The Bite Of The Mango

1. The Bite of a Mango by Mariatu Kamara and Susan McClelland, is a powerful story about the experiences of young Mariatu Kamara, a Canadian refugee from Sierra Leone. The culture of Sierra Leone during the 90’s and 2000’s impacted Mariatu’s life and how she ends up in Canada. One aspect of the Sierra Leonean culture is that young girls get married and have children at a very young age. When Mariatu was only 12 years old, an older man named Salieu wanted to marry her, but she rejected him. After that, while Mariatu was all alone at her house, Salieu came in and raped her, making her pregnant. She later gave birth to a baby, Abdul, who died due to malnutrition. Mariatu getting raped by an older man shows how the Sierra Leonean culture impacted her life because, in the West, this would not be acceptable, and Salieu would have been punished, although in the book, he is later shot by rebel soldiers. Next, another culture aspect of Sierra Leone is that a civil war is going on during Mariatu’s time there. Rebels and soldiers alike were attacking and destroying the country. One day, Mariatu had to go to a nearby village to get food, where rebels captured her

People both today and back then have been traumatized by war’s brutal combat, fallen victim to cruel soldiers, and had war cause sorrow and grief to them. Through characters seeing death, characters that are soldiers, and characters that are not in combat, Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See demonstrates that war affects individuals negatively, even if they are extremely

“The media often focus on the trauma people suffer, forgetting to tell us about their ability to recover and the humanity that remains intact” (Ishmael Beah). The quote of Ishmael Beah was used to describe Mariatu Kamara’s autobiography called The Bite of the Mango. Kamara’s story shows people the horrible events she lived through and how perseverance and optimism is essential for survival. If it hadn’t been for Kamara’s unbreakable will, she would have died when the rebels first came to her village, captured her, and cut her hands off. Despite the loss of her hands, Mariatu Kamara inspired others with her strength to continue living through her childhood and later in life became an activist and humanitarian.

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 catastrophic war in Sierra Leone included all ages that were hurt, amputated, or killed right outside of their own houses. After reading the two books, The Bite of the Mango and A Long Way Gone, there were some similarities and differences the two main characters came across in their books. Living through this event was a very deplorable time for victims. The two books, The Bite of the Mango and A Long Way Gone, are both similar and different in how the two main characters are both victimized but differently because of their gender.

War can destroy a man both in body and mind for the rest of his life. In “The Sniper,” Liam O’Flaherty suggests the horror of war not only by presenting its physical dangers, but also by showing its psychological effects. We are left to wonder which has the longer lasting effect—the visible physical scars or the ones on the inside?

The Bite of the Mango speaks about the war in Sierra Leone in the 1990s and is through the eyes of Mariatu Kamara, a female and amputee, while A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier is written by Ishmael Beah, a boy soldier that lost everything. They both were casualties to one of the most brutal civil wars; however, their experiences were different due to gender.

Monday morning, Sally, a twelve-year-old American girl, is woken up by her father. As she gets ready to go to school, her mother hands her a backpack and lunch with a quick kiss goodbye. Meanwhile, Zarina, a twelve-year-old Sierra Leone girl, wakes herself up to get ready for work. Her aunt says good morning as they both head from their home to the cassava fields. Both of these girls have a traditional family setting. In America children in a traditional family grow up with both biological parents and any siblings they have. In Sierra Leone, the setting for both The Bite of the Mango and A Long Way Gone, children of traditional families live with aunts and uncles as well as many children from different parents. These different views of

Manipulation is a key factor in the outbreak of a war. Ishmael Beah discusses the several instances of manipulation that occur in Sierra Leone. In his memoir, A Long Way Gone, Beah discuses his life during the civil war outbreak in Sierra Leone. He explains how the affects of war affected in both a positive and negative connotation. Several publishers seek a better understanding of the struggle that Beat faces during the time of the civil war. Throughout the novel, Beah discusses the damage Sierra Leone goes through. He learns valuable lessons throughout his time in combat, which he seeks to share with others. Although Beah describes the importance of soldiers in a time of war, he believes in his memoir, “A Long Way Gone”, that awareness should

While reading The Bite of the Mango, there are many traumatic events Mariatu experiences. Even these events are extremely devastating, heartbreaking, and life changing, Mariatu learns to seek the positives in her situations to make her life more joyful. The first traumatic event that Mariatu experienced was her little brother Santigie dying when Mariatu was 6 years old. Over the past years, Mariatu has formed a strong bond with him through playing and talking. When he died, in order to cope with her loss, she imagined that Santigie could be a spirit watching over her. “I was walking one day, I thought I could hear his voice calling me. I turned to look, but there was no one there. This happened several times over the next year.” (Kamara 19), mariatu proclaims. These occurrences made Mariatu think that Santigie was truly a spirit looking over her. Mariatu contemplating this assumably helped her cope with her issues by thinking that Santigie is in a better place now, looking over her shoulder.

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

In Ishmael Beah’s memoir “A Long Way Gone”, Beah’s imagery reflects both his decrepit emotional state and Sierra Leone’s disarray. When Beah explains how he and Kaloko went to Kamator to see if there were signs of anything living, he describes the scene as such, “The silence in the village was too scary. I was scared when the wind blew, shaking the thatched roofs, and I felt as if I were out of my body wandering somewhere” (46). Here, Beah’s distinguished use of imagery represents his worn emotional state and Sierra Leone’s disarray. How the war has not only turned villages into ghost towns, but also displays the emptiness and the fear that he has felt during this experience. This imagery represents the effects the war had on Sierra Leone

Mariatu Kamara and Susan McClelland’s co-written non-fictional novel, The Bite of the Mango is a page-turning adventure through the mind of a young girl who struggles with many physical and emotional challenges in her daily life as a poor village girl in Sierra Leone. Mariatu Kamara is an eleven-year-old girl who has learned how to live without her hands. In result of being a victim and survivor of a rebel attack, Mariatu is now a double amputee and has made many lifestyle changes to work around her disability.

The impact of war can have devastating effects on people and the way they live their life. A book by Ishmael Beah titled, A Long Way gone, tells a story about how war has had an impact on him and his way of life. The book takes place in Sierra Leone during the time the RUF had tried to overtake the government. The RUF and the other side of the war got their soldiers by brainwashing kids usually around ten or twelve and had them fight for their side. The RUF was ruthless and did unspeakable things to innocent people and would usually in some cases give drugs to their kids. Ishmael fits the role of both a victim and a victimizer because of what the war and the RUF soldiers had did to him and what he has done to

War is and can be defined as both a state of emergency and the liberator to a world so corrupt and unjust. The war in Sierra Leone separated families and ruined lives. How can a fight for a cause so right be so wrong. The Books “The Bite of the Mango” and “A Long Way Gone” compare and contrast Ishmael Beah’s experience to Mariatu Kamaras’. Both books are very different yet very similar. In The Bite of the Mango and A Long Way Gone both characters lose their childhood because of the war, but go through different journeys based solely on their gender.