The Theme Of A Long Way Gone By Ishmael Beah

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

As they pass through the villages that the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels have destroyed, they see the destruction and dead bodies left behind: “ The breeze brings the faint cries of those whose last breath are leaving their mangled bodies. I walk past them. Their arms and legs are missing; their intestines spill out through the bullet holes in their stomachs, brain matter comes out of their nose and ears” (18). When Beah and his friends encountered this horrific scene, they were stripped from the peace they have known. They were exposed to the reality and destruction that comes with a war, and instead of living their lives as children, they found themselves trying to survive on a day-to-day basis. The boys stuck together even though traveling in a group of boys was only as bad as coming into contact with the RUF rebels, which could either recruit or end them. Later on once the Sierra Leone army recruits Beah, he holds his first gun, an AK-47, and starts to take the white tablets, and other drugs given to him. One day the Lieutenant called for the boys to get ready, as they are about to go head out to a battle against the RUF rebels. The boys are handed green head ties and instructed to kill anyone without a

When the war unleashed in Sierra Leone, Beah and his friends have a difficult time finding villages with a food supply, and find themselves without money, so they decide to head back home in search of any money they had left hidden back home. The boys barely survived getting out of their village, only to find that no one in Mattru Jong was willing to sell their food, because they were saving it for themselves. This angered Beah for his time lost traveling back to his home village and risking his life for nothing, ultimately. Moreover, in that moment Beah realized that he had nothing left to do practice the survival tactics that everyone else was taking part in: “ Things changes rapidly in a matter of seconds and no one had nay control over anything. We had yet to learn these things and implement survival tactics, which was what it came down to. That night we were so hungry that we stole people’s food while they slept. It was the only way to get through the night” (29). Correspondingly, Beah and his friends did what they had to do to survive at least through that night. Beah knew that by taking the food he was enabling the survival of others, but in that moment, the only worry on his mind was his own survival; that later on turns into a day-to-day situation. Furthermore, with the war and trying to survive, Beah was not able to