Reading Questions

The Fog of MemoirThe feud over the truthfulness of Ishmael Beah's A Long Way Gone.

By Gabriel ShermanPosted Thursday, March 6, 2008, at 2:20 PM ET (The Slate)

Ishmael BeahOn Jan. 19, the Australian, Rupert Murdoch's Aussie broadsheet, published a 4,600-word investigation challenging the credibility of the child-soldier memoir A Long Way Gone. Author Ishmael Beah's heart-wrenching account of Sierra Leone's civil war and the two years he spent as a cocaine-addicted teenage killer achieved instant literary acclaim after its publication last winter and was selected as the inaugural title in Starbucks' reading club. Into its 35^th printing, A Long Way Gonehas sold more than 600,000 copies worldwide. Beah, 27, now travels the world as a UNICEF ambassador raising awareness for the plight of child soldiers.

To Read the whole article:

http://www.slate.com/id/2185928/pagenum/all/#p2


This raises some interesting points, but really, with all the horrors and blood that has spilt in Africa and Sierra Leone is this the best discussion we can have? No matter the truth of Ishmael's story or not - which I as well wondered how he could remember it all so clearly - the fact of the matter is that his story is real somewhere and to someone. What he describes in his book has happened, and we need to be doing something about that, not about if one story has 100% accuracy. Whether the boy was a child soldier for two years or two months - does it matter? It must have been horrible. Let us focus on that.

Speak to me!!

Contacts page!!  For those of you who do not already have a way to contact me, I just set up an email address and created a 'contacts' page.  Not very exciting at all, but hey, what in life really is exciting...  ;)   I got out the emails to the phone companies in Sierra Leone, but still nothing back yet but an automated out of office reply with other contacts.  Nothing from the Giants or Vibram either, but will call again today.

I spent some time yesterday, by chance, on this site librivox.org.  I was trying to find audio books as I've been enjoying them of late in the car or whatever.  And then here is this library of some 3000 recordings of 'public domain' books.  They are mostly older classics or the such - pre-copyright type of stuff, Shakespeare, whatever.  But there was some really good stuff there and it got me thinking that that might provide a nice option for the evenings after a long day of trekking.  It would take up no extra space - not like books would - and I wouldn't even have to sit and hold my eyes at attention to read when I was tired!.  Anyway, I thought it seemed interesting to think about.  I downloaded a few things to experiment with: Confucius, Sun Tzu, the 911 Report, The Wealth of Nations, even the one fiction book I own and haven't finished - Kim by Rudyard Kipling -, and of course, I had to download all 2 gb of Das Capital by Marx!!  Big fun!!  lol.  Anyway, I think today I will do some follow up stuff, then get into the non-profit set-up and hopefully into contacting Non-profits themselves...

   

Done reading that one...

So I finished a long way gone last night at about 3 am.  Any book that can keep me up at night has to be pretty profound!!  lol.  I thought it was a great book, and my only thought of critique was really as with my second post on it about the clarity of such a horrific time.  The drugs, the killing, the life he was living, he talks of it as such a fog, yet remembers and describes it so vividly.  But that may just be the critical analyst/theorist in me.  I would think that I would remember much of it all and probably be able to write about it as well (but I'm not 15), and of course the writing about it would bring a lot of it back.  Otherwise, It might have ended a bit abruptly, as if a time line had been met when the book had to be done.  It also probably isn't a great introduction into Sierra Leone either, not because of anything in it, but that it does not have any context about what is going on within the country and the war.  That was my mother's observation, as it was her 'first introduction' to the country.  

As for the end of the book there were two parts that I wanted to mention.  I thought it was a truly profound and illuminating statement when he writes of returning to Sierra Leone after a short trip to NY.  He says:

"My sixteenth birthday was eight days away, and throughout the flight back home I still felt as if I was dreaming, a dream that I didn't want to wake up from.  I was sad to leave, but I was also pleased to have met people outside of Sierra Leone.  Because if I was to get killed upon my return, I knew that a memory of my existence was alive somewhere in the world."

The sad thing about this statement, is that conflict after conflict, "the world" is still forgetting millions of people just like Ishmael every day.  We know what is going on in these countries, but we let it happen and condone it by our policies, business practices, and general disinterest.  Yes there are a few people he had met that would have known of his existence, but everyone else has forgotten all the other people of both Ishmael's and other war torn countries.

The final passage of the story is one that is so truly important I can't even put words to it and is a viewpoint that I have had a great deal of trouble in life for having.  Ishmael discusses a story that he had heard numerous times when he was younger.

"There was a hunter who went into the bush to kill a monkey.  He had looked for only a few minutes when he saw a monkey sitting comfortably on the branch of low a tree.  The monkey didn't pay him any attention, not even when his footsteps on the dried leaves rose and fell as he neared.  When he was close enough and behind a tree where he could clearly see the monkey, he raised his rifle and aimed.  Just when he was about to pull the trigger, the monkey spoke: 'If you shoot me, your mother will die, and if you don't, your father will die.'  The monkey resumed his position, chewing his food, and every so often scratched its head or the side of its belly...  What would you do if you were the hunter?"

Every year they told this story, with parents and children present, and the children were supposed to answer the question.  Ishmael said no one ever did, but that the children later spent hours trying to figure out how it could be resolved.  Hunting other things, whatever.  But Ishmael had a thought that he kept to himself until now, and it underscores both why I think he went through the pain of writing this book, and more importantly, what the world really needs.  He says:

"When I was seven I had an answer to this question that made sense to me.  I never discussed it with anyone, though, for fear of how my mother would feel.  I concluded to myself that if I were the hunter, I would shoot the monkey so that it would no longer have the chance to put other hunters in the same predicament."

That is what the world needs.  A view that is not all about he self, but that is in fact selfless.  If my death or my mother's death means the lives of a thousand people, is there even a decision to be made?  A thousand people can do so much more than one person.  The sad thing is that there a billions of people in the world, we just can't seem to find a way to focus them and/or for them to work together as a team.




 

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...

Reading...

So I'm thinking in here that it will be worth passing along some of the things that I am reading about the country. Yesterday I sat on the beach and finally was able to start reading a long way gone, memoirs of a boy soldier, by Ishmael Beah.  I read the first couple chapters and was physically appalled.  I looked around and saw all these people, sitting on the beach - umbrellas, chairs, towels, toys, - yet none of them seemed to care Not just about boy soldiers or far away countries, but about anything.  They were on 'vacation', from work, from life, from a moment, from whatever... what else mattered but the serenity of their moment?

"The last casualty that we saw that evening was a women 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 sen 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." 

"I am pushing a rusty wheelbarrow in a town where the air smells of blood and burnt flesh.  the breeze brings the faints cries of those whose last breaths are leaving their mangled bodies.  I walk past them.  Their arms and legs are missing;their intestines spill out through the bullet holes in their stomachs;brain matter comes out of their noses and ears.  The flies are so excited and intoxicated that they fall on the pools of blood and die."

The boy that wrote these passages was describing his life at 12 years old.  Do you know how many boys on that beach were around that age?  To many for me to watch - all having fun.  I sat there listening to conversations... nothing, no one cared.  The trappings of our everyday American lives are so simple, so pristine - so much of a paradise.  We don't want to know about these other places.  If we ignore them we don't have to realize that our human instincts actually force us to care about other people.  When people you know are sick or in the hospital you rush to their side, you try to help them, you do what you can.  You know them, they matter to you.  If we never acquaint ourselves with other people and their problems then we don't have to worry about them.  We don't have to stop what we are doing to help them, to care about them.  

People always say America gives the most aid to the developing world of any country (in dollar terms this is true, but not as a percentage).  But what have you done?  What have you given?  And I do not mean this in dollar terms, but what part of your heart, your sole, what emotional bond have you given or created?  Too what extent have you attempted to feel the pain of other people that are simply just not fortunate enough to have been born within a certainly randomly demarcated line of national control such as the US or Europe?  

The at risk and impoverished people of these countries and the world in general are innocent - mostly children.  Yet we don't choose to care, we don't choose to become aware of these 'others', less fortunate than we are.  It is time though.  Time for humanity to start showing its true colors, that deep down inside we do care, we just don't know about the travesties found in the far corners of our world.  Teach us!!  Nothing worth having or doing every came easily...  Strive for more.