A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Solder, Ishmael Beah’s chronicle of his life in war-torn Sierra Leone in the ’90s, starts with scenes of his peaceful early childhood. But they don’t last long. When Beah is 13, this peace is replaced by violent tragedy when the civil war raging through the nation’s countryside hits his village. Insurgency and counterinsurgency forces attack villages, burning people alive, forcing children to become soldiers, and worse. When Beah’s village is attacked, he and his brother become separated from his family. They walk from ruined village to village among a group of boys, starving, exhausted, and lost.
Everywhere they go, there are people who want to kill them, out of a misplaced sense of revenge, out of fear, out of confusion or boredom or anger – the countryside is so dangerous that no one can trust anyone else. Eventually, maybe inevitably in the mess of this civil war, Beah and his brother become separated during an attack on a village in which they’ve spent the night. Beah spends a whole month totally alone before he encounters another group of boys, with whom he begins traveling. Again, there are some amazing escapes – and Beah comes achingly close to seeing his family, in the minutes before they’re burned alive. Soon after, Beah is given a choice by the commander in a village: become a child soldier, or leave, alone and unprotected. At this point in the war, Beah explains, it really wasn’t a choice at all.
The rest of the memoir covers Beah’s life as a child soldier, his "rehabilitation" by UNICEF in Freetown, Sierra Leone’s capital, his adoption by his uncle, and his ultimate escape to America after the war hits Freetown.
This is a miraculous story, not only in terms of what Beah has been through, but in his ability to tell it – that he can remember and retell the horror of what was done to him, and, maybe harder, of what he did to other people as a child soldier. And it’s a vital story. In this global world, where a civil war in Sub-Saharan Africa is a news story, a bumper sticker, here is a human life through which can comprehend this nearly incomprehensible tragedy, the depth and reverberations of it.
That said, this story could be told more effectively. For instance, some of the words and constructions Beah uses to describe the multiple traumas he endured detract from the power of his story. For instance, throughout the book he refers to the civil war and all its tragic consequences as "this madness." That term rings hollow because of the severity of Baeh’s losses – to my ears madness connotes silliness, confusion; what is happening here is so much more extreme than that.
Similarly, moments in which Beah’s friends die feel wooden. When one of the boys with whom he’s traveling dies, for example, he writes,
I was in disbelief that Saidu had actually left us. I held on to the idea that he had just fainted and would get up soon. It hit me that he wasn’t going to get up only after he was lowered into the hole. …What was left of him was only a memory. The glands in my throat began to hurt. I couldn’t breathe well, so I opened my mouth.
The obvious details of this description – it never really departs from the realm of cliché – and its unnecessary details ("so I opened my mouth") pull us out of the moment rather than make us feel it.
Something Beah does quite well, though, is transition from one scene to the next. The book has a wonderful movement between the past and present; it’s primarily told linearly, but Beah uses flashbacks and flash-forwards as if to show that the tragedy he and his nation went through is too big to fit into the boundaries of a traditionally told, start-to-finish story.
The most engaging parts of the book cover the period during and directly after Beah’s time as a child soldier. He’s neither didactic nor simplistic in his explanation of his "war years," as he calls them, sounding old enough to have lived several lifetimes, and in a way, he has. Beah and his fellow soldiers are always high on cocaine and marijuana, so much so that they never sleep. When they’re not training or fighting, they watch violent movies like Rambo and try to emulate those action stars when they fight. They kill without mercy. The worst things imaginable have already happened to them, and now they have nothing left but this; the army is their family, the only thing in the world that has meaning. Beah has a great description of the state of semiconscious that allowed them to burn people alive and do other horrible things that I’ll leave you to find out about if you choose to read the book. "A lot of things were done with no reason or explanation. Sometimes we were asked to leave for war in the middle of a movie. We would come back hours later after killing many people and continue the movie as if we had just returned from intermission."
Beah’s war years end (sort of) when he is taken to be "rehabilitated" in Freetown. This was my favorite part of the book, because it shows in sharp detail how futile and even disastrous the best-intentioned international reconciliation efforts can be. The rehabilitation facility is nearly as deadly as the war, because the rebel soldiers and the army soldiers are just smushed together there, as if they hadn’t been mortal enemies the day before. "It’s not your fault," the therapists, teachers, and nurses at the facility keep telling the boys, which infuritates them because all they were doing was getting revenge on the people who killed their families – to their minds there’s no question of fault. But, of course, the boys who fought on the rebel side feel the same way, and it was a matter of random chance whether it was the rebels or the army who killed their families.
The book never is as interesting or as spirited as it is in those scenes of rehabilitation, of trying to reckon with an irreconcilable past. Because of how pat much of Beah’s discussion of his misery is and the book’s abrupt ending, I wondered if he really has gotten over his war years – or if it’s even possible to get over them during one lifetime. Maybe the only thing to do is what he has done: move on.
Lucy B., Books Correspondent
Lucy’s column, published every other Tuesday to Gather Essentials: Books, revisits recent works of literary fiction.
Lucy is a copy editor at a news service in Northern Virginia.
You can find Lucy’s book reviews at www.gather.com/lucysreviews
Keep up with Lucy’s other postings and Gather activity by joining her Gather network – just click here ldbieder.gather.com and select the orange "Connect" button on the left-hand side of the page.
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