A Long Way Gone is memoir that was written by a young soldier by the name of Ishmael Beah who was forced into the war raging army for the sake of his protection and survival. Ishmael’s story is full of traumatizing experiences and the violent conflicts that occur in being a child solider. His home village, Sierra Leone, was attached by a rampant group of rebels who were devoted in destroying and killing everything and everyone one in its path. During the time of the attack, Ishmael, his brother, and friends began to wonder off to different villages as a way to escape the rebel’s wrath. Maneuvering from village to village required the group of boys to endure the struggles of finding food, shelter, and safety.
Within Ishmael Beah’s book A Long Way Gone we see the sierra leone civil war take over and consume a young boy’s life. During Ishmael’s life his settings change rapidly because of the war, this causes him to change with his surroundings. Throughout the book the 3 reoccurring themes has to be family, death and food.
Many people died during this tragic war. People want to escape the dangerous situation that war presents. Ishmael experiences the loss of friends and family, he is forced to ingest drugs including cocaine. Ishmael kills many innocent children and adults in the towns he invades. Ishmael is a victim on the fact that he was
How do people comprehend war when everything they know has seemed to vanish, before they can image? A Long Way Gone is heartbreaking memoir written by Ishmael Beah. The book takes place in Sierra Leone during the time of the civil war. The war was fought over economic profit, rather than political and social pandemonium, even though it was claimed that the war was fought over civil and social reasons. There were 2 sides to this war, the RUF and the Government.
In the novel, “A Long Way Gone,” Ishmael Beah suffers from PTSD due to the exposure to war at such a young age and the rehabilitation process. Ishmael was exposed to guns, drugs and other types of violent acts due to the war at the age of 12. As time went by, Ishmael lost his family and slowly his friends too. Ishmael was traumatized from all the violence he experienced due to the war approaching his village. He had been forced by the Sierra Leone Armed Forces to serve as a child soldier during a civil war and “It was not easy being a soldier, but we just had to do it.
The Story of an Innocent Murderer Imagine your life being turned upside down. One minute, everything is business as usual: you go to work and school and you are surrounded by friends and family. The next minute, everything becomes chaotic and hopeless: you cannot find your family and death surrounds you. Ishmael Beah’s life turned upside down as an innocent child when a war began between the government of Sierra Leona and rebels who wanted to overthrow the government. Beah is captured by the government and is brainwashed using drugs into becoming a ruthless child soldier, focused on avenging the deaths of his family by rebel hands.
Not experiencing war is a luxury many people unfortunately do not get; however, Ishmael Beah, the author of A Long Way Gone, lives and survives the war, though not without heartache. With war there is always fear, death, and hell. Ishmael Beah proves war is hell through the killing of civilians, the distrust, and the after effects of the war. Ishmael proves war is hell through the killing of civilians. Many innocent bystanders of the war are forced out of their homes, made to run for their lives.
Ishmael Beah’s memoir, "A Long Way Gone," tells the story of a young soldier boy in Sierra Leone and explores topics of death and rebirth. The narrative is instrumental in demonstrating how the human being can be strong even amidst the adversities of life. His journey from a happy childhood to a war-torn existence and on to convalescence shows how loss can have far-reaching effects on the possibility of redemption. The dark moments that Beah refers to are described in great detail and evoke emotion, through which he aims to show that it takes courage to overcome such situations. Before the start of the civil war, Ishmael had his family close by as well as a lively community.
In the first few chapters of the novel everything is perfect for him. But, then the attacks happen. Ishmael and his friends go back to their village and try to find their families. They can’t.
In the memoir A Long Way Gone, by Ishmael Beah, Beah writes about his childhood to teen years being an unwilling child soldier in Sierra Leone and living through times of great tragedy and war. Ishmael was born in Sierra Leone in 1980 and he moved to the United States in 1998 where he finished high school at the United Nations International School in New York. Ishmael went to Oberlin College. He is also a member of the Human Rights Watch Children’s Watch Rights Division Advisory Committee. He has spoken in front of the United Nations, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Center for Emerging Threats and Opportunities (CETO), and many other NGO panels on how children are affected by war.
Ishmael Beah’s memoir, A Long Way Gone is appropriate for the Sterling High School English IV curriculum because it exposes the students to the lives of the children in Sierra Leon who’s lives have been altered due to the war and it presents the theme of survival, and what humans will do in order to survive, whether it means hurting others along the way. Right off the bat, Beah starts off his memoir with describing his childhood when all he worried about was going to school and dancing with his brother and friends to the rap music on the tapes he carried around with him everywhere. The way that Beah depicts his childhood, is one without worry and laid-back, but all that changed when the boys decide to leave their village, Mogbwemo, for Mattru
The War A Long Way Gone is the true story of Ishmael Beah who becomes an unwilling boy soldier during a civil war in Sierra Leone. When he is twelve years old, Beah's village is attacked while he is away performing in a rap group with friends. Their day-to-day existence is a struggle of survival, and the boys find themselves committing acts they would never have believed themselves capable of, such as stealing food from children. Eventually, Ishmael is conscripted as a soldier by the army and he becomes the very thing he feared: a killing machine capable of horrible violence.
The way Beah explained what happened to him, he did it in a sad way. My response to the writer is that I feel sorry for him. I cannot relate to him in any way since I have never been exposed to war and even been a soldier fighting in it. He was strong through the hardest part of his life; the actual war itself, rehabilitation, and ultimately escaping Freetown, Sierra Leone to eventually fly over to New York and start a new life. Ishmael Beah’s memoir, A Long Way Gone, replays a part of Beah’s life that will always be very vivid to him.
In Ishmael Beah’s memoir A Long Way Gone, Beah’s images of nature reflect both his inability to think clearly and the distressing state of the Sierra Leone. Beah’s symbolism and images of nature reveals that he is unable to see hope for the future. “On the third day, I found myself in the middle of a thick forest, standing beneath huge trees whose leaves and branches made it difficult to see the sky” (49-50). Clearly, the sky represents the future for Beah, or freedom.
(1991-2002) Ishmael’s story solely focused on the years he was affected by the war. (1992-1997) The tale begins when with Beah, his brother, and a couple of his friends, heading to another village to put on a performance and while away, they catch wind that their village had been attacked by the RUF (Revolutionary United Front). The boys' having no home to go back to, wander from village to village looking for shelter and safety.
