Books & arts
Review: 'A Long Way Gone' by Ishmael Beah
Mildred Barya
2008-07-31, Issue 391
http://pambazuka.org/en/category/books/49795
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Ishmael Beah’s memoirs, A Long Way Gone, is an emergency one. Not only does Beah highlight the horrors of war that he went through in Sierra Leone, but he also reveals how gross and wasteful war is. Just like Grace Akallo’s Girl Soldier: A Story of Hope for Northern Uganda’s Children, Els De Temmerman’s Aboke Girls: Children Abducted in Northern Uganda, John Bul Dau’s God Grew Tired of Us: A Memoir, the documentary, The Lost Boys of Sudan, and the film, Blood Diamond, the children who are not killed during the war are turned into soldiers and indoctrinated in murderous violence. The gun is magnified. What starts as a war tactic eventually becomes deeply ingrained in children’s mind, the gun becomes not only a ‘vehicle’ to power but power itself.
Beah begins his story in an engaging but detached manner. News of war come to him as if the war is happening in a faraway and different land. Later, as fleeing refugees begin to spill into his town does Beah realise that the war is taking place in his country. Soon it ravages a substantial chunk including his home area and neighbouring towns. In an effort to escape, Beah ends up right in the arms of the rebels. He is forced to grow. He loses his childhood, his family, his friends and part of his dream. Throughout the war he carries remnants of his dream in his pocket—cassette tapes of rap music. In his mind are snapshots of the schools he would have gone to and the kind of hip-hop artist he would have become had war not destroyed the tapestry of his dreams. This is what becomes of Beah’s land: littered with bodies. “The flies are so excited and intoxicated that they fall on the pools of blood and die.”
The major strength of Beah’s story must be the glimpses of hope amidst raw reality. He and surviving friends are sustained by the memory of reunion with their families. In one incident when they are walking through forests, hills and rivers, Alhaji gives everyone hope as he imagines crossing into the village that is deemed safe. “I look forward to getting to this village. Ah, I will give my mother a very tight hug. She always complains though, when I give her a tight hug: if you love me, stop squeezing my old bones so I can be alive longer.” This memory however becomes overstretched with continual deaths and total destruction of villages. The children who are captured by the Revolutionary United Front rebels are tattooed with initials RUF to make their escape impossible. They are given drugs to make them maniacal and fearless. The brutal rape of their innocence leads to anger, migraines, nightmares, and generally poisoned attitudes.
Beah’s eventual escape is both miraculous and touching. At the Benin Home which offers him shelter and friendship, he meets Esther, a nurse, who helps him confront the demons tearing at him. That starts his rehabilitation and healing. He makes new relationships. War has affected everything and the final test is the preservation of memory. Things that happened in the recent past appear like they happened a long time ago. When Mohammed, Beah’s childhood friend, arrives at the healing centre, he recalls their past. “Sometimes I think about those great times we had dancing at talent shows, practicing new dances, playing soccer until we couldn’t see the ball…it seems like all those things happened a very long time ago…” War has a way of not only aging memory but making good news appear shameful. When Beah discovers that he has an uncle who is alive and might accept him into his family, Beah feels guilty to tell his colleagues because no one from their families has been found. And Mambu, whose family is found, the family refuses to take him in so he goes back to the front line.
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Reading Beah’s story, no sane country should be going to war. Not with its neighbouring states, not with itself. The intensity of suffering is too deep and costly no government or people can afford it.
A Long Way Gone is the kind of story that people from peaceful states should read so that they know what they should never erupt into. Those in war zones should also read it to clearly understand how pointless, horrendous and shameful war truly is. Think of Sierra Leone, Liberia, Sudan, Congo, Northern Uganda…what good has war achieved?
Long ago when wars were glorified, they were an adult affair. Women as usual bore the greatest sting as victims of rape and sacrifice but the children could get away with a few scars. Humanity’s greatest crime in present day wars has been to involve the children. This has completely destroyed the human psyche and thread that could weave society and hold it up together once the war ended. What remains is not a recovering society but a dead one. How long shall the warmongers use our children while we stand aside and look?
A Long Way Gone. Pages 218
Publisher: Harper Perennial 2008.
Author: Ishmael Beah