The Significance Of My Creative Title A Long Way Gone By Ishmael Beah

My Creative Title

The environment in child hood is important for forming identity; especially children are more vulnerable to surrounding environment. People who experienced the war in childhood often carry their grim memories even they grew up and show having troubles to find their identities. When they cannot endure their experiences they tend to remove the specific time, “[s]ome even forgot their names, family backgrounds and native language, and many had to wait decades to feel free to reveal their roots.”(Siev) In the book, A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah, Ishmael experiences the war age of twelve and travels to find safer place from war. We encounter the changes in Ishmael’s identities as a boy, a soldier, and a civilian boy throughout

The war to Ishmael was simply an issue extraneous to him and far away from his home. He sees people coming from his village were escaping from the rebels leaves his home village, Mataru Jang and for the first time, he gets a shock from a man covered with his son’s blood and a woman who carrying her dead baby on her back. He does not know if his family is alive or dead. He was a boy who never had been through the unexpected situation without learning how to weather the situation. All he could do was “listen[ing] to rap music, trying to memorize the lyrics” (Beah 15) to avoid thinking about the situation at hand. Ishmael was troublesome to his family but he followed ethical behavior based on learning from his family. His squad took a little boy’s two boiled ears of corn while they were suffering for foods. The boy’s mother gave them more corns later, he “felt guilty about it for a few minutes.”(31) Ishmael is separated with his brother later and forms a

Ishmael refuses to be rehabilitated and suffers from the traumas those were hidden under the drugs. This rehabilitating period gives back to Ishmael the memories with his family. He starts to heal and he finds his uncle in the city. He gets another chance to be belonged in a family and chance to be a son to someone again. Ishmael occasionally suffers from the trauma but with the love from family he identifies him as a normal boy with experience of war. He had been chosen to go to the UN to talk about the lives of children in Sierra Leone. His experiences in the New York were quite a shock to him that he had never experience in his life before. After returning to Sierra Leon, while he was living normal workaday as a student that he was forgotten by the war. All of the sudden, he hears the gunshots everywhere and the rebels and the army collaborated. The foods were taken to the army and now Ishmael faces the war situation again. His uncle dies due to the war. He starts to question to his identity after all the catastrophe,“[he] was always losing everything that meant something to [him]”(208) and decide to leave the country and head to the New York without telling his family except his friend Mohamed. Ishmael’s identities became a civilian and he was afraid to “end up being a soldier again” (209) because he knew that being a soldier would result his