He has written how he was 12 when he and his friends were forcibly recruited into the government army to counter the attacks of rebels. A homeland of thick forests and a rich tradition of storytelling was soaked in the blood of its people as villages were set fire to and inhabitants indiscriminately decimated. He and his friends were systematically inducted into the business of war by indoctrination and large doses of drugs from troop leaders and commanders. The boys had set out from their homes to rap at a performance in another village. Suddenly fighting broke out and for a while the children eluded capture, but eventually they were ‘recruited’ and taught to wield AK-47s with accuracy.

Rebels killed Beah’s entire family. The book talks about this, the boys’ journey and experiences, and about the difficult period of rescue and rehabilitation by the UNICEF and other organisations whose workers repeatedly said to them: “It’s not your fault, it’s not your fault”, until finally some of them began to believe it. The book ends with Ishmael escaping from Sierra Leone into neighbouring Guinea.

Later, he managed to make his way to the US with the help of storyteller Laura Simms, his ‘heart’s mother’. There he finished school and went to college. Today he is on the Human Rights Watch Children’s Rights Division Advisory Committee. He has spoken before the United Nations several times. He is not quite 27.

Thanks to the persistence of writer and journalist Marie Oskarsson, I manage to get nearly half an hour with Beah at the Gothenburg bookfair in Sweden this September where he presented his book, newly translated into Swedish, and participated in a discussion with journalist Anki Wood. Recalling the time he made those phone calls, Beah laughs and says, “One of my friends said he was sorry for having pushed me around, ‘You could have killed me!’”

A Long Way Gone Memoirs of a Boy Soldier By Ishmael Beah Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux Price: $22

A Long Way Gone is compelling, not only for the urgency of its content but also for the uniqueness of its structure and language. How does one write coherently about the kind of experiences Beah has had and yet make it a work of luminosity, which the book is?

“Language finds a fit landscape.” This is a phrase Beah uses often in the public interview and in our private conversation. The book is “about how I felt during the war, not how I felt about it after... During war, there are no good guys and bad guys. Good people can do bad things, and bad people can do good things. I wanted to show it’s not that simple.” The structure of the book evolved naturally, he says, and the language he uses evokes the sights, the smells, the spirit of Sierra Leone. When Beah explains that in his language, Mende, the English sentence “Night came suddenly” would be “The sky rolled over and changed sides”, I think I begin to understand. When he further explains that the seemingly philosophical overtones of the book is only “the way we speak in Sierra Leone. When somebody sets out on a journey, you say ‘Walk well with the spirits’, that’s part of the culture, that’s how we speak…” I think I begin to connect with the soul of Sierra Leone.

But how does he deal with such traumatising experiences? How does he carry the burden? “Healing is not forgetting,” says Beah. “You can never forget.” With the help and intervention of many people, he learned to slowly transform his experiences and move on with his life. People think that just because you have been through tragedy, you must be sad all the time, but life’s not like that, he points out. What happens, he says, is that “you understand the fragility of life; you celebrate the presence of life when you have known the absence of it”.

Beah also attributes his transformation to the resilience of his culture: “We were angry at the time because we had lost everything, even the ability to cry. The rhetoric of taking revenge was appealing. Images of death and violence were fresh in our minds, and so we were easy to manipulate.” Then of course there were the drugs.

Yet, “when human life becomes meaningless, there is a comedy that arises”. Many people are shocked when he talks about this, he says, they don’t understand. For instance, he says, there was once the situation of a boy from the Limba ethnic group being held with a gun to his head. The boy “had lost his Limba” (the language) but that moment, with the gun at his head, it returned to his tongue. The man holding the gun happened to be Limba himself and he said, “Your Limba’s not bad.” Beah recalls that he and his friends laughed whenever they remembered this. Other people didn’t understand what was so funny, “but it was!”

The nightmares, however, are not all exorcised, but he is learning to deal with them. Writing the book was one way to do that. It happened initially out of a sense of frustration because people knew nothing of Sierra Leone and associated it only with conflict. “I wanted to show there was a Sierra Leone before, during and after the war. The war was a short period in its history, it was the context for my story,” says Beah. As he wrote, it became a form of release. Sometimes, during the writing, he wanted to stop, give up, and then he would think of a child out there possibly going through what he had gone through. “I felt it was my responsibility to write,” says Beah. Even as we speak on the third floor of Hotel Gothic Towers above the bookfair venue, we know there are child soldiers in Sri Lanka, in Colombia, and elsewhere, an estimated 300,000 of them in more than 50 conflicts going on around the world, in theatres of war in which no rules of combat exist.

“It’s not Hollywood,” Beah told Anki Wood, even though as child soldiers they lived on a diet of movies such as Rambo and Commando. Sometimes they would pause the film, go out on a mission, and return to watch the rest. Here in India the closest we have come to Sierra Leone is the Leonardo diCaprio starrer Blood Diamond. “The reality is nothing like the movies,” says Beah, repeating himself in interview after interview.

Inevitably, the book has had its share of controversy. As soon as it was published, three journalists raised questions about its veracity, even questioning the existence of Beah’s village, Mogbwemo. In a statement he issued in response to the charges, Beah said: “The Australian’s reporters have been calling my college professors, asking if I “embellished” my story. They published my adoptive mother’s address, so she now receives ugly threats. They have used innuendo against me when there is no fact. Though apparently, they believe anything they are told — unless it comes from me or supports my account. Sad to say, my story is all true.”

Musa, Beah’s friend from secondary school, was a fellow child soldier who did not make it. He was the storyteller in the group. While they are sitting in a village, thinking about what to do, Musa offers to tell a story about Bra Spider, Brother Spider. They protest, but he insists on telling it saying, in Beah’s words:

‘“My mother told me that whenever a story is told, it is worth listening to. So please listen. I will tell it quickly.” He coughed and began.

‘“Bra Spider lived in a village that was surrounded by many other villages. At the end of the harvest season, all the villages had a feast in celebration of their successful harvest. Wine and food were in abundance and people ate until they could see their reflections on each other’s stomach.”

‘“What?” we all said in shock at this extra detail he had added to the story.

‘“I am telling the story, so I can tell my version. Wait for your turn.”’…

We would do well to listen to Ishmael Beah’s story.

The author, a journalist and writer of children’s books. sandyrao99@rediffmail.com

More Stories on : Books | Children & Parenting

Article E-Mail :: Comment :: Syndication :: Printer Friendly Page