E3W Literature | University of Texas

Ishmael Beah
A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier

Sarah Crichton Books, 2007
229 pages
$22

Reviewed by Emma Alpert

Developments in warfare have led to a dilemma of definitions in our effort to understand contemporary international conflicts. Blurring lines between victims and violators, modern wars are creating uncharted territory in debates on human rights. In the absence of adequate terms, authors of social justice literature attempt to make sense of new questions through a variety of literary processes. As a result, the war narrative has become an increasingly diverse, complicated, and devastating genre. A poignant illustration of this shift is the phenomenon of the child soldier and the emerging body of literature on the topic.

Current data suggests that more than 300,000 child soldiers are serving in conflicts around the world. An unlikely melding of childhood and warfare, child soldiering creates both disillusion and discomfort in the discourse on social justice and children’s rights. In her report on the legal status of child soldiers, Tanya Monforte (2007) writes, “Like the mad seer, the child soldier is portrayed as another archetype of an unnatural combination of truth and irrationality.” The term child soldier thus becomes a paradox, shattering our conception of children strictly as innocents and questioning the role and rights of children in war.

Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier attempts to make sense of the transitional place of children in war. Beah was eleven when civil war erupted in his country, Sierra Leone, a former British colony in West Africa. From 1991 to 1998, Beah roamed the war-torn ground of his home, bearing witness to and participating in the violent conflict that is the subject of his book. Later rescued by aid workers, Beah moved to the United States where he finished high school and graduated from Oberlin College in 2004. Beah, now twenty-six has become a vocal advocate for children affected by war, participating in efforts by Human Rights Watch, the United Nations, and other nongovernmental organizations to raise awareness and provide services for children in conflict and post-conflict regions.

The historical backdrop of the Sierra Leonean war frames and informs Beah’s story. Violence began in 1991 with the uprising of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), a group that became notorious for their brutal military strategy including routine mutilation of civilians and the use of abducted children as soldiers. The RUF and other military factions recruited the children as they swept across the country—burning, looting and killing entire villages. Beah, his family murdered, transforms from victim to violator when forced to join the Sierra Leone army at age twelve. As a child soldier, Beah is handed an AK-47 and trained to adopt the ruthless tactics of his enemies, inflicting the same misery on other families that had befallen his own kin.

In a sense, A Long Way Gone portrays Beah’s internal struggle to reconcile his life as a child soldier with his life as an American teenager. “My high school friends have begun to suspect I haven’t told them the full story of my life,” begins Beah’s memoir, revealing a hesitant start to his tale. As the story unfolds, however, Beah takes on a confident voice, spilling his journey onto the pages as if purging his mind of the haunting memories. The result is a powerful combination of sincerity and innocence that leaves readers with a sense they are intruding upon an intimate therapy session. This unconventional rhythm is one of the few reminders that Beah was in fact a child during his account, which is otherwise told with uncanny wisdom and insight.

As the “memoirs of a boy soldier,” A Long Way Gone dedicates surprisingly little attention to Beah’s time in the army. Instead, the book focuses on the process of becoming and later unbecoming a child soldier. For more than one hundred pages, Beah takes the reader along his path, through destroyed villages, fearful nights in hiding, and deaths of friends and family until he is ripe for the transformation from boy to soldier. Presented through Beah’s eyes, the process of becoming a killer seems almost natural, a logical next step in a disturbingly backward child development. “My squad was my family, my gun was my provider and protector, and my rule was to kill or be killed,” writes Beah. Moments after these words, Beah describes being discharged by his lieutenant and taken by men in UNICEF t-shirts. Whereas his conversion to being a soldier had come with ease, Beah’s transition out of soldiering proves a more challenging road.

While in the army, Beah reveals he survived on a strict regimen of “smoking marijuana, and sniffing brown, brown, cocaine mixed with gun powder” and replaced sleep with war movies such as Rambo: First Blood and Commando. The aid workers whose task it is to rehabilitate the young soldiers are not equipped with positive counterparts to undo the children’s potent addiction to drugs and blood. Far from thanking their rescuers, Beah and his fellow soldiers lash out, struggling to overcome the combination of withdrawal and post-traumatic shock. Nevertheless, Beah eventually prevails over his nightmarish past to become a living example of his own words: “children have the resilience to outlive their sufferings, if given a chance.”

Through his autobiographical account, Beah presents an alarmingly close view of a war that, for many of us, was lost in the myriad of international conflicts that get buried inside the fold of our daily newspapers. His unusual coming-of-age story grapples with questions of war, children, and the relationship between them with an honesty that is both brutal and inspiring. Through his story, Beah makes sense of the senseless and humanizes the inhumane with surprising grace, reminding readers of the power of social justice literature. More than one child’s therapeutic exercise, A Long Way Gone gives voice to hundreds of thousands of children who cannot speak or have simply never been asked. Thus Beah transitions from victim, to violator, and finally to advocate, living proof of the complex yet powerful place of children in war.