2008-09 Common Book: A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah
This article was exerpted from a Towers magazine article by Roger Routson.
At age 12, Ishmael Beah's peaceful life and childhood in Sierra Leone were suddenly shattered with the horrific scenes of war. His family was murdered. By 13, though he and his friends had run from the war, he was captured and trained as a child soldier. For two years he was kept high on drugs to fight the rebels. Killing became commonplace. A Long Way Gone is his story, one of deliverance and redemption.
When I began to read A Long Way Gone, one thing that struck me right away was the quickness with which the war struck Ishmael Beah's life. The conflict hit without warning, like an earthquake, and shattered his young life. One day, at age 12, he was walking with his older brother and friends to a neighboring village to participate in a talent show. The next, he was seeing the victims coming from his own village - a volkswagen with a dead family inside, all shot; a man carrying his dead son, still talking to him, clinging to hope; and a woman who carried her baby on her back, the baby shot dead as the woman had run for her life.
Slowly, it began to sink in to the author that his family was likely dead. And soon he and his friends were running from the war, running from the rebels, running for their own survival.
Despite the traumatic events of his early life, Ishmael Beah is always smiling, happy to be alive.
As you can already tell, A Long Way Gone is not an easy book to read. It is filled with horrors, suffering, inhumanity, grief, and killing, ever more killing. The author acknowledged as much in his talk. One of the first things he did was to thank everyone who had taken time to read his book. "I know it is not a very easy book to read emotionally so I'm always grateful when people take time to read it."
The book chronicles an amazing and horrendous journey: months of Ishmael and his friends on the lam, trying to avoid capture; the subsequent capture and training to be a soldier; the young Ishmael moving from a terrified unwilling participant in the war to a grizzled veteran, even before reaching age 16; the rescue and removal of Ishmael from the war by UNICEF; his rehabilitation in Freetown; and finally his frantic escape from Sierra Leone for his very survival.
The story reads like a novel. If only it was mere fiction.
On Oct. 21, 2009, Ishmael Beah, now 28, stood in Cowan Hall and talked to the Otterbein community about the book he wrote and his life after fleeing Sierra Leone. He related that when he first came to the U.S. in 1998 and attended high school at the United Nations International School, he didn't want to talk about his experiences with his classmates. "Lots of questions were asked. Whatever the person's speculation about my situation, I agreed with it because I didn't want to talk about my experiences, not because I was ashamed, I just felt that people would not understand. It would not take enough lunch to tell someone of my experiences. I had to give them a lot of context and was afraid if I gave them a little bit they would basically misconstrue it and I would become the child soldier and people would become afraid of me. I didn't want that."
Beah related his frustration with the media for their generalization of the fighting in Sierra Leone. "It seemed like Sierra Leone had always been at war. When anyone was born they picked up an AK47 and went to fight right away. There was no context given at all."
Beah added, "People just don't get up in the morning and say, 'Oh, we hate our neighbors, we have to fight them.' It doesn't happen that way at all . . . I grew up in a place where there was a strong sense of community, where as a child growing up, your neighbors were your friends and family . . . that context wasn't given . . . And when that context is not given, people do not understand that people who lived in Sierra Leone, even during the war, were still human beings. They had the same desires, tendencies, needs and wants as anyone anywhere. The sacrosanct nature of their lives was still the same."
This is why Beah wrote his book. "I wanted to write to put a human face to this experience so it's no longer distant. So people can see, feel, hear, and be a part of this so intimately, they will no longer be able to turn away. That they can see that, those children, everywhere in the world, not just in Sierra Leone and Africa, wherever this is happening, are someone's child. That wherever this is happening that could be your child, your brother, that it could be you. That all of us have the capacity to lose our humanity completely, but that we also have the strength to regain it, if given the right care and support."
Things that we all take for granted, "the paraphenalia of our life," as Beah put it, is lost during a war. He related the frustrations of not having report cards, or even a baby picture to contribute to a group project at the United Nations school. And he was frustrated as well by an attitude he ran up against that said if you were a child soldier, if you were exposed and contributed to all sorts of violence, you were finished, you couldn't be rehabilitated.
"All of these experiences frustrated me but they also shaped what came to be the book. I felt I needed to write this book so I could give people a very strong experience about what really happened during the war. What it does to human beings. How it disrupts the traditions, the culture, the community that I grew up in. How once as a child you're innocent, it's something that people cherish. And how that place now is filled with tremendous fear because as a child you're forced to shoot those adults who once upon a time you would not raise your voice to. It changes the dynamics of a society."
What was remarkable was the cheerfulness and glowing happiness that Ishmael Beah clearly exuded during his talk and subsequent discussion with the audience. He spoke of still having nightmares, though they are less frequent and do not disturb as much. He spoke of sleeping only three hours a night, and never for more than one hour at a time - residual after-effects of the vigilent soldier. He spoke of what happens if someone runs by him really fast on the street or if he sees a particular kind of tree in the bush how it will bring up a painful memory. But he also spoke of putting all this into positives. "I could look at insomnia as the worst possible thing that could happen to me, but I don't. As a student in college, it was a blessing," he said with a smile. "It's the same thing with the nightmares. They come and go but I have a deeper appreciation for just being alive, which is why I'm always smiling. For me, just being alive is enough to be happy."
Ishmael Beah continues to speak around the world about the plight of children soldiers and continues to be an ambassador for UNICEF. He has discussed the plight of children in war with such dignitaries as UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, Nelson Mandela, and Bill Clinton.
Also see:
Common Book Program - Ismael Beah's book A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier is Otterbein's Common Book for 2008-09.
