Reimagining Home in Child Refugee Narratives: Trauma, Memory, and the Reconstruction of Belonging

Abstract

This study examines how contemporary child refugee narratives reconfigure home as an emotional, relational and psychological space rather than a fixed geographical location. It comparatively analyses Veera Hiranandani’s The Night Diary, Alan Gratz’s Refugee, and Victoria Jamieson and Omar Mohamed’s When Stars Are Scattered, which portray displacement across the Partition of India, Nazi persecution, the Cuban refugee crisis, the Syrian civil war and the Somali refugee experience. Using qualitative comparative close reading, the study considers narrative structure, memory, symbolism, emotional expression and interpersonal relationships. It applies concepts from trauma studies, cultural memory, postmemory and affect theory to interpret how child protagonists experience violence, separation, disrupted identity and prolonged uncertainty. The analysis indicates that forced migration fractures children’s physical security and familiar routines, while memory, storytelling, caregiving, education and human solidarity support the gradual reconstruction of belonging. The selected texts employ diary narration, interwoven perspectives and graphic storytelling to represent fragmented traumatic experience and the continuing emotional presence of lost homes. Across the narratives, home is not recovered solely through territorial return; it is continually remade through family bonds, cultural practices, collective memory, hope and adaptation. By foregrounding children’s perspectives across distinct historical and geopolitical contexts, the study clarifies the psychological and relational dimensions of displacement and shows how literary narratives represent belonging as an ongoing process of reconstruction.