CI 5442: Biography/Memoir Response #2

I was hesitant as to what I would encounter while reading Ishmael Beah’s memoir A Long Way Gone but despite the horrific and tragic circumstances of Beah’s life growing up within a war torn Sierra Leone, in the end he proves that it is possible to overcome the past and look to the future. The book takes readers through Beah’s experiences; we see evidence of his troubled yet happy life with his brother and friends, the terrifying travels of his band of boys, the initiation into the life of a boy soldier, the violent and conscious-less life of a soldier, the jerk back to boyhood, and the final struggle to leave all the past behind in order to reach a brighter future. These different existences combine into Beah’s present; “These days I live in three worlds: my dreams, and the experiences of my new life, which trigger memories from the past” (20).

Throughout the book I followed the theme of family and belonging, as it played such an important part in the actions and events within the story. Beah is driven in the beginning of the book by his desire to find his family and creates a temporary family with his brother and his friends. When he is separated from them, the loneliness is difficult for him to bear but he soon joins another group of boys—boys who become his family and the members of his unit once he joins with the army forces. After he is pulled away from active duty, Beah is forced to adjust his family to meet his new circumstances. His past catches up with him and he laments his lack of true family; “I feel as if there is nothing left for me to live for….I have no family, it is just me. No one will be able to tell stories about my childhood” (167). He finds new family in Esther and is reunited with a long lost uncle who brings him into his makeshift family; suddenly, he has a new family and more stable existence and even though this existence is shattered again, Beah keeps moving forward in search of a more hopeful existence with families to come.

The hope that pushes Beah on during the longs months wandering the forest, the time spent as a soldier, and the months after his rehabilitation illustrate how it is that hope can be both inspiring and beautiful or driving and twisted. It is the hope in finding his family that inspires Beah to keep surviving in his never ending search for safety and news about his family, but it is also hope that motivates him to kill the rebels—the hope for successfully finding and meting out revenge. The different effects of hope mirror the ways in which it is used by Beah and the people around him. Beah uses hope to keep him moving forward while the army uses hope to twist the thoughts of their boy soldiers in looking to revenge the past. I was horrified at the seemingly easy task of the army to brainwash boys into fighting. When training the boys, they even cast the targets in ways that make the boys think only of what the rebels have cost them; “Over and over in our training he would say the same sentence: Visualize the enemy, the rebels who killed your parents, your family, and those who are responsible for everything that has happened to you” (112).

The hardest parts of the book for me to comprehend were the complete lawlessness of the soldiers. Based on the information within the book, it seems as though the rebel forces went from village to village terrorizing and murdering the people before forcing men and boys to join them. Later in the book, we see the army forces—with Beah—doing the same. Beah recounts how they entered a village occupied by rebels and killed all the rebels as well as anyone they saw. In the end they realize their mistake for killing every member of the village because there was no one to transport the supplies from the village to their base camp. It’s remarkable to think that given their circumstances and the intense need for revenge—on both sides of the fighting—that the soldiers on either side wouldn’t be able to see how they were perpetuating the violence done to innocent villagers, leading to more escapees being turned to one side or the other. It isn’t until long after his rehabilitation that Beah is able to see this for himself. He recounts the endless circumnavigation of the revenge cycle and the need for an end to such perpetuating violence and death.

Something that really stuck out to me in the book were the actions of the boys and the soldiers. Throughout the book Beah and his friends “high-five” one another for any success or happiness, as the story continues, so do the high-fives. Beah and his friends high-five when they find money to spend at a market to buy food, rebel soldiers high-five when they successfully destroy three villages in the course of several hours, and Beah and his unit high-five when they successfully take over a small village. The juvenile gesture that is used to illustrate a job well done and to create a sense of camaraderie is defiled by its use for such perverse actions. The high-fives administered by the soldiers only served to illustrate their youth or their view of the war as nothing more than a type of game. Every time a high-five appeared later in the text I would cringe from the context in which the celebratory mark was recognizing. The familiarity of the gesture brought its placement within the narrative that much more close to home for me. It was a relief toward the end of the book to see the high-five be once more associated boyhood as Mohamed is doing the “running man and singing ‘Here Comes the Hammer’” (170).

After his rehabilitation, I was amazed at Beah’s ability to regain a sense of clarity about his life and to come to terms with his past actions—at least to some degree. At first he is angry and defiant toward those trying to help him, but eventually he takes their words to heart when they say, “None of these things are your fault” (165). Once he internalizes this, he is able to see the past more clearly. His speech at the UN Economic and Social Council was incredibly intelligent and moving. It is in this speech that he tells how boys become seduced and forced to become soldiers due to, “starvation, the loss of our families, and the need to feel safe and be part of something when all else has broken down” (199). He later claims that his experiences have taught him the dangers of revenge and how it “will never come to an end” (199).

The end of the book was heartbreaking to me. After all Beah had been through, the war finds him again. He loses his uncle and is forced to flee Sierra Leone. It seems as though the world is set against him with every step he takes, but in the end I felt confident that he would rise to the challenge and find family again in better circumstances. I was pleased to read in his note at the end of the text that he was reunited with some of his friends and family and that he was able to start a new family with kind people in New York. I think Beah’s memoir is an eye-opening and stunning text everyone should read—it truly gets to the heart of what it means to be human.