A Former Child Soldier Speaks

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by Melinda Tuhus | Apr 11, 2007 11:31 am

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Posted to: Arts

ishy%20smiling.JPG It’s hard to believe that a young man with such a beatific smile lived in a hell of child soldiering in Sierra Leone’s civil war. Ishmael Beah came out the other side to tell the tale to a transfixed audience of more than 200 adults and young people at the New Haven Free Public Library.

p(clear). New Haven has an important connection with Sierra Leone through the Amistad story of rebellious slaves who won their freedom after being imprisoned in the Elm City in the late 1830s.

p(clear). donald%20and%20ishmael.JPG Beah was introduced at Tuesday night’s event by Donald George (pictured on the left, giving Beah a small gift), a fellow Sierra Leonian who is part of the crew of the replica Amistad. “The guest speaker tonight has been involved in combatant activities. He has been drugged to do very atrocious things. After counseling, he finally went to an integration program and was able to get into normalcy again.”

p(clear). Beah wrote A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier and is on a nationwide speaking tour. He read from two sections of his book: One described how he and his older brother initially escaped when their parents were killed, and the carnage they observed from their hiding place near a road as marauding soldiers carried out atrocities. The other was of the idyllic childhood he remembered before war engulfed his small country, where the birds sang and his grandmother taught him to observe the moon.

p(clear). ishy%20talking.JPG He said his story, in which he killed others in a daily struggle for survival, “shows that anyone can lose their humanity, but anyone can also regain it.”

Beah began by describing a peaceful childhood, in which he was close to nature and to his family, where he attended school (and even studied Shakespeare, under the English school system in place since colonial times) and listened to American hip hop music. He said the image of a violent Africa, “where every two-year-old picks up an AK-47” is a false one, or at least not the whole picture. Using the example of the music, he pointed out that Africa isn’t so far away or disconnected from America as most Americans think.

When the war in Liberia erupted, on Sierra Leone’s border, he said, “At first we couldn’t believe the stories we were hearing,” about the violence and slaughter. Then the war came home. “When the guns started, the birds no longer sang.”

He described hiding from soldiers, terrified, in the forest. “But after a week, when you need to find food, then you have to go out” and the terror takes second place to the fear of starvation. “You have to normalize the situation to survive,” he said.

After three years fighting with government forces, he was one of the children allowed to go with a group that was rehabilitating child soldiers. Although he didn’t mention it Tuesday night, Beah wrote in an article in The New York Times Magazine that he was angry at being sent away by his commander, since the army of child soldiers was now his only family and he felt he had somehow failed them.

For the first weeks at the center, the children were detoxed from all the drugs they’d been given. One of the most poignant stories he told was of his treatment in the rehab center, where a woman named Esther took a special interest in him. “I told her my most horrible stories trying to drive her away,” he said, but she refused to be dissuaded from her loving support. He said he and the other children at the center would sometimes beat up or stab those trying to help them. “They’d come back to us bandaged up, but they wouldn’t be angry. Instead they’d say, ‘It’s not your fault,’ and ‘Have you eaten?’ They were the most selfless people, and they treated us as children no matter what we had done.”

Beah said that healing is a long process. Of his ordeal, he said, “You lose trust, and to regain it takes time.”

p(clear). Beah said he wrote his memoir to bring attention to the plight of thousands of children still caught up in fighting wars on all sides of global conflicts. He said he would never forget what happened to him, but the love and caring he was shown in a rehabilitation program have enabled him to appreciate every day of his life.

p(clear). dan%20baker.JPG Beah said as a young child he listened to American hip hop and found he had a way with words. The first question after his talk came from Dan Baker (pictured), who had come down from Manchester with friends to hear this edition of the library’s Writers Live! series. Baker asked Beah to comment on the violence that permeates much of hip hop. Beah replied that his love for hip hop was in the words and rhythms, which he used to describe everyday life. He said it often seems to be people who have never directly experienced violence who are fascinated by it, while those who have lived through horrific violence don’t find it fascinating or romantic. He also said, “Violence keeps us from knowing ourselves,” and added, “Fighting for peace is an oxymoron. That’s not a political statement; it’s just a fact.”

p(clear). After taking several questions, Beah signed books for a long line of fans.

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