ABSTRACT
Namina Forna’s debut novel, The Gilded Ones, is a sprawling fantasy tale about Deka and other ostracised and persecuted teenage girls banding together to confront patriarchy and its legacy of lies and oppression of women, children, and other disempowered members of society. Kim Nguyen’s fourth feature film, War Witch, is about a young girl, Komona, caught in the crosshairs of the struggle for power between government and rebel forces in an unnamed sub-Saharan country. Thanks to her vivid imagination, which helps her squad survive deadly skirmishes, she is chosen as the personal witch of The Great Tiger, the leader of the armed movement that has forced Komona and many other children to join its war. As victims of state and other forms of structural violence, both Deka and Komona are pushed by external circumstances to leave their homes and take up arms among strangers, eventually orchestrating their own freedom from their captors and oppressors. Through the lives and experiences of these girls, I interrogate the complex notions and realities of childhood, victimhood, and agency, as well as their implications for the girls in question, their respective societies, and for law and policy.
