Imagine a group of freshmen, packed from one wall to the other inside the Trojan Center Theatre on Tuesday, Sept. 29, 2015. There are people all around, even seated on the stage and the aisles, and standing in the back. This is what it looked like when Ishmael Beah came to Troy University to talk about his book, “A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier.” It narrates his childhood in Sierra Leone as a boy soldier fighting in the civil war. The novel is beyond inspirational and informational, and I would highly recommend it to anyone.
Ishmael’s bright personality filled the TC Theatre from the moment he stepped onto the stage. The warm Trojan welcome the audience gave him made him smile and laugh. He began by saying that he was going to tell us a story. Beah began by taking us back to his childhood, to the roots of his storytelling. His father and he would play a game where Ishmael would lead his “blind” father around the village. While navigating his father around, Ishmael had to explain the world to his father. What was around? What was happening in those moments? It was then that Beah was able to “relearn how to bring people into a world ... to live in a story, feel emotion.” It was this game that later helped inspire him to write.
Beah was still young when the civil war started in his country. The “simple, remarkable, beautiful” childhood Beah said he had was quickly extinguished. He said that “it became difficult to be a child” when the war hit home. At 13-years-old, he was recruited to fight as a child soldier. At this time, he had lost everything and used the war and his fellow soldiers to fill the void. After spending years in the war, Ishmael was put into a rehabilitation home for boy soldiers located in Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone. It took eight months for Beah to learn how to function normally again. He said that the boys “thought of [ourselves] as soldiers, not children,” which made adapting to civilian life difficult. However, he defied the odds and was able to go home with his uncle, the only remaining family he had.
While living in Freetown with his uncle, Ishmael came across an opportunity to travel to the United Nations in New York City as a representative of Sierra Leone. At the United Nations, Beah would be able to bring to attention the civil war in his home country and show how it affected the people -- mainly the children fighting a violent, bloody war. Beah discovers that he “was the only one who has experienced the war” in the group of people he was essentially competing with. In the end, Ishmael and his friend Bah got to attend the UN meeting for Sierra Leone.
In a light-hearted manner, Ishmael begins to tell the audience about his first impressions of the United States. As a kid, Beah loved hip-hop and was able to connect to it via an American Mining Company that was near his home. It was in these music videos that Beah got his first glimpses of America. The audience laughs as he explains that the hip-hop music videos, with fast cars and gun violence in the streets at all hours of the night, had influenced his ideas about life in New York. “I was really not looking forward to visiting New York … visiting the U.S. the first time around,” he told us. However, Ishmael defeated the odds and survived, although he was more worried about braving the cold New York winter once he landed at John F. Kennedy Airport in NYC.
Beah liked New York and living in the United States so much that once trouble started brewing in Freetown and the civil war reached those streets, he fled to South Africa and then found refuge in the United States with a friend he met while he was in New York during his United Nations visit. Beah came to America on a student visa and began to explore his writing skills. It was here, after finding trouble getting into a high school due to his lack of a report card, that Ishmael wrote his first essay, “Why I Do Not Have a Report Card.” Writing, as Ishmael discovered, allowed him to bring to life the war in Sierra Leone, so anyone who read his work would no longer be ignorant about what was happening in his home. Ishmael continued to dabble in writing throughout college and won a writing contest with a fictional story based on events of the civil war. By the time he graduated, Ishmael had been taken under the wing of one of his creative writing professors and had a draft of “A Long Way Gone” ready for the world.
What has the book done for Ishmael? He answered that question, as well as many others, before the event was over. Since most of Beah’s writing was influenced by his frustration at the lack of knowledge of the events in Sierra Leone, he said that “it’s meant a lot to see what it’s done to change people’s perspectives.” Writing about his experiences as a child soldier for the purpose of the book “was the first time [I] was able to go back … and bring that to life,” which he admitted to the audience allowed him to learn a lot about himself. One student asked Beah if one specific chapter was hard to write, and he replied, “Every part of the book was difficult to write.” When talking about the writing process, Ishmael said, “Every time I wrote about before the war, I realized what I really lost.”
The final question of the event was excitedly asked by a student sitting in the middle of the crowd. “What was your favorite word?” she asked. “I like a lot of words,” Ishmael replied. After putting a little bit of thought into the question, Beah decided that his favorite word, courtesy of early memories of his father, was “nincompoop.” If that doesn’t say anything about how amazing this man is, I don’t know what will. Afterward, he posed for pictures with people, signed books, and even did an interview. I believe that the Troy Trojans now understand how much of an inspiration Ishmael Beah is, and having him on campus is one memory I know I will always remember.
