Ishmael Beah’s story is a traumatic one, which was probably written for the reader as much as it was for Ishmael himself. I believe that after such a horrific childhood, Ishmael was trying to make sense of what he had been through during those lost childhood years by writing A Long Way Gone. This is by far my favorite memoir I’ve ever read. The way he pulled you into the story and shared his emotion was magnificent.
When the story began it introduced us Ishmael, the average kid from the small African village of Mogwembo, in Sierra Leone. He has a love for American hip-hop and rap music, which he performs at talent shows with a group of his friends. One day he is on his way to his grandma’s village to perform a rap song in a talent show, when his home village is attacked by the ruthless RUF rebels who are in a gruesome war with the national army. The village is in utter chaos and everyone is separated trying to flee for their lives across the river. This would be the last time he ever saw his family.
At this point in the book Ishmael realizes just how fortunate he had been before the war. He had a home, a peaceful environment, and a loving family, but the war stole that all from him. He was with six other friends just trying to get by each day. At this point he begins to believe that now he really has no future and that his life will never be the same. This is only the beginning for him, and already he feels hopelessness.
For the next few months he wanders with a group of six friends, including his brother, through the dense forest of Sierra Leone just trying to survive. Along the way they are faced with a major problem. No one in the war torn country trusts anyone, especially a group of a group of seven 12 year old boys. Being mistaken for rebels countless numbers of times, they are repeatedly put at gun point by men protecting their villages. And repeatedly they must plead their cases chiefs, trying to convince them that they aren’t the ruthless rebels that they believe them to be, but a group of innocent children who have lost their families. “Some people tried to hurt us to protect themselves, their family and communities...This was one of the consequences of civil war. People stopped trusting each other, and every stranger became an enemy. Even people who knew you became extremely careful about how they related or spoke to you.” He said trying to describe the distrust that came with the war.
This to me was one of the most important issues in the book. As is true with many wars, it brings a certain amount of distrust among people, especially when boys as young as 10 years old are being taken from their homes and are turned into trigger happy rebels. Everywhere they travel, they are suspected of being rebels and no one wants to aid them on their journey. When they are finally able to convince the tribal chiefs that they are just innocent boys, they are told that they can live but have to leave immediately. Even while walking on a path families will hide in the bushes when they come by.
One night while they are staying in a village, they are attacked by the rebels sending everyone into chaos fleeing in all directions. Ishmael is separated from his friends and walks alone through the dense jungle for five straight days. On the fifth day while walking he stumbles upon some kids from school, he joins their group and starts a new journey with them.
At this part I think he notices two things. First, he notices just how easy it is to lose someone at those times. At any time of the day you never know when you will see your friends again, or even if you will live to see the next day. The second thing I think he notices is the abundance of lost children wandering without their families, trying to avoid the war. He loses his friends and then five days later he’s off again with a new group of kids.
The new group faces all the old challenges the old groups faced. They are in constant need of food and water, no one trusts them, and everywhere they go they need to be cautious of being captured or killed. At one village they learn that their families are located in the village only a few miles away, they are eager to set out and meet them, but decide to wait until morning. In the morning they set out for the village. On their way they help a farmer from a farm near the village carry some wood. You can fell their eagerness at this point to drop the wood and run to see their families again, but right when they get to the top of the hill the village is attacked by rebels. The rebels are ruthless and shot every person not letting anyone escape or taking any prisoners.
This attack basically symbolizes his luck during the book. One mile short. One mile short of seeing his family, one minute away from being shot by rebels when held captive in a village, one bullet away from being dying and not being able to live to tell his remarkable story to the world. After coming so close to seeing his family and falling short he became depressed for the next few days saying he had rather die and been able to see his family.
Ak-47s, ammo, a little food, and backpacks. On their first day they encountered rebels in the forest. They hid in the brush and ambushed them when they came closer. During the battle a kid right next to him gets shot and killed. Ishmael panics and stands up trying to revive the ten year old kid. He is yanked down before a bullet whizzes by right where he had been. He doesn’t fire a single shot in the first battle in fear that he might kill someone. Ishmael soon becomes addicted to marijuana and cocaine, in the next few battles he proves to be a strong fearless fighter killing dozens of rebels. During a contest one night he kills a rebel prisoner in less than five seconds and becomes a “Junior Lieutenant”. He leads some small scouting missions and at one point he and five other soldiers take an entire village by themselves.
This right here is the heart of the story. He is turned from the innocent lost boy to a fearless soldier. He kills countless men and has no mercy. He sees how in reality the military is no better than the rebels. They are murderous monsters that attack even their own villages for supplies. Ishmael changes drastically throughout this part of the book. He is hooked on drugs, he kills rebels for pleasure, and war has become his life. All he does is fantasize about war and imagine that he was Rambo taking on a whole army.
Ishmael has become high ranked in the military and never wants to leave, but all that changes. One day a UNICEF truck pulls up and the lieutenant chooses Ishmael and 4 other boys. They are all enraged when they find out that they are being removed from the war and brought to a rehab facility. They plot to hijack the truck, but each time that they are about to attack they pull up to a checkpoint. They arrive at the rehab center where they are given rooms with beds. There are a lot of people already living there and more arrive by the hour. The clueless UNICEF workers don’t realize their mistake of joining the RUF rebel kids with the kid soldiers until it’s too late. A horrible fight breaks out killing six of the kids. He is sent with a group of retired kid soldiers to a rehab facility farther from the capital Freetown. They act totally irrational; they attack employs, steal food, and sell their supplies for money. The workers only give them new supplies and say “It’s not your fault.” This drives them mad. In their minds they are still soldiers and they shouldn’t be taking orders from civilians. After a few days they start going crazy from the detox and lack of drugs in their body. Finally they are able to get over it and the center begins to become his home.
This is a drastic change in the story, he thought he was going to be a soldier his whole life and then all of a sudden he is taken away to rehab. He feels betrayed by his battalion and he wants nothing more than to be back on the front lines. He had changed from a child to a soldier overnight, but changing back would prove very difficult. Even at the rehab center the war is still raging with fights that break out daily. At the beginning he still feels superior to the civilians and city soldiers who they mock. They act like brats for the first few weeks knowing that the workers and city soldiers can do nothing about it. Ishmael realizes how hard he was to bring back to his old self and just how much he had changed.
As the need for drugs gradually wash out of their systems they begin to behave better and go to school so they can take a trip to the city each weekend. Ishmael becomes great friends with a nurse by the name of Esther. She befriends him and really helps him get back to his old self. She plays a major role in restoring his life; she buys him a Walkman and Bob Marley’s album. He spends time with her every day and she helps him track down a lost uncle who lives in the city. He finally meets his uncle and every week goes home with him for a day to meet his family and get used to his house.
Esther becomes a major part of his life, and without her he probably would have ended up a very different person. She was like a motherly figure for him who he could converse with and joke around with. She was also someone who he could trust which was hard to find at the rehab center. He blows off the criticism he receives from his friends and stays with her every day.
One day he finally goes home with his uncle who has five other kids who he has adopted. One week after h moved in with his uncle, one of the men from the rehab center came to the door and asked him to come with him. He told Ishmael that he wanted him to go to an interview in the city to go to the UN in New York and talk about the problem of child soldiers to the council. When he goes to the city he is amazed by the size of the building and the other kids laugh at him when he stands in front of the elevator not sure of how to work. He tells the man who is interviewing him for the trip that he deserved to go more than any of the city boy, because he himself had been a child soldier. A few days later he gets a call telling him that he along with one other kid has been chosen to go to the UN in New York. The next few weeks he spends in anticipation getting his visa and passport. His father keeps telling him to not get his hopes too high because these people lie all the time.
When the day comes he says bye to his family leaves the country for the first time in his life. When he arrives in New York he is stunned by the freezing temperature and the icy wind. He can’t fathom how people could possibly live in a place as cold as New York, and he instantly wants to return home to Sierra Leone. He bonds with the other 52 kids from around the world and goes around the city every night with his new friends. When they accidentally stumble upon Times Square they are flabbergasted and just stand there mesmerized for a few minutes. The next day they go to the UN and give preplanned speeches in front of the general council. Ishmael decides that instead of giving the speech he had planned, to talk to the council and tell his story from his heart. At the end of his story people come up to him telling him how much he inspired them. After the week with his 52 new friends, he realizes just how an amazing of an experience he had been through and just how much he didn’t want to leave. When they are at the airport ready to depart they all break down and start crying, not wanting the wonderful experience to end.
Ismael is definitely changed at this point in the book. Right here he sees just how amazing and lucky his journey was. He knows how much of a problem child soldiers are from first-hand experience, and he realizes just how much he wants to stop it, and what it means for his country. When he gets to America for the first time he kind of hates it, but by the end of his trip he wants to stay there forever. Also his conception of New York changes “My conception of New York City came from rap music. I envisioned it as a place where people shot each other on the street and got away with it; no one walked on the streets, rather people drove in their sports cars looking for nightclubs and for violence.” He also befriends one of the councilors at the UN named Laura, who gives him her phone number if he ever needs anything.
He finally arrives back home in Sierra Leone and tells his family all about the strange culture in New York, and they all agree that it was very weird. Ishmael is extremely eager to start school again as a normal student again, but when he arrives at the school he and his one other friend who had been on the trip with him in New York were looked down on for having been child soldiers. He doesn’t let this bring him down because he decides that anything is better than his past life, and when he thinks this he begins to smile. Later that month, one morning a huge group of rebels march into the capital and start fighting with the soldiers. Later that afternoon the General announces that he has overthrown the current president and his group of soldiers and the rebels join up to make the Sebles. They go around looting and stealing all around the city for the next few months. The sound of gunfire and explosions become a usual noise, and people need to look around the city for any place that still has food, and the only place they can find food is in a black market where prices are more than double the usual cost. During those months his uncle dies of a disease and regardless of the soldiers occupying the streets, tons of people come out for his funeral.
“They had run so far away from the war, only to be caught back in it. There is nowhere to go from here.” (201) He says when the rebels invade the capital. He had tried so hard and almost got away from the war, but now he realizes that there is just no safe place to be in the whole country. This is when he begins to realize that this country isn’t fit for a boy to grow up in and that he has to get out of there. The situation goes from bad to worse the longer the city is under Sebel control. The leader changes almost every other month and you can never plan what will happen to you in the future.
Ishmael contacts Laura and explains his situation and asks if he can go to New York and live with her. She says that that would be great and she wires him some money. He sneaks out to a secret bus stop where tons of people get on the bus and set out to travel to the northern border with Guinea. They get stopped countless amounts of time at checkpoints where they need to get off their bus, show their documents, and usually bribe their way back to the bus. After more than a day of travel they arrive at the border with Guinea and cross over it becoming free of the war. He finds it very hard to communicate because they all speak French in Guinea instead of English. He is able to communicate enough to get to the Sierra Leone Embassy where he and other refugees are able to stay for a while. At the very end of the book he thinks of a story that he had been told by an elder in his village. A hunter is out hunting and is about to shoot a monkey when it says “Stop! If you shoot me your mom will, but if you don’t your dad will die. Then the elder would end the story and ask all the children what they would do while their parents watched them, the kids would never answer. At the end of the book Ishmael decides that he would shoot the monkey and his mom would die, but then no one else would to face the decision again. This decision signifies how he has matured and is now a different person then who he was as a soldier. He is willing sacrifice someone he loves so that others wouldn’t have to suffer.
In this final escape we see how he realizes the horror of war and fighting. He knows that if he stays he would either run into an old friend from the army who would shoot him if they found out he had been rehabilitated, or he would end up rejoining the army which he was intent on not doing. He risks his life trying to escape the situation and ultimately is one of the few lucky people who were able to make it out, and he knew what lay ahead of him when he arrived in America. Laura ended up becoming his mom and he went to a special UN school, then on to college.
The title of this book is very significant, A Long Way Gone. The title basically means that he is far away. He is far away from home, he is far away from happiness, and he is far away from peace. It also means how he has gone a long way to try and find a peaceful home where he will be safe. I remember seeing that he used those exact words in the book at one point, but I’m uncertain if he took that line from his book and made it the title, or if he put the title in the book afterwards to show the meaning of it. Another thing that I found interesting was the front cover. “a long way gone” and “ishmael beah” are both written all in lower case. And “Memoirs of a Boy Soldier” are written in what looks like hand writing. There is a picture of a boy the age he was in the book walking with a gun and bazooka, but I doubt it’s actually him. I think the title is written the way it is to show how young he was.
This book is amazingly written and there are a lot of great quotes from the book. Out of these I had two favorites. The first one was said by an old man in his grandma’s village. “We all must strive to be more like the moon” he said, reminding people to always people to be on their best behavior. The old man justifies what he says by saying. “People complain when there is too much sun and the again when it is too cold. However, no one grumbles when the moon shines, because a lot of happy things happened in the moonlight.” I just loved the sound and flow of this quote. It made me put down the book for a minute and actually think about the meaning of it. My second favorite quote was. “Some nights the sky wept stars that quickly floated and disappeared into the darkness before our wishes could meet them.” I loved this quote because it showed how he was feeling down and how everything, including the sky was sad. It also showed his bad luck again. He would see the shooting stars, but never be able to make a wish in time.
Ishmael learned so much about himself through writing this book. The most important thing I think he realized from writing was that fighting is not an answer to problems. “I joined the army to avenge the deaths of my family and to survive, but I've come to learn that if I am going to take revenge, in that process I will kill another person whose family will want revenge; then revenge and revenge and revenge will never come to an end...” This quote I found to be so real, and it showed what he had come to learn. And because of this he now works with the UN trying to prevent child soldiering around the world. He had joined the war because of his family’s death, and he ended up killing families. If someone didn’t put a stop to it, it would be an endless cycle. The book was one of the best memoirs I have ever read.
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