A Long Way Gone: Part I

I recently started reading Ishmael Beah's book, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. Beah writes about his own personal journey growing up in Sierra Leone, located in western Africa. During his childhood, Beah and thousands of others struggle with the current conflict of the rebels. The rebels commit mass atrocities and murders all across the land, and they force children to become their soldiers. Ishmael Beah eventually becomes a child soldier, and he recalls his most horrific memories of this horrific time of his childhood.

Although I am only a few chapters into this highly-detailed book, I can already sense the great intensity of Beah's journey. At the beginning of the book, the narrator starts off with a memory of a visit to his mother's house several miles away. However, right when Beah and his brother return to their village, there is an immediate awakening. The text becomes extremely graphic, and it becomes very easy to visualize what Ishmael Beah experienced. It becomes highly graphic. Even though Beah's descriptions can be extremely disturbing, they are definitely necessary in order to bring the proper light to his story. Thousands of people felt so much pain and torture from this conflict, and it is proper to convey those same feelings to the readers of A Long Way Gone. I can only imagine that one of Ishmael Beah's main intentions in writing his book was to spread awareness, and his graphic descriptions definitely help his cause. Beah's text magnifies the reality of his story and the conflict, and it helps to pull its readers into understanding that struggle. Although this is an extremely tragic book, I can only hope that its upcoming chapters will be just as compelling as they are so far.

"The last casualty that we saw that evening was a woman who carried her baby on her back. Blood was running down her dress and dripping behind her, making a trail. Her child had been shot dead as she ran for her life. Luckily for her, the bullet didn't go through the baby's body. When she stopped at where we stood, she sat on the ground and removed her child. It was a girl, and her eyes were still open, with an interrupted innocent smile on her face. The bullets could be seen sticking out just a little bit in the baby's body and she was swelling. The mother clung to her child and rocked her. She was in too much pain and shock to shed tears" (13).