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A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier

by Ismael Beah

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (February, 2007)

Sierra Leone is a small, West African country rich in minerals and diamonds. After many years of British rule, the country became an independent Republic in 1961. Since then, with all of the diamond wealth as a a prize, the country has been shaken by corruption and military coups. Bolstered by a nearby civil war in Liberia, rebels took over much of the east coast of a country where drugs and weapons were becoming increasingly prevalent. With the official government unable to contain the rebels, vicious and cruel fighting broke out all across the country with both sides committing widespread atrocities on the civilian population. This included the cruel practice of drugging young boys and recruiting them to fight in the civil war.

Ismael Beah was a 12 year old boy whose family had been killed by rebel soldiers when he was captured by pro-government troops and conscripted into the army in 1993. Given an AK-47, rudimentary training and lots of drugs (cocaine, marijuana and something called “brown-brown”, a potent mixture of cocaine and gunpowder), Ismael became a killing machine for over two years. After being rescued by UNICEF workers in Freetown (the capitol of Sierra Leone), he and other young boys were rehabilitated over an 8 month period. After moving in with an uncle and his family, he began to lead a normal life. Chosen to participate in a UN program on child soldiers, he flew to New York City in XXX where he met a woman who would eventually help him to repatriate to America.

Back in Freetown, his uncle died suddenly and the town was overcome by rebel forces who began to loot, rape and kill the population. Ishmael, fearing that he would encounter members of his old unit and be re-conscripted, began a harrowing journey out of Sierra Leone into neighboring Guinea where with the help of his sponsor in America he as able to leave Africa and begin a new life in New York.

After completing high school at the XXXX and then receiving an undergraduate degree at Oberlin college, Ismael has written a book about his experience of being a child soldier. It is a sad, horrific, poetic, but ultimately celebratory story that is as important a book as you will read this year.

1. “A Long Way Gone” is an incredible achievement. The fact that Ishmael was able to reflect on his shocking and horrific experiences and then form them into a coherent story is, to my knowledge, unique. Outside of Kosinski’s, “The Painted Bird”, I know of no other account quite like it. But don’t think that the book is entirely about the gruesome cruelty of child war, it isn’t. Ishmael ,from the beginning of his youth, was interested in literature and story-telling. As a child he could recite from memory speeches from “Macbeth” and “Julius Caesar”? Told in a simple, almost naïve style, “A Long Way Gone” is also about what it is to lose your humanity and then to regain it through the love of others. I can only imagine how difficult this book must have been to write. Who would want to relive the horrors of the past? But Ishmael’s descriptions of nature and the world he lives in, even during his soldiering, are poetic. His love for food is evident in the many descriptions of meals in the book. His portraits of the people in the book, including those who had done him a great harm, are compassionate and memorable. And while the book is a way of reconciling his past, it is also a way of celebrating his family, friends and his country.

In interviews, Ishmael has stated that he wanted people to know that children can easily be conscripted into an army and that that considerable time had gone into thinking how this could be done by the authorities. His insistence that “everyone is capable of going beyond their own humanity” rings true and is, to my mind, a major theme in modern literature. What was hard, he said, was to regain your humanity after having lost it. While Ishmael doesn’t hesitate to describe the horrors he participates in, the real heart of the book, for me, is his story of rehabilitation and eventual emigration to America. He describes one nurse in particular at the UNICEF camp that finds out the had a love of rap and reggae music. She buys him a walkman cassette player and tapes and encourages him to sing along with Run DMC and Bob Marley songs, and to write out the lyrics. Her kindness and help allow him to find a way past his anger/guilt and obessive dreams, so that he is able to become the young boy he once was.. Listening to him on film and watching some of the many inteviews he has done at the books website, it’s hard to imagine this was the young boy who took a knife to unarmed prisoners and slit their throats and then high-fived his fellow soldiers in celebration. It’s also suprising that there is so little blame in the book. Despite being manipulated into becoming a killer, his portrait of his Shakespeare-reading lieutenant is one of the most sympathetic and affecting in a book that is filled with artful and moving characters.

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