Walking the Wall

Ishmael Beah says in an interview with CNN about his life as a child soldier in Sierra Leone. In another interview with Jon Stewart, he said “that he believed that returning to civilized society was more difficult than the act of becoming a child soldier—that dehumanizing children is a relatively easy task.”

I finished reading “a long way gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier” in the early hours of the morning today, and it has been, in some ways been a real struggle to keep going through the book. It is heartbreaking to watch the process of a child becoming a killer–heartbreaking, but also painfully clear on how it happens. It is eeiry and frighteningly accurate when Beah says that dehumanizing children is a relatively easy task.

I won’t recount all the events as that is what the book is for, but there are so many moments of startling clarity and poignancy–like a baby girl killed “with an interrupted innocent smile on her face” that becomes the symbol of all the estimated 300,000 child soldiers in the world today–interupted innocence. To see this young boy move from a boy I can recognize in the face of my nephew when he was twelve, or my son sitting and talking to his grandmother–moving to being “wrapped in a blanket of sorrow” and numbed by constant fear, stress, and hunger. I think what made this book so powerful is that throughout the book Ishmael would interlace memories of “before” and the memories seem so commonplace, so much like my memories or memories my own children would have–that it makes it impossible to distance my world from his.

“Our innocence,” he writes, “had been replaced by fear and we had become monsters. There was nothing we could do about it.” All the fear eventually turned into rage and children were made into monsters and it is terrifying to see that process so clearly as this book shows it. Terrifying, but important. It is so easy to look at the atrocities in places such as Darfur and think to ourselves, they are all monsters, not human beings, monsters. Beah says in one of the interviews that it is important that people realize that under the right circumstances, we are all capable of becoming monsters.

There is hope found in odd places throughout the book, spots of innocence where he is able to be a child playing with a ball or running in the sand. He writes of the first time he saw the ocean after so long of running and running from the rebels and villagers who were afraid of him. He saw the ocean and he smiled. “Even in the middle of the madness there remained that true and natural beauty, and it took my mind away from my current situation as I marveled at this sight.”

Early in the book when he had been alone for a long time he remembered something his father had told him, “If you are alive, there is hope for a better day and something good to happen. If there is nothing good left in the destiny of a person, he or she will die,” Beah writes, “Those words became the vehicle that drove my spirit forward and made it stay alive.”

Every time I look at Beah’s smiling face on the back of the book, I am amazed, I am amazed that someone can live through such horror, commit such horrors, and come out the other side with any spirit at all, let alone such a beautiful one committed to stopping other children from living through what he did. He is a testament of the depths that humanity can sink to and the heights it can climb.

Know that although in the eternal scheme of things you are small, you are also unique and irreplaceable, as are all your fellow humans everywhere in the world.
~Margaret Laurence