For this month’s SSR I read A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. The author is Ishmael Beah and the publisher is Sarah Crichton Books. The copyright date is 2007 and there are 218 pages in this book. The genre of non-fiction is autobiography.
These three core topics stay the same yet, as Ishmael’s response changes we see how deeply the war is affecting him. As we make our final round back to the beginning, to see the young boy Ishmael was once again. Right before the war finally hits Beah’s village we see some refugees come into the village, trying the wreckage of the war. This is where Ishmael’s first opinion on war formulates, or at least shown. “At times I thought
Yafet Mebrahtu P.4 The author of A Long Way Gone is Ishmael Beah. This book is about his life in Sierra Leone during the civil war. He tells how he suffered from hunger and fear,eventually this lead him to becoming a killer and joining a group of people that kill anyone on sight called the rebels. The rebels are killers that burn villages,kill anyone in sight and recruit child soldiers.
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
Ishmael who was once a peaceful, innocent little boy, was transformed into a man killing machine like most children. The civil war in Sierra Leone had malformed many people’s lives, personality, and faith, bringing them to extreme measures. Families were torn apart by the war, everything had changed. Homes that used to once carry families and joyful memories were no longer there, everything was demolished. Like Ishmael many children were manipulated to join the war to avenge the deaths of their families, making the war more chaotic that it should have been.
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.
In the beginning of his journey, Ishmael would sometimes overstay at villages and suffer from rebel attacks. Through his journey with his family of boys, he learns to move frequently to avoid being raided. After a village feeds Ishmael, he leaves quickly, “We thanked them for their generosity and left. We knew that the rebels would eventually reach the village” (39). Traveling with many other boys let Ishmael pick up good habits.
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.
Ishmael has a flashback of his life in the war. In his dream he encounters a body wrapped in white bed sheets, and as he unwraps it he realizes it is his own face he is looking at. He then awakens, sweating and on the ground. He says, “I was afraid to fall asleep, but staying awake also brought back painful memories” (Beah 19). Even being in a different country cannot take away the hell that Ishmael has been through.
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.
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.
