During the 1980s, Sierra Leone was fighting a major civil war which resulted in many people fleeing their homes and many children getting recruited to fight in the war. These kids had no family, food, or shelter and joining the war was their only choice. The book A Long Way Gone, centers around a true story of a boy named Ishmael Beah and his journey through the war. He tells the story of his life and the people he encountered and affected him in different ways. Ishmael had many encounters with different people throughout his journey in Sierra Leone that shaped who he is today, these people include his older brother Junior, his military leaders who he fought with in the war, his friend and nurse from the rehabilitation center, Esther and his Uncle whom he reunited with after he underwent rehabilitation. All these people had specifically impacted Ishmael's life in negative or positive ways that were important to his survival. When the civil war in Sierra Leone first started, Ishmael had to flee his home town and travel to safety with his older brother, Junior. Ishmael states “At first I was afraid, but then I recognized the voice of Junior” (pg. 35). Junior and Ishmael …show more content…
had to travel a long way through Sierra Leone to get to safety. Junior was the only person who stayed with Ishmael until he passed away. Without him, Ishmael would have been alone while traveling and would not have been able to survive on his own. As Ishmael is recruited as apart of soldiers during the war, he begins to look up to the corporal and value’s him as someone in his life.
When Ishmael was recruited during the war he had no family left and looked up to the lieutenant for giving him “new life”. Ishmael and the other boys “cheered in admiration of the corporal’s fierceness” and would only discuss with the others about how impressed they were “with the way either lieutenant or the corporal had killed someone” (pg. 123-124). Although negative, the lieutenant helped Ishmael survive by recruiting him when he had no family, food or shelter by providing him with those things if he were to fight in the war. Fighting in the war was not good for Ishmael, but because he was recruited this helped him survive and eventually become
rehabilitated. After Ishmael was rescued from the war, he was taken to a rehabilitation center where he met his nurse Esther, and was reunited with his Uncle. When he first arrived at the rehabilitation center, Esther was the nurse who helped Ishmael with his migraines. She became someone he could talk to and be honest to. She even suggested they “should be friends” (pg. 153). During his time at the center he said himself, “I loved her but never told her” (pg. 181). Esther helped Ishmael become a normally boy after the traumatization of the war. After a few months at the rehabilitation center, Ishmael met his uncle and got to know him very well. Ishmael would visit him on the weekends and would “eagerly await his arrival” (pg. 176). Eventually he lived with his Uncle in the city of Freetown and was able to start a new life with an education and even take a trip to New York. Both Esther and his Uncle were important to Ishmael and his survival by helping him through the rehabilitation process and giving him a brand new life to live. Ishmael went through a long journey while encountering many different people that affected his life in negative and positive ways. Without the people he encountered, Ishmael would not have survived the war or become the person he is today. Ishmael’s brother Junior, the Lieutenant, Esther and his Uncle all helped Ishmael survived to where he is today.
In A Long Way Gone, Ishmael Beah, a former boy soldier with the Sierra Leone army during its civil war(1991- 2002) with the rebels of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), provides an extraordinary and heartbreaking account of the war, his experience as a child soldier and his days at a rehabilitation center. At the age of twelve, when the RUF rebels attack his village named Mogbwemo in Sierro Leone, while he is away with his brother and some friends, his life takes a major twist. While seeking news of his family, Beah and his friends find themselves constantly running and hiding as they desperately strive to survive in a land rendered unrecognizable by violence. During this time, he loses his dear ones and left alone in the wilderness, is forced to face many physical and psychological dangers. By thirteen, he has been picked up by the government army, and is conditioned to fight in the war by being provided with as many drugs as he could consume (cocaine and marijuana), rudimentary training, and an AK-47. In the next two years, Beah goes on a mind-bending killing spree to avenge the death of his dear ones. At sixteen, he was picked up by UNICEF, and through the help of the staff at the rehabilitation center, he learns to forgive himself and to regain his humanity.
...ircumstances as he did, believe that revenge is not good and it keeps on going if no one stops the process. Overall, Ishmael eventually learned that revenge does not solve anything and seeking revenge just results in a longer war sustained by the counterproductive concept of vengeance. Additionally, Ishmael learned that by constantly thinking about his culpability, he was just bringing more harm to himself and in the process was unable to create any progress in his own life. Ishmael eventually realized that merely reflecting on his actions did not do anything and to fix and prevent the problems he faced, he would have to take initiative to reach out to the people who could help. By utilizing the idea of forgiveness, Ishmael learned that he could let go of the huge mountain of stress that was bringing him down and prevented him from overcoming the effects of the war.
Ishmael Beah’s first transition on his approach to family began with a strong sense of hope. Consequently, after the separation of his mother, father, and older brother his life completely changed. When he began to take his journey Beah hoped to find his family and survive the war together. In his memoir, Beah demonstrated the idea of hope when he came across a childhood memory that impacted his life. As he walked alone in the forest Beah remembered his father’s significant words of advice that motivated him to find hope and purpose. With this idea in mind, his father once said, “If you are alive, there is hope for a better day and something good to happen” (2007, P. 54). For Ishmael, his father, mother, and
A prominent theme in A Long Way Gone is about the loss of innocence from the involvement in the war. A Long Way Gone is the memoir of a young boy, Ishmael Beah, wanders in Sierra Leone who struggles for survival. Hoping to survive, he ended up raiding villages from the rebels and killing everyone. One theme in A long Way Gone is that war give innocent people the lust for revenge, destroys childhood and war became part of their daily life.
Ishmael starts his journey with a will to escape and survive the civil war of Sierra Leone in order to reunite with his mom, dad, and younger siblings, who fled their home when his village was attacked by rebels. Having only his older brother, who he escaped with, and a few friends by his side Ishmael is scared, but hopeful. When the brothers are captured by rebels, Ishmael’s belief in survival is small, as indicated by his fallible survival tactics when he “could hear the gunshots coming closer…[and] began to crawl farther into the bushes” (Beah 35). Ishmael wants to survive, but has little faith that he can. He is attempting to survive by hiding wherever he can- even where the rebels can easily find him. After escaping, Ishmael runs into a villager from his home tells him news on the whereabouts of his family. His optimism is high when the villager, Gasemu, tells Ishmael, “Your parents and brothers wil...
Ishmael experienced many encounters in which he was on the brink of death because he was assumed to be an R.U. F soldier. For example, in chapter six, page 53, Ishmael and his companions were tied up and threaten to be drowned. This shows that trust was completely disregarded. People of the village showed no remorse as they shouted: “Drown the rebels”. An imbalance between trust and survival causes
In his memoir, A Long Way Gone, Ishmael Beah deals with his loss of innocence as he is forced to join the children army of Sierra Leone in the country's civil war after being conscripted to the army that once destroyed his town in order for Ishmael to survive. His memoir acts as a voice to show the many difficulties that the members of Sierra Leone's child army had to suffer through and their day to day struggle to survive in the worst of conditions. In order to escape the perils and trials of war, Ishmael loses his innocence as he transitions from a child who liked to rap with his friends to a cold blooded solider in the army during the civil war in Sierra Leone. Through his transition, Ishmael is forced to resort to the addiction of drugs such as cocaine, marijuana, and “brown-brown” just so that he, along with the other members of the child army can have the courage to be able to kill their fellow countrymen and slaughter entire towns who stand in their paths. In order to portray his struggles in the army, Ishmael uses the dramatic elements of memories explained using flashback, dialogue, and first-person narration in order to establish the theme of the memoir being how war causes for a child to lose its innocence. The transition shown in the memoir illustrates how the title of the novel, A Long Way Gone, was chosen because it demonstrates how he is a long way gone psychologically, emotionally, and physically, from the child that he was when the memoir begins to the soldier that he is forced to become.
The theme of survival/resilience despite great suffering was shown throughout the book. Ishmael’s ventures from village to village while running away from the RUF, going through treacherous circumstances such as burning sand, angry citizens, and even
When Ishmael was recruited by the military in Yele, he was given the opportunity to get
In “A Long Way Gone”, we follow a twelve-year-old African boy, Ishmael Beah, who was in the midst, let alone survived a civil war in Sierra Leone, that turned his world upside down. Ishmael was a kind and innocent boy, who lived in a village where everybody knew each other and happiness was clearly vibrant amongst all the villagers. Throughout the novel, he describes the horrific scenes he encounters that would seem unreal and traumatizing to any reader. The main key to his survival is family, who swap out from being related to becoming non-blood related people who he journeys with and meets along his journey by chance.
At nature, a gentle young boy, he was accomplished of really dreadful deeds. Few days later on the rampage he is unrestricted by military and referred to a UNICEF rehabilitation centre, he wriggled to re-claim his humankind and to re-enter the biosphere of non-combatants, who seen him with terror and distrust. This is a story of revitalisation and hopefulness. CHRONOLIGICAL ARRANGEMENT OF EVENTS THAT LEAD TO CONFLICTS A long way gone is the factual story of Ishmael Beah, who turns out to be an unenthusiastic boy warrior throughout civil warfare in Sierra Leone. In Chapter 1, at twelve years of age, January 1993 Beah’s town is attacked while he is gone performing in a rap group with accomplice’s.
Children exposed to violence within their communities are left with emotions of hopelessness, insecurity, and doubt. Historical events such as the war on terrorism, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the tragic events of September 11th have had a detrimental effect on the entire nation, including the children. Although every child is not directly affected by the aspects of war, it somehow has an emotional effect on all. The involvement of a nation with war affects every individual differently, whether it is out of fear, anger, doubt, hope, or love. In the short novel A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah, he narrates the story by telling his own involvement in the Civil War in Sierra Leone as young boy and the many issues he faces while living in horror. Also, author Garbarino points out in his book Raising Children in a Socially Toxic Environment in the chapter involving the security of children that:
No one knows what will happen in his or her life whether it is a trivial family dispute or a civil war. Ishmael Beah and Mariatu Kamara are both child victims of war with extremely different life stories. Both of them are authors who have written about their first-hand experience of the truth of the war in order to voice out to the world to be aware of what is happening. Beah wrote A Long Way Gone while Kamara wrote The Bite of the Mango. However, their autobiographies give different information to their readers because of different points of view. Since the overall story of Ishmael Beah includes many psychological and physical aspects of war, his book is more influential and informative to the world than Kamara’s book.
Beah, Ishmael. A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007. Print.