Ishmael Beah's A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier is a gripping, harrowing account of the author's coming of age as a teenage military recruit in war-torn Sierra Leone. He tells about how he and several friends left home at age 12 to visit the village of Mattru Jong 16 miles away. While there, word comes that Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels have attacked their hometown, killing many people. When they attempt to return, they see people fleeing the area and are first exposed to the brutality directed toward civilians. Beah never again sees his family members, and this marks the beginning of a long ordeal. Eventually, he and his friends are forced to fight with the Sierra Leone army. They go through a grueling whirlwind training and are issued AK-47s. A couple of the boys aren't even strong enough to hold their weapons up to fire them. Beah is lucky enough to survive in the catastrophic environment, and he reports his own implication in acts of extreme violence and cruelty. The soldiers are given drugs to desensitize them and are in other ways enured to the brutality that surrounds them. Finally, he is fortunate enough to be saved by a United Nations group that is in Sierra Leone trying to prevent the recruitment of underaged fighters. He is flown to New York to speak at the UN about his life, and ultimately he's able to return to the U.S. where he eventually attends Oberlin College. He now lives in New York and speaks on behalf of children affected by war.
His book (begun under the guidance of Oberlin professor Dan Chaon) is engagingly written, containing an astonishing amount of detail about events in Sierra Leone. Occasionally, there is a sort of sophomoric naivete in the language, which actually seems to fit the voice of the former boy soldier. Here's a typical passage:
The villages that we captured and turned into our bases as we went along and the forests that we slept in became my home. My squad was my family, my gun was my provider and protector, and my rule was to kill or be killed. The extent of my thoughts didn't go much beyond that. We had been fighting for over two years, and killing had become a daily activity. I felt no pity for anyone. My childhood had gone by without my knowing, and it seemed as if my heart had frozen.
The leanness, even bluntness, of the writing serves well to convey the life he lived, despite the cliches ("as if my heart had frozen") that sometimes creep in. The language suggests a tension between boyish wonder or matter-of-factness and the horrors that he experiences.
There were certain passages, such as when he is shot three times in the same foot, that raise for me some questions about credibility. So I was not surprised to find that others have questioned various elements of his story. No one doubts that he was a boy soldier and experienced extreme horrors. But a group of reporters from The Australian (a Rupert Murdoch publication) have called into question some aspects of his tale, as Gabriel Sherman reports in SLATE. There is some evidence that he was a soldier only two months, not the two years that he mentions above. The factual questions have created a vitriolic debate between the publisher (Farrar Strauss and Giroux) and the reporters. Even Beah's English prof from Oberlin has entered the fray. None of this is to minimize the impact of his story. There is no doubt that he directly experienced war in a way that few can imagine. And at least the book doesn't raise the more severe sorts of credibility issues that have come up with James Frey's A Million Little Pieces or, more recently Margaret Seltzer's concocted "memoir" of gang life in L.A.
A Long Way Gone comes out in paperback in August, so I'm tempted to make it a last-minute choice for my Literary Nonfiction class in the fall.
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Judith Thurman writes in The New Yorker about prehistoric cave art
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L.A. Times review of Mark Bauerlein's The Dumbest Generation
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On Poetry Daily, two poems by David Wagoner that make me want to buy his latest book
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