I just finished reading Ishmael Beah's memoir, A LONG WAY GONE, and had to take a few minutes to compose myself and "take in" all the unsettling nuances of the text. A LONG WAY GONE is about Beah's experiences as a child soldier in Sierra Leon in the early 90s and the mind boggling atrocities and brutalities that helped to shape his life as it is. I first saw Beah in a television interview with Steve Paikin on TVO's, "The Agenda" back in May about his abovementioned book. I recalled taking issue with some of the questions Paikin was asking Beah because the politics of race and violence was still fresh in my mind. I nonetheless kept the book's title in the back of mind, never thinking that i would actually go out and buy it. Turned out i did, on July 06, 2007, and here is my review:
The memoir is more than a dictation of Beah's experiences; it is a riveting account of the realities of war and what it means to exist in a war torn country with no breathing space for hope, freedom and redemption. His memories of his experiences in the army are profoundly disturbing and it forces you to psychologically negotiate your own humanity, not in the context of war because you still can't imagine being forced to participate in and help to direct the course of a civil war bent on miming and executing others, but through sheer perplexity and bewilderment. When reading Beah's work, you sometimes close the book and dream with him, you go through war, rehabilitation and more war. You open your eyes, but you cannot keep your mouth shut because you are seeing all the blood and dead bodies, children and women screaming for their lives and warlords sporting AK47s and machine guns which the author vividly describes.
By the second half of the text, the plot starts to feel like something fit for the silver screen; it just becomes more and more riveting, nauseating, heart piercing and unfathomable all at the same time. You fall in love with Beah because you admire his courage, determination and resilience when, in fact, given the situation of the war, you would want to lay down and beg someone to shoot you. Undoubtedly, this is a demanding text. It demands your attention, exclusively, and demands that you spend some time in your own head deciphering what you have witnessed between the pages of the text. It makes you contemplate the innermost questions of what it is to exist among others by showing you the extent of your own evil, which, if given the circumstances and space to breed, can transpire above and beyond your wildest dreams of your own capability. This is a text that scares you, if only to reflect upon the values and structures of your own society. It offers you no answer to the pain and trauma that surrounds the text like a golf of smoke, but asks that you think about them, meditatively.
With the present-day international conflict predominating the media and our coffee shop conversations, this text is good timing because it speaks to the broader global, historical and human problems that we face in this post-modern era. A LONG WAY GONE is about a child soldier engulfed in a "mad" civil war but it goes beyond the the problem of recruiting and exploiting children to touch upon the very meaning of war and what it means to fight for change and national morality. It is a text worth reading a million times over.
The memoir is more than a dictation of Beah's experiences; it is a riveting account of the realities of war and what it means to exist in a war torn country with no breathing space for hope, freedom and redemption. His memories of his experiences in the army are profoundly disturbing and it forces you to psychologically negotiate your own humanity, not in the context of war because you still can't imagine being forced to participate in and help to direct the course of a civil war bent on miming and executing others, but through sheer perplexity and bewilderment. When reading Beah's work, you sometimes close the book and dream with him, you go through war, rehabilitation and more war. You open your eyes, but you cannot keep your mouth shut because you are seeing all the blood and dead bodies, children and women screaming for their lives and warlords sporting AK47s and machine guns which the author vividly describes.
By the second half of the text, the plot starts to feel like something fit for the silver screen; it just becomes more and more riveting, nauseating, heart piercing and unfathomable all at the same time. You fall in love with Beah because you admire his courage, determination and resilience when, in fact, given the situation of the war, you would want to lay down and beg someone to shoot you. Undoubtedly, this is a demanding text. It demands your attention, exclusively, and demands that you spend some time in your own head deciphering what you have witnessed between the pages of the text. It makes you contemplate the innermost questions of what it is to exist among others by showing you the extent of your own evil, which, if given the circumstances and space to breed, can transpire above and beyond your wildest dreams of your own capability. This is a text that scares you, if only to reflect upon the values and structures of your own society. It offers you no answer to the pain and trauma that surrounds the text like a golf of smoke, but asks that you think about them, meditatively.
With the present-day international conflict predominating the media and our coffee shop conversations, this text is good timing because it speaks to the broader global, historical and human problems that we face in this post-modern era. A LONG WAY GONE is about a child soldier engulfed in a "mad" civil war but it goes beyond the the problem of recruiting and exploiting children to touch upon the very meaning of war and what it means to fight for change and national morality. It is a text worth reading a million times over.
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