ABSTRACT
In the opening of War Girls, Tochi Onyebuchi’s character Onyii is detaching her arm—a practice that other girl soldiers in her camp often engage in before embarking on sleep. It is April in the year 2172 in southeastern Nigeria and Onyii, her sister, and other former child soldiers and orphaned girls are surviving in a camp with some imaginable and unimaginable technologies. “Other War Girls have gotten used to sleeping without their arms and legs. But Onyii’s phantom limb haunts her in her sleep. In her dreams, she has all her arms and legs and can run. She can run far and fast and away from whatever is chasing her” (Onyebuchi, 2019, p. 3). When I first began to examine the intersectionality of youth justice and education, one of my first studies—a multisited ethnography—followed young playwrights or student artists aged 14–18 who learned the art of playmaking and performance in the context of youth detention centers or jails for children. I argued the student artists in my studies—African American girls, many of whom were incarcerated for status offenses 1 —lived “betwixt and between” lives that simultaneously straddled confinement and freedom (Winn, 2010a, 2010b). Like Onyii, these girls had dreams of running “far and fast and away” from whatever was chasing them. They wanted to run away from miseducation in their schools, lack of resources in their communities, and self-doubt while running toward more desirable lives where they could live with dignity and take care of themselves.
