. Honesty is not the most common feature among humans these days.”

Ikbal Habib, a children's clinical psychologist working in Lebanon and the UAE, echoes Maarouf’s perspective on honesty, saying adults tend to underestimate how much children understand the world around them.

“A lot of people in Lebanon, if there is something traumatic, they think it shouldn’t be discussed in front of children — they don’t want to confuse them. But children are very perceptive. They know how to read the room.”

Children make up for they can’t understand verbally by observing, Habib explains, reading body language, tone of voice and other cues.

Considering how much they pick up on, “it can be very confusing for them when adults say ‘Everything is OK,’” says Habib. “It can create anxiety and affect children’s abilities to trust people or their environment. People think children don’t understand, but they do.”

In an echo of the classic tale The Emperor’s New Clothes, in which a child is the only one in the whole empire willing to admit, or even able to see, that the Emperor is parading naked down the street, Maarouf’s stories reveal the absurd reality of war in a way that cuts clean through the constructed justifications for violence toted by the adults responsible for such catastrophes.

Children in Gaza

Reading Maarouf’s stories now, amid Israel’s war on Gaza, its relevance is striking. Almost half of the people in Gaza are children – 47.3 percent of the population according to a 2017 census. Half of those living for eight months now amid relentless violence are under the age of 18. And who asks them about the war?

Habib cites children’s ability to use fantasy and imagination to help them process trauma. Storytelling is a form of therapy, she says.

“I remember, sometimes we would be under heavy bombing,” Maarouf recalls. “We were in the shelter, everyone is scared — every moment could be the last moment. And then people decided to start making fun of each other. When you make fun of someone, you are creating a story — a very, very short story. I think this was the ultimate freedom. This was how we could break through the authority of war.”

Palestinian author Mazen Maarouf sits with a cat in the courtyard at Cafe Younis in Hamra, close to where he grew up during the Civil War. (Credit: João Sousa/L'Orient Today)

It’s not just the children that survive who get to tell their stories. Maarouf says the characters in his stories are often sculpted in homage to children he knew who were killed during the war — people who never got to grow up.

“It doesn’t leave you,” he says. “I still think about it and I still base characters on these children that I lost. I try to give them life, in a way, or to assume a life for them because they were nine or ten when we lost them. So I try to give them voices again.”

Mazen Marouf is a writer and poet. His book Jokes for the Gunmen won the al-Multaqa Prize for Arabic Short Stories in 2016. Forthcoming is a stand-alone English translation of his novella “The Curse of the Mud Ball Kid,” a surreal, sci-fi story about “the last Palestinian,” which takes place in Palestine, in the year 2048.