Imagine if you had a younger sibling or relatives between the ages nine through eighteen. What if they were forced to be sent to fight in the war at such a young age. But in Sierra Leone, that is not the case. Many children within that area were taken from their own homes and were threatened to become adult soldiers. As for the book, "A Long Way Gone” wrote by Ishmael Beah and the movie "Blood Diamond", shows a briefly description of how young innocent children were obligated to be committed to be a soldier. Most of the children were restrained from leaving the different rankings that they were sent to.
Ishmael Beah, is a veteran who wrote the novel "A Long Way Gone", that shares his horrific memoir experience in A Long Way Gone. In Beah 's younger years he was a happy child who loved listening to the genre rap along with listening to rap he enjoyed breakdancing on his free time. Ishmael life was different compared to other children 's lifestyle. At the age of twelve, he was one of the children who was taken away by Revolutionary United Front (RUF) and forced to become a child soldier. The 2006 film Blood Diamond demonstrated the manner in which the kids were taken from their homes and forced to become soldiers. The rebels tried taking the kids that looked like they would be able to survive the war and kept those to continue fighting. In one scene, the rebels blindfolded one of the chosen kids, gave him a gun, and told him to shot. Frightened the little boy shot the gun,
In A long way gone, although Ishmael suffers from the atrocious status of the war, thanks to the help from various people and his efforts, he ultimately overcomes the adversity and his trauma and becomes a human rights activist to save and to defend those who are in the same situation as his childhood. Ishmael Beah, a 12-years boy, who loves rap music and dancing like general teenagers, begins to be racked with pain as he encounters the miserable war circumstance. The arduous situation of the war takes Ishmael’s family, his innocence, his identity of a child, and his childhood from him, but leaves the agony for him. To survive and to revenge on the rebels who murdered his family he enters the army. His life as a soldier traumatizes him. The war takes away his hope, dream, and pleasure, and makes him think he has: “no control over the future” (87). This claim demonstrates the replacement of his dream and delightful memory by the terrible and traumatic memory of the war. Even though those traumas, pain, and suffering ruin Ishmael’s life and mind, they force him to grow as a person and he ultimately overcomes them with his desire and other’s help. Ishmael’s change in attitude and
In a report published by UNICEF (United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund) it states that there are around 300,000 child soldiers, participating in over 30 different conflicts worldwide. Of these 300,000, 120,000 are serving in different countries in Africa. One of the countries where this issue has been extremely prevalent is Sierra Leone, where child soldiers made up a significant part of the armed forces during its 11-year civil war, with 10,000 out of about 50,000 soldiers being children. Accounts of child soldiers in Sierra Leone have been made, with both the book A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier and the movie Ezra telling the story of a Sierra Leonean child soldier. Even though both the book A Long Way Gone by Ishmael
"We went from children who were afraid of gunshots to now children who were gunshots… Shooting became just like drinking a glass of water" (Barnett, 2012). Ishmael Beah, the main character and writer of the novel A Long Way Gone is a clear example of the loss of innocence that war causes. During the Sierra Leone’s civil war, Beah is recruited as a child soldier and eventually turned into a cold-blooded killer with no sign of naivety in his body. At a tender age, Beah is trained to kill, mutilate and terrify dozens of people, which causes him to be bared to a flood of disturbing scenes; transform into a murderer; loose all sense of emotion; and in time, lose his innocence. In the novel A Long Way Gone, the reader can view the multiple events
A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier and the recent 2006 film Blood Diamond both depict how it was living in Sierra Leone, Africa during the Civil War in the ‘90’s. While A Long Way Gone focuses on child soldiers and what they had to live and go through for many years, Blood Diamond focuses mainly on how the country is torn apart by the struggle between government soldiers and rebel forces. The film portrays many of the atrocities of that war, including the rebels' amputation of people's hands to stop them from voting in upcoming elections. Both the movie and the book try to tackle major issues by asking the questions: how
The child soldier Ishmael Beah once said, “These days I live in three worlds: my dreams, and the experiences of my new life, which trigger memories from the past.” This represented what Ishmael had to go through during the war. The Sierra Leone war began in 1991. This war was fought by the RUF (Revolutionary United Front) and the National Sierra Leone Army Force. As a consequence, 10,000 child soldiers were recruited, along with them there Ishmael Beah. Beah was only 13 years old when he was forced to become a child soldier by the rebels. In addition, rebel superiors brainwashed Ishmael, along with the rest of the recruited kids by inducing them into drugs such as marijuana, brown-brown and amphetamines. Consequently, a lot of problems were
When most people of think of war, they generally think of the glorified aspects. Love and violence. Or perhaps their minds are drawn to an image of a soldier’s homecoming: A father embracing his son, crying tears of joy, all while the solider relays his experiences of the war among celebratory decorations. He is now considered a hero. But what difficulties has he faced to get there? This is the side of war that many of us don’t recognize. In the memoir, A Long Way Gone, author and protagonist, Ishmael Beah, experiences civil war and its effects first hand when he is forced into becoming a child soldier in the poor third world country of Sierra Leone. As the novel progresses, Ishmael becomes increasingly addicted to drugs,
A Long Way gone is a memoir about Ishmael Beah’s life before and after he was a child soldier. It took a toll on his life when his village was invaded by the rebel soldiers. His family was taken his mom and his little brother everything he had and known was ripped from his reach. Ishmael was a good kid and was kind because of the people around him his community shaped into the person he was when he lived there. He had a good place and had been surround by good people all of his life so it was easy for him to be happy just like the people around him.
The purpose of the book A Long Way Gone Memoirs of a Boy Soldier written by Ishmael Beah, is to show the evil behind arming children and having them fight. Beah tells a story of a personal experience of being a child forced to become a soldier, and in his story there are many rhetorical strategies that he uses. Beah uses rhetorical strategies such as Onomatopoeia, Anaphora, and Hyperbole. He uses these strategies to make the story a more sorrowful story and allow the readers to feel a certain type of connection or understanding to him. Ishmael who is suffering from what is going on around his villages goes through many obstacles with his brother and their friends. These strategies make the story more personal because they give out a lot of detail and lets the reader really see the perspective of Ishmael.
Starting a calm day in Sierra Leone to surviving, and being trafficked into the army is what Ishmael Beah experiences as a child. A Long Way Gone is a memoir of a child soldier, Ishmael Beah, and the memoir shows the experiences he has throughout his childhood. Beah experiences trauma of the war just like all of the other child soldiers. Ishmael is one of the very little amount that survive the war. The three main themes in A Long Way Gone are the themes of survival, healing, and memory.
“My entire body went into shock. Only my eyes moved, slowly opening and closing” (Ishmael Beah 18). Ishmael had just found his family's ashes in their house, that burned down. In a Long Way Gone Ishmael Beah was separated from his family at twelve years old when his town, in Africa, was attacked. When he was eighteen years old, he went through many challenges of being a soldier in the Sierra Leone Civil War. He got through most of his days with the power of alcohol, drugs, and marijuana. Throughout A Long way Gone Ishmael lost, and partially regained his innocence, his will to survive weakened, and the damage of war continued to get worse. Ishmael Beah's theme is survival, and manipulation. Ishmael did whatever he needed to survive, and he was also manipulated during the war to take drugs, drink alcohol, and smoke marijuana.
War has scared people all over the world, including the people outside it, and has made changed people to do things they did not know they were capable of. A Long Way Gone is a book that features Ishmael Beah who is both the author and the narrator in this novel. Beah was born in 1980 and was only around 11 years old when a civil war in Sierra Leone broke out in 1991. The civil war had many problems that took place, but this novel aims its focus on the fact that both sides of the war used child soldiers and he was one of the victims to become one. Beah had become a child soldier when all his friends started to die off and were forced to become a soldier and survive the war he had desperately tried to escape from. Ishmael Beah can be seen
The book A Long Way Gone, was an honest book. It showed the struggles of war and what it does to a person. The story of Ishmael Beah is a valuable one, full of love, struggle, family and violence. One of the things that is great about this book, is that it shows a clear progression of Ishmael’s character, from a sweet young boy, to a hardened young man You can see is innocence being slowly ripped away by the military, who forced him to smoke gunpowder and massacre villages. He is a real role model for kids who are struggling to get through something. If this boy can get through a war and survive, then you can get through this! The thing I didn’t like about it is the violence. They could have gotten away with not showing a baby being cut out
Childrens were given no choice they had to become soldiers to get food and shelter.
The change in Sierra Leone culture is one of the first consequences of war seen in the story. Throughout the civil war the rebels (RUF) recruited or forced many children to become soldiers. In order to get these children they would raid villages and then draft the strongest ones. They would then tell the children that they would not need their families
No one wants their childhood to be utterly destroyed or have their family taken away from them in the blink of an eye, without the chance to even say one last goodbye. The odd chance of that happening to us, here in America, is slim to none. In Sierra Leone on the other hand, along with many other parts of Africa, child soldiers are being put to use in armies. In A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah, the recruitment of child soldiers, African living situations, and the psychological trauma endured by the children deals with the issue of child soldiers.