In May 2006, Deborah Ellis’s book Three Wishes: Palestinian and Israeli Children Speak became an object of controversy when the Canadian Jewish Congress protested its availability to junior elementary students in the Toronto school system. As a result, the Toronto District School Board restricted access to the book and removed it from school libraries serving children below grade seven. PEN Canada, an association of writers that exists to protect, among other things, freedom of expression, along with the publisher of Three Wishes, Anansi Press, and Ellis herself, protested the decision made by the Toronto District School Board. The politics of the debate clearly straddled the “rights” spectrum, from those supporting the right to free speech to those in support of the moral right of religious communities to determine their specific interests in the multicultural grid work of Canadian society.
The paper examines this public debate and argues that this particular controversial event put into play a new political subject within this civil society, one who is being subject to new determinations as to how to invest and mobilize its powers. I am speaking here about the figure of the child, both the child who testifies as a political subject and the child who reads the significance of political signs in the context of today’s international readership. It is my intention to examine what the debate and the text itself have to say about the making and unmaking of children and youth as political figures in a transnational framework of testimonial production.