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The whole truth and a true story are two very different things. While a story may be true, it lacks the perspectives of others, has missing details, doesn’t represent a certain group accurately, or is biased and does not show what may of veritably happened?WHAT IS WRONG HERE????. Ishmael Beah, author and the main character of memoir, “A Long Way Gone” was a child soldier who experienced many difficulties and struggles during the Sierra Leone Civil War. His story is accurate according to Ron Hogan, who writes “Ishmael Beah: My Story Is All True,” and explains how Beah defends himself from the Australian press to prove that his story is true. However, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a Nigerian novelist and storyteller, claims “this demonstrates …show more content…
how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story” on her TedTalk, The Dangers of a Single Story. “A Long Way Gone” is just one story from the perspective of a young boy. Although it is a true story, it cannot be used to represent Sierra Leone or to be used to critique the country. One story does not have enough information to be able to judge a community in a correct yet not stereotypical way.
On the other hand, with multiple stories, it is possible to accurately view the people of Sierra Leone. Beah’s experience in Sierra Leone was just one perspective, as a young boy and a brainwashed soldier trying to survive during the civil war. However, there are many other people with different viewpoints in Sierra Leone such as rebel soldiers, government officials, or citizens. “A Long Way Gone,” does not show how the RUF (Revolutionary United Front) forced citizens to mine diamonds, which they sold to fund the civil war, as the documentary “Blood Diamonds”(Brummel) explains. The memoir also does not explain why the RUF attacked or even how the war started . With so many factors missing from “A Long Way Gone” judgements will not be equitable. In order to judge people or a place, you must have more points of view, or information than one …show more content…
story. “A Long Way Gone” takes place in Sierra Leone, whose size is approximately .024 percent of Africa. As Adichie stated in her TedTalk, all she heard was that Fide’s family was poor, so she could not see them as anything else. That is the same with most people. In the press, news, or media, there are stories of how poor some countries are, such as Malawi. Hearing this, people prematurely judge all people in Malawi or even Africans as a whole. They believe everybody there is very poor people, based off of one article, which is very untrue. Hearing one story about the pains of a young boy soldier cannot relate to the whole country of Africa. Judging a whole continent from one country, smaller than one percent of the whole continent, is very unfair. The memoir showed that many young boys had a tough time surviving in a time of a civil war. With only this one source to educate or inform me about the topic, I assumed everyone as something that they were not. With one point of view or one side, it is hard to see the full picture. In the memoir, the rebels were only seen as people who were mercilessly killing citizens for no reason. The army was portrayed as evil for using child soldiers and brainwashing them with drugs and killing. While “Blood Diamonds” gave another perspective and explained what was actually going on during the Sierra Leone war. The documentary showed that there was another story and without this, a reader would believe that the RUF had no purpose to instigate this war. With only the sole perspective of Beah, it is easy to assume things that may not be true. X Complete judgments cannot be produced about Sierra Leone, based on a single story, especially considering the depth of what occurred.
X “If I had not grown up in Nigeria, and if all I knew about Africa were from popular images, I too would think that Africa was a place of beautiful landscapes, beautiful animals, and incomprehensible people, fighting senseless wars, dying of poverty and AIDS, unable to speak for themselves and waiting to be saved by a kind, white foreigner.”(Adichie 5:55). Without taking in more knowledge about the African people, the Sierra Leone civil war, and further educating ourselves, our assumptions could be completely wrong. It would be like saying that everybody from South Carolina is a school shooter because there was a shooting there.“There is never a single story about any place”(Adichie 18:16). Because of this, before we comment or judge people or a place, we must see multiple aspects, be well educated on the topic, and know multiple
stories. Works Cited Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. "The Danger of a Single Story."TED Talk | TED.com. TEDGlobal, July 2009. Web. 08 Jan. 2017. Beah, Ishmael. "A Long Way Gone." Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 13 Feb. 2007. Web. 08 Jan. 2017. Brummel, Bill. "Blood Diamonds." History Channel, 30 Dec. 2006. Web. 06 Jan. 2017. Hogan, Ron. "Ishmael Beah: "My Story Is All True"." GalleyCat. 22 Jan. 2008. Web. 07 Jan. 2017. Rawes, Erika. "10 of the Richest (and Poorest) Countries in the World." TheCheatSheet, 14 Feb. 2015. Web. 8 Jan. 2017
During the author’s life in New York and Oberlin College, he understood that people who have not experienced being in a war do not understand what the chaos of a war does to a human being. And once the western media started sensationalizing the violence in Sierra Leone without any human context, people started relating Sierra Leone to civil war, madness and amputations only as that was all that was spoken about. So he wrote this book out o...
Being located in the west coast of Africa and between Guinea and Liberia, “Sierra Leone has an abundance of easily extractable diamonds”(BBC News). The diamonds had brought “encouragement” for violence in the country in 1991. Attacks of the Revolutionary “United Front (RUF) ,led by former army corporal Foday Sankoh”(Encyclopedia Britannica), were on government military and civilians. In response to a corrupt government, the RUF performed violent and terrorist acts that scarred many. “The RUF captured civilians and forced them to work”(Analyzing the Causes) in their army to gain control over Sierra Leone. The savages went a...
There was a war in Sierra Leone, Africa, from 1991 to 2002 where a rebel army stormed through African villages amputating and raping citizens left and right (“Sierra Leone Profile”). Adebunmi Savage, a former citizen of Sierra Leone, describes the reality of this civil war: In 1996 the war in Sierra Leone was becoming a horrific catastrophe. Children were recruited to be soldiers, families were murdered, death came easily, and staying alive was a privilege. Torture became the favorite pastime of the Revolutionary United Front rebel movement, which was against the citizens who supported Sierra Leone’s president, Ahmad Tejan Kabbah.
In the first segment of his film series, Different but Equal, Basil Davidson sets out to disprove the fictitious and degrading assumptions about African civilization made by various Western scholars and explorers. Whether it is the notion that Africans are “savage and crude in nature” or the presumed inability of Africans to advance technologically, these stereotypes are damaging to the image and history of Africa. Although European Renaissance art depicts the races of white and black in equal dignity, there was a drastic shift of European attitudes toward Africa that placed Africans in a much lower standing than people of any other culture. The continent of Africa quickly became ravished by the inhuman slave trade and any traditional civilization
The truth to any war does not lie in the depths of storytelling but rather it’s embedded in every person involved. According to O’Brien, “A true war story does not depend on that kind of truth. Absolute occurrence is irrelevant. A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth” (pg. 80). Truths of any war story in my own opinion cannot be fully conveyed or explained through the use of words. Any and all war stories provide specific or certain facts about war but each of them do not and cannot allow the audience to fully grasp the tru...
A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah is a memoir of a young, emotionally distraught child soldier who takes his audience through his mental and physical journey to his eventual escape of the Civil War in Sierra Leone. For the past few days, our World Literature class have been trying to figure out/argue what category A Long Way Gone falls under. In Tim O'Brien's book, The Things They Carried, he distinguishes between two types of stories: (1) stories that need to be real and (2) stories that rely on the emotional truth. To me, A Long Way Gone is a novel that relies on the emotional truth and should be read as such; it relies on the emotions of human beings for the story to be understood as it was written by a boy like one of us. Initially I was not sure what the emotional truth was, so I googled the definition and got that, “an emotional truth is writing in such a way that readers not only learn the facts of an event, but can feel the joy, sorrow, anger, envy, love, hate, poignancy that the participant feels.” And I believe that a story that relies on the emotional truth is not any less significant than stories that strictly state the truth. A story told using emotional truth/validity is a story that, in my opinion, offers more of the real picture than that of a story that doesn’t tug on the emotions of a reader and just blatantly state the true happenings of an event.
The Sierra Leone Civil War was a savage conflict that would rage for over a decade, claiming the lives of 300,000 and displacing 2.5 million civilians. The Bite of the Mango and A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier are firsthand accounts of children affected by the war. Mariatu Kamara had her hands severed and was left for dead. Ishmael Beah was conscripted by the government army to fight the rebel forces. Ishmael and Mariatu were both victims of the bloody Sierra Leone civil war, however their journeys to safety were vastly different.
Contents INTRODUCTION 2 CHRONOLIGICAL ARRANGEMENT OF EVENTS THAT LEAD TO CONFLICTS 3 CONCLUSION 5 INTRODUCTION An attention-grabbing story of a youngster’s voyage from beginning to end. In “A LONG WAY GONE,” Ishmael Beah, at present twenty six years old, tells a fascinating story he has always kept from everyone. When he was twelve years of age, he escaped attacking the revolutionaries and roamed a land rendered distorted by violence. By thirteen, he’d been chosen by the government, military and Ishmael Beah.
After a journey into the dark history of Europe and Africa with Sven Lindqvist, I found myself shocked. It’s earth shattering. Ideas and historical events are presented through a journal/proposal of his unique view on racism. Lindqvist raises questions as to where racism was spurred and why what happened in late 1800’s and early 1900’s lead to the holocaust. Including religion, personal human values, advanced warfare and even societies’ impact as a whole. His travels through the Sahara and Africa in the early chapters show a more current day view of society over seas. The description of the desolate continent and harsh conditions paints a picture of what previous civilization lived through. He explains that part of the reason he has traveled to the desert is to feel the space all around him, a definite emptiness if you will. As his travels progress he introduces his own family life that pertains to the human emotion, which is also a big focus point in this book. Childhood beatings over taking the lord’s name in vain, dropped calls from his daughter that leave him torn and sad. He does an excellent job on taking the reader on a personal journey with him through his current day traveling and even his early life. Linking these personal experiences and tying in histories misconceptions of “right and wrong” is what makes this book so valuable. Lindqvist gives a relevant and educated answer to the question of how racism became such a terrible tribulation in all parts of the world.
Englishmen found the peoples of Africa very different from themselves. “Negroes” looked different to Englishmen; their religion was un-Christian; they seemed to be very libidinous people (Jordan, 1).” In this example Winthrop Jordan begins to target the differences that Englishmen seen and identified with from themselves and the Africans. Pointing out an area that differed, which to the Englishmen mirrored the souls and morals of the Africans, religion. Prejudice begins with difference.
A Long Way Gone written by Ishmael Beah is a story where the narrator himself,
Both Beah and Kamara do share a similar event recovering from the war in their books. Upon traveling across the world to North America, Beah and Kamara would include this trip as crucial points to their stories. One main purpose of these books is to inform the world of the tragedies that happen outside one’s own country. Traveling to another continent has allowed them to spread the truth about Sierra Leone’s civil war. Each author thoroughly describes what it is like to live under the harsh conditions. Although these authors lived in the same world filled with blood and horror, their life stories are significantly divergent.
In the year 1943 the notorious twentieth century psychologist, Abraham Maslow, developed a theory concerning the hierarchy of human necessities. Maslow organized his theory into a pyramid consisting of psychological needs as the base, safety as the second tier, love/belonging as the third tier, esteem as the fourth tier, and self-actualization at the pinnacle. In the novel, A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah, the reader witnesses all tiers of the pyramid through the perspective of Ishmael. Ishmael begins his journey as a child, and is thrusted into the horrifying life of war. As result, he’s stripped of every tier in Maslow’s pyramid of needs, and must work to regain self-actualization.
“Humans are emotional, humans are short-tempered beings”, the remark many people receive when they collapse to their emotions. Tell that to Ishmael, a boy who plunges straight through the horrors of war and still returns to what people consider normal. Ishmael Beah is a child of warfare, fleeing from the conflict whenever it caught up with him. When it envelops him, the government recruits him as a child solider, but the freedom group UNICEF removes him from combat. Later in a center the corporation supports, UNICEF restores the tattered Ishmael to an innocent child.
I have created a poem, from the point of view of Ishmael Beah from the novel, A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah. In the poem, I talk about the past and how I should use that experience to go on into the future. I have included major events that happened to the main protagonist, Ishmael Beah and applied it to my poem. Sine his future was bad and horrifying, Ishmael Beah uses his past to talk to others. I have also portrayed what he does, remember his past to help with his future in the poem as well.