Review of by Ishmael Beah's A Long Way Gone

Is it possible to rehabilitate a child who fought between the blurred boundaries of right and wrong, life and death, during the most impressionable, malleable years of his childhood? This is the question author Ishmael Beah prompts readers to contend with in the chilling pages of his book, A Long Way Gone. 

A Long Way Gone catapults readers into an environment completely unlike anything many have ever been exposed to before. Sure, we all turn on CNN from time to time, bombarded by gruesome images of war, children at the ripe age of five equipped with machetes and rifles, but viewing life through a detached, altered lens does not invoke the same emotions as reading the first-hand account offered by Beah.

His memoir commences with a brief but poignant account of his life before Sierra Leone’s civil war polluted his community. Just like any other twelve year old boy, Beah was full of childhood ambitions, setting off to a neighboring town to expose audiences to the next ‘rapping sensation,’ he and his friends. Within pages, readers are immersed into a completely antithetical situation: Beah describing his first encounter with war, a woman cradling her baby, seemingly dismissive of the bullets that riddle her child’s lifeless body.

For the better part of the book, Beah and his friends aimlessly roam the countryside, directionless and famished. The group quickly realizes that the war has not only cast physical scars, but has also pitted community members against one another, laying a crack of mistrust in the foundation that once bound people together. “People were terrified of boys our ages. Some had heard rumors about young boys being forced by rebels to kill their families and burn villages… Some people tried to hurt us to protect themselves.”

The book progresses with a constant intensity. Struggling to reconcile his actions with the immediacy of life and death, Beah repeatedly battles his fate, each time narrowly escaping the inevitabilities of war. The flows of emotion are raw. The optimism once exuded by Beah gradually recedes to defeat, “In truth, realizing that I would eventually be caught, I had stopped running…”

Eventually Beah is recruited to thwart the combat efforts of the rebel forces. The evolution from child to man in the span of two years is incomprehensible. Instead of playing cards, learning arithmetic or flirting with a childhood crush, Beah’s teenage years are consumed by drugs, guns and death. But just like roughly 300,000 other childhood soldiers, Beah quickly assimilates into his new life, emotionally rationalizing his actions with the war-time propaganda communicated to him by his superiors. His immunity to guilt strengthens with time, vanquishing any sense of emotion he once derived from killing. Two years after being initiated, the war had effectively transformed him from a compassionate child into a machine bred to kill.

Readers travel with Beah every step of the way on his life-altering journey, a true testament of the human will to survive. Not only does Beah surface from the war physically unharmed, but he perseveres through the emotional tides that once swept him under: the uncertainty of tomorrow, the unspeakable acts inflicted by humans on humans, and the quest to confirm his family’s mortal existence. As Beah notes, “One of the unsettling things about my journey, mentally, physically, and emotionally, was that I wasn’t sure when or where it was going to end.”

Void of both self-pity and political culpability, A Long Way Gone focuses the concept of childhood soldiers into uncomfortable clarity. Not only is Beah’s tale a riveting page-turner, it also fills an important void in today’s literature on the instability that plagues Sierra Leone as seen through a child’s eyes. And, while childhood soldiers are not a role exclusively filled by children living in Sierra Leone, it is important to consider the relative implications a tale such as Beah’s might have for ‘freedom fighters’ who characterize conflict in the Middle East.

If nothing more, this book should dissolve the disconnect we derive through geographic distance. As the proverb goes, let’s not let history continue to repeat itself. It’s an accurate representation of the message Beah attempts to hone in on.

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