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Essays on war literature
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Book Summary In A Long Way Gone, Ishmael Beah, a former boy soldier with the Sierra Leone army during its civil war(1991- 2002) with the rebels of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), provides an extraordinary and heartbreaking account of the war, his experience as a child soldier and his days at a rehabilitation center. At the age of twelve, when the RUF rebels attack his village named Mogbwemo in Sierro Leone, while he is away with his brother and some friends, his life takes a major twist. While seeking news of his family, Beah and his friends find themselves constantly running and hiding as they desperately strive to survive in a land rendered unrecognizable by violence. During this time, he loses his dear ones and left alone in the wilderness, is forced to face many physical and psychological dangers. By thirteen, he has been picked up by the government army, and is conditioned to fight in the war by being provided with as many drugs as he could consume (cocaine and marijuana), rudimentary training, and an AK-47. In the next two years, Beah goes on a mind-bending killing spree to avenge the death of his dear ones. At sixteen, he was picked up by UNICEF, and through the help of the staff at the rehabilitation center, he learns to forgive himself and to regain his humanity. Document Analysis During the author’s life in New York and Oberlin College, he understood that people who have not experienced being in a war do not understand what the chaos of a war does to a human being. And once the western media started sensationalizing the violence in Sierra Leone without any human context, people started relating Sierra Leone to civil war, madness and amputations only as that was all that was spoken about. So he wrote this book out o... ... middle of paper ... ...it may help us arrive at an understanding of the war situation through the eyes of what were those of an innocent child. It is almost unique in the sense that this was perhaps the first time that a child soldier has been able to directly give literary voice to one of the most distressing phenomena of the late 20th century: the rise of the child-killer. While the book does give a glimpse of the war situation, the story should be taken with a grain of salt. Works Cited http://observer.com/2008/02/ithe-australiani-continues-assault-on-ishmael-beahs-credibility-citing-school-records/ http://oneminutebookreviews.wordpress.com/tag/a-long-way-gone/ http://chrisblattman.com/2008/03/05/credibility-a-long-way-gone/ http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2008/03/the_fog_of_memoir.html http://resources.mhs.vic.edu.au/contextwhosereality/Downloads/ishmaelbeah.pdf
Ishmael Beah’s memoir, A Long Way Gone, narrates the story of Ishmael’s life as a child soldier in the Sierra Leonean civil war. Ishmael chronicles his journey from a scared, adrift child who lost his family in the war to a brutal child soldier who mercilessly killed many individuals to a guilt stricken rehabilitated teen who slowly learns to overcome his remorse from his past actions. Ishmael’s life as a child soldier first started when the Sierra Leonean army took him and his friends with them to the village, Yele, occupied by army officials and seemingly safe from the rebels. Unfortunately, within a few weeks of their stay, the rebels attacked Yele, and Ishmael and his friends decided to make the choice of becoming a child soldier in order to sustain their slim chances of staying alive. Ishmael’s interaction with violence was very different as a child soldier compared to as a civilian: while he witnessed violent actions before, as a child soldier he was committing them. As his life as a soldier demanded more violence from him, Ishmael sank deeper into the process of dehumanization with his main driving point being the revenge that he sought from the rebels for the deaths of his family and friends. After a few months as a child soldier, Ishmael was brought to the Benin home by UNICEF officials who hoped to rehabilitate the completely dehumanized child soldiers. With the help of Esther, a compassionate nurse, and other staff members in the center, Ishmael was able to ultimately reverse the effects of the war on him. By forgiving himself and the rebels who took away his close ones from him, Ishmael was able to restore his emotion of empathy and become rehabilitated.
...and wounds soldiers but murdering their spirits. War hurts families and ruins lives. Both stories showed how boys became in terrible situations dealing with war.
Think about how your life was when you were ten. For most people, the only worries were whether you finished your homework and if you’ve been recently updated for new games. Unfortunately, in Sierra Leone, kids at the age of ten were worried about if that day was the only day they’d be able to breathe. The cause of one of this devastating outcome is Sierra Leone’s Civil War. This war was a long bloody fight that took many lives and hopes of children and families.
In 1996 the war in Sierra Leone was becoming a horrific catastrophe. Children were recruited to be soldiers, families were murdered, death came easily, and staying alive was a privilege. Torture became the favorite pastime of the Revolutionary United Front rebel movement, which was against the citizens who supported Sierra Leone’s president, Ahmad Tejan Kabbah. I was in the grips of genocide and there was nothing I could do. Operation No Living Thing was put into full effect (Savage 33).
Hope enables people to move on by providing the thought that maybe tomorrow’s events will be better than today’s. Hope is a theme that remains constant in every part of A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah. Ishmael begins the novel optimistic, believing he will find his family again. This optimism is later lost when Ishmael is recruited by the army to fight against the rebels, causing him to become addicted to drugs and the thrill of killing. Three years after his recruitment, Ishmael is rescued by UNICEF-a group dedicated to rehabilitating child soldiers. During his rehabilitation, Ishmael discovers hope once more by relearning how to trust, love, and have the will to survive. The presence of hope throughout A Long Way Gone enables Ishmael to have an ability to move on and a will to survive that he lacks when he loses hope.
This reader’s rating for this book is average. It is a very well written book but it may not appeal to some people. If the reader was familiar with the war then this would be a wonderful book to read. This reader thought it was interesting but not as enthralling as it should be. The book was mainly made out of quotes or dialogue from the men in the war. This was a very different way of writing but it was interesting. Many of the veterans had interesting stories to tell and how it felt like to be in the war. Overall it was a book to consider if you’re into war stories.
Beah, Ishmael. A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007. Print.
Wells, Karen C.. "Children and youth at war." Childhood in a global perspective. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2009. 152. Print.
In order to understand the effects that come with being a child soldier, one must first understand how a child ends up in such a position. To three teenage boys living in a small Indian village, the hope of a better life for themselves and their families as well as the affirmation of employment seemed promising. So pr...
The civil war of Sierra Leone lasted from 1991 to 2002. In this civil war approximately fifteen thousand kids were forced to become soldiers. Either by being kidnapped or by having their lives threatened. The situation was an extremely sad one. They had no choice weather they wanted to be soldiers or not. Like Ishmael said in A Long Way Gone, “It was either kill or be killed.” This situation is one where most people would not even be able to imagine themselves in. Ishmael Beah was a boy who suffered, because of the civil war. His family was killed and he was forced to become a soldier for the military. He eventually was rescued by UNICEF and eventually moved to the United States. For a decade, there has been a war between Mexican drug cartels and the Mexican government. There have been an unacceptable number of kids that have been used as soldiers in this war. Approximately, thirty thousand youngsters have been forced into becoming soldiers. In contrast to Sierra Leone, the soldiers here are only for the drug cartels, but in Sierra Leone even the government made the children become soldiers too. Just like the children of Sierra Leone, the children of Mexico are also kidnapped or threatened into becoming soldiers. Once captured, they are transformed into belligerent
So the harsh discipline and the threat of death continue to underscore the training programs of almost all child soldier groups. Works Cited Singer, P. W. Peter Warren: Children at war. New York : Pantheon Books, c2005. Eichstaedt, Peter H., 1947- First kill your family. Chicago, Ill. :
Miller, Sarah Rose. “Child Soldiers.” Humanist 1 July 2002: 1-4. eLibrary. Web. 14 Feb. 2011.
In the short story “Chickamauga”, the author Ambrose Bierce uses a young boy to connect to his audience with what is the disillusions of war, then leads them into the actuality and brutalities of war. Bierce uses a six year old boy as his instrument to relate to his readers the spirits of men going into combat, then transferring them into the actual terrors of war.
Machel, Graca & Sebastian Salgado. The Impact of War on Children. London: C. Hurst, 2001.
The war was worsened by the wealthy minerals in the ground and the influence of the mineral was strengthened by the fear and displacement the war caused. The intertwining of these two destructive forces is seen in the story Salima is told by a man who bought her. In this he tells of a man who stuffed”...the coltan into his mouth to keep the soldiers from stealing his hard work, and they split his belly open with a machete”(31). Not only does this story show the harsh conditions the men are exposed to in war, but also it further demonstrates the hold coltan has on the minds of those who live in the Congo. The want for coltan leads to the destruction of the community and individual identities of those involved as it perpetuates a cycle of war that damages men, induces violence against women, and ultimately creates a cycle of lost identity.