Still Reading...

As I continue through a long way gone I can't help but think about where he (Ishmael Beah) was mentally when he wrote it.  I am just about half way through the book and the whole thing up to this point is him running/hiding and expressing his fear and humanity, showing compassion, and the holistic struggle of war that a person goes through within.  The thing that resonates with me is the clarity, and the verbiage that he writes with.  It is an incredibly well written book, but I have a thought - which I am unsure if it is necessarily true.  It is that he is almost overcompensating in showing this sensitive "caring" and "human" side as a way to offset the horrors that he eventually undertakes.  I do not want to belittle the words and feelings he is expressing, it is exactly what one would probably expect from such a situation, it just is an awful lot, and not balanced very much by thoughts of malice, revenge, or anything else of a more negative sort - especially from someone that was self-professed to be 'troublesome'.  There are passing mentions of his crew of boys stealing a pot of food, or something of the sort.  But then there were also these rumors that ran through villages about boys there age doing bad things, and these rumors preceded them to villages and put them in some contentious situations.  It jsut seems to me that there might be parts of the story that are possibly glossed over thus far.

On a psychological level this would make complete sense, I don't want to judge this as a negative thing, but more as a cathartic process.  If you were forced to do horrible things, I would think that you would wholly focus on the most humane and compassionate things that you had done and felt in life just so that you could simply live with yourself.  I do not mean to imply that he is consciously trying to show how nice he was, and then to show how bad he was made to be, and it wasn't his doing, but just that this is perhaps a natural coping mechanism that we as humans may - whether consciously or subconsciously - do just to remain sane.

I could never imagine the horrors that Ishmael and the people of Sierra Leone went through at that time.  Thus far it just strikes me as very telling of the human psyche that in his writing, his remembrance, and his story telling that he is so thorough in illuminating the good in him - which I don't doubt he was/is.  I feel as though in reading this book, less through his specific words, but through the whole picture he is presenting, that I am learning about humans.  About humanity and that by the simple way a person remembers and/or choses to tell their story about such a horrible thing as the brutalities of war, that we all make a bit more sense.  My heart goes out to you Ishmael, and all those who's struggles mirror yours...