A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah - Essay Example

Ishmael Beah: Comments on His Novel on Being a Boy Soldier in Sierra Leone Ishmael Beah has written a poignant memoir of his experiences in his home country of Sierra Leone called A Long Way Gone: Memoir of a Boy Soldier. While watching the videos, it can be observed that he has a restrained passion for the topic of children in the midst of war. His demeanor is casual and professional as he explains his motivations for writing about the devastation he experienced in his country and the personal tragedies that fell upon him. He appears to not suffer from the trauma, but to have been empowered by what he has seen to use what he saw to inspire change through the telling of his story. Beah’s demeanor is that of a man who has experienced wide growth from a childhood of war. The book promises to be a story of triumph and victory. When first reading the chronology in the back of the book, it leads the reader through a political maelstrom full of a twisting tale of governmental breakdowns and churning disruption of leadership. Power is transferred back and forth between factions creating an instability that will lead to a rebellion beginning in March of 1991 that would set the stage for Beah‘s story. That rebellion is manifested in the Revolutionary United Front lead by Charles Taylor and is more infamously known by its acronym, the RUF. Those letters become a source of terror in Sierra Leone. Sierra Leone’s history is full of struggle. The country was occupied and colonized by Britain. The famous story of the Amistad, a slave ship where a rebellion by the slaves occurred the story of which was later immortalized on film, was lived out by slaves who were taken from Sierra Leone. During the colonization a hut tax was created in 1898 by 1 the British that taxed the citizens according to hut size. This act resulted in two rebellions. In 1951 the beginning of decolonization began as a constitution was enacted by the British for local citizens. In reading the chronology it is initially apparent that the RUF was created for an altruistic cause. The RUF seeks to abolish the corruption of the All Peoples Congress, or the APC. They have begun a rebellion to overturn a government that they do not believe serves the needs of its people. Seeing this history before reading the book brings into question of how such turmoil in government could directly affect a childhood. Beah begins his story with an exchange between himself and other teenagers after he has been relocated to New York. “Why did you leave Sierra Leone?” “Because there is war.” “Did you witness some of the fighting?” “Everyone in the country did.” “You mean you saw people running around with guns and shooting each other?” “Yes, all the time” “Cool” (Beah, 2007 p. 3) This simple exchange between young people begins a story that is anything but simple and isn’t in the most remote way cool. The word ’cool’ speaks to the romanticized culture that has developed around the idea of war. It suggests the detached point of view that must be cultivated in order to commit the atrocities as well as very clearly stating the inexperienced ideas of glory and power that are associated with war by young men and women who are oceans away from the actual experience. The chronology speaks about the facts of the political turmoil. Beah explains his work with the humility of experience. In his story one hopes to find the human side of war. One hopes to see how a child deals with the loss of family, of community, and of 2 dignity. One hopes to live with Beah through these experiences and find the truth of what the result of war is on the soul of this child. How he survives, both in his soul and in his body, is the most crucial question. The RUF creates in Sierra Leone an atmosphere of terror by the institution of cruel tortures and creative deaths. A practice called ‘one love’ was described by Beah as cutting off all of the fingers except for the thumb. It was also a regular occurrence to carve the letters RUF into the flesh by use of a heated bayonet. Such terror breeds extreme fear and prejudice. (Beah, 2007 p. 21) It was just this kind of prejudice that greeted Ishmael Beah and his friends as they traveled through Sierra Leone trying to escape from the soldiers who might commit these same horrific crimes against themselves. In Chapter 8 Beah has gone from being with his brother and friends from his community to having spent a month alone in the forest. Eventually, he finds other boys with whom to travel through the country and because of the fear that has grown and festered in the villages they have become know as the ‘seven boys’. Beah relates how an old man describes their impending arrival in a village. “Everyone ran when they heard of the ‘seven boys’ on their way here. I couldn’t run at all. So they left me behind. No one was willing to carry me and I didn’t want to be a burden.” (Beah, 2007 p. 56) The recruiting habits of the RUF had become so entrenched in the use of young boys that these seven youths were seen as a threat without having gained any reputation from their own actions. By the time this period of his life was taking place Beah had gone through starvation, witnessed bloody executions, come across multiple rotting 3 corpses, and lost all of his family. Now he was being associated with those that had tormented his life. He was a child. Yet, he was feared just for being a boy. Beah says that “Many times during our journey we were surrounded by muscular men with machetes who almost killed us before they realized we were just children running away from the war.” (Beah, 2007 p. 57) As the villagers sought to protect themselves, these children endured under a type of stress that is difficult to understand. Survival became something raw and desperate for them. Beah describes his feelings during these machete threats as “Sometimes I looked at the blade of the machete and thought about how much it would hurt ot be chopped with one. Other times I was so hungry and tired that I didn’t care.”(Beah, 2007 p. 57) Beah describes another incident where some fishermen grabbed them and took their shoes before chasing them away. He says “We didn’t realize what sor of punishment the fishermen had given us until we stopped running away from their village.” (Beah, 2007 p. 60) Without shoes they would endure unbearable burning on their feet from the sand that they had to walk through. The flesh was literally seared and blistered and there was no relief from the pain except to keep moving. They were met with fear in every village until they were able to convince the people that they were just running away from the horrors. Beah says that “the men sty up to keep an eye on us” (Beah, 2007 p. 57) and that “When we went to the river to wash our faces mothers would grab their children and run home.”. (Beah, 2007 p. 57) These boys were feared just because they were boys. This kind of fear is damaging because it can be unending and can perpetuate an atmosphere of hostility. 4 As stereotypical physical features become associated with the enemy it is very difficult to come to a decision of peace. This type of discrimination breeds a continuation of hostility that extends into the adult world and into the political arena. As the villagers who looked into the faces of the boys found initial fear until they were convinced that they were just innocent boys, so do world leaders need to look into the eyes of those they deem enemies and see the humanity that resides within them. Individuals lose identity and humanity when grouped into ideals that are contradictory to their adversaries, where when they are once again seen as individuals the motivation can be seen from a human point of view. When Ishmael makes his way to the village of Yele his life changes dramatically. In the beginning he finds a new sense of community as the village, while occupied by soldiers, is functioning. He is given purpose again with chores and duties that benefit the village and ultimately himself because he now has food, water, and shelter. The soldiers are fighting against the RUF which has plagued him during his journey so with this common enemy he finds allies in the soldiers occupying the village. The war rages just outside of the village as he watches the soldiers leave for the front and then watches as fewer return after the fighting for the day. The numbers of the soldiers begin to dwindle. Eventually, he is pulled into military service. He is fifteen years old at this time. He has been starved, tortured and reviled by fellow countrymen, and left without home and family. He has seen atrocities that cannot be imagined by anyone who has never witnessed such a thing. Now, he is given a gun and told that he will have the opportunity 5 to avenge these things. Beah says of his service “I stood there holding my gun and felt special because I was part of something that took me seriously and I was not running from anyone anymore.” (Beah, 2007 p. 124) However, his service is controlled by forces that are inexcusable. He is not with the RUF, the organization that has done such terrible things, but he is with the army of his country. The army uses terrible methods to pump him up and numb him to the acts of war that he will be required to commit. The boys are given a steady diet of drugs. They smoke marijuana and snort a substance they call “brown brown” which is cocaine cut with gun powder. The cocaine makes them feel invincible and creates a temperament of fearlessness that pushes them to do things beyond their own sense of humanity. (Beah, 2007 p. 121) The boys wear green cloths on their heads to signify that they are not with the rebels. This is a unifying symbol much like a team uniform unifies a team. They are a part of something after being disenfranchised for so long. Where they had been through the experience of being stripped naked in another village and made vulnerable in front of the leaders until they could prove that they were no more than boys, now they were soldiers fighting together for a common cause. However, they were controlled by drug use and pumped up on war movies. The reality and human tragedy of what they experienced was replaced by a fraternity of power based on unity and purpose. IN training they were asked “Is that how you stab someone who has killed your family?“(Beah, 2007 p. 112) The war was personal in a way that can only be experienced when loss has occurred in country. 6 Beah’s conscription into service was very different than the experience of American soldiers who were drafted to go to war. Since the American Civil War all wars have been fought on soil foreign to the Americans. The war was ’over there’ and could be disassociated from what those soldiers considered home. The American soldiers did not have to worry about losing family or having their towns occupied. The fighting was done as a sense of patriotism to country and with the idea of protecting their homeland, but without having to physically protect their country. American soldiers drafted into service had never seen the affects of war until after they were trained. This was not the case for Ishmael Beah and his friends. By the time they were taken into the army they had seen the travesty of war. They had lost everything that had created their lives. They were told “visualize the enemy, the rebels who killed your parents, your family, and those who are responsible for everything that has happened to you”. (Beah, 2007 p. 112) This was something they could readily accomplish. Their fighting wasn’t done for honor and country. It was done out of a sense of vengeance. It was personal. The trauma of war on the mind of a child sets scars that are different than the scars that an adult might suffer. As a child does not understand death in the same way as an adult might understand it, he or she experiences these things from a perspective that is far more malleable. Pumping these children up on drugs and violent movies created a world that was less real and allowed them to justify actions that would have appalled them under other circumstances. The experiences that the boys went through once they were 7 removed from the army and sent to rehabilitation shows how very traumatized they had become from their journey through this terrible war. When Beah was released from service and instructed to hand over his weapons he kept a bayonet and a grenade. These things had become symbols of his personal power and freedom from his former starved and vulnerable state. He says that “When one of the soldiers came to search me, I pushed him and told him that if he touched me I would kill him.” (Beah, 2007 p. 129) The soldier left him alone. This ability to control how he was treated kept him safe. Reintegration into society was very difficult. He had to go through withdrawal from the drugs he had been steadily given and he had to learn how to trust the security provided for him. He and the other boys fought and killed each other as well as those in charge of the facility within which they were housed. This sense of absolute entitlement and loss of humanity had to be extricated from their identity through patient education. His life as a soldier could be summed up by the statement that when he entered a village “We went to work, killing everyone in sight.” (Beah, 2007 p. 143) Now he had to learn to live without that entitlement to have power over those with whom he came in contact. Within the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict it is made clear that a child is defined by anyone under the age of eighteen. Article 1 asks that children not take “direct par in hostilities” (Vol 2173, A-27531 p. 237) In Article 3 it is made clear that anyone under the age of eighteen who chooses to volunteer must do so with the consent of their parent of guardian and be “fully informed of the duties involved in such military service;” (Vol 8 2173, A-27531 p. 238) Ishmael Beah experienced first hand the threat of being killed and the act of killing. When he was brought into the army his choices were limited and his experience was full of situations that created exposure to things that he could not easily process. This kind of horror breeds generations of men and women that perpetuate war and violence. Peace is hard won when children become numb to death and destruction. The madness of vengeance becomes the ruling power. The kind of service that Beah experienced was not based on the preservation of his identity and of his life. He was pressed into war without regard to his well-being and personal safety. As he was pumped full of drugs his own sense of preservation was nullified allowing him to act without regard to his own survival. Without fear it is difficult to remain humane. The world does not need the minds of children tainted by concepts of life and death and the usurpation of the safety and security of others. Still, humanity remains as the healing begins. Beah says that “Whenever I turned on the tap water, all I could see was blood gushing out. I would stare at it until it looked like water before drinking or taking a shower.”. (Beah, 2007 p. 145) A man should not be left with such things in his mind, let alone a boy. Client Name Client University Date 9 List of References Beah, Ishmael (2007) A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier Sarah Crichton Books New York. United Nations Human RightsVolume 2173, A-27531 Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict [online] (236-241) . 10 Read More