Sierra Leonean writer and human rights activist Ishmael Beah spoke Monday as the final speaker of the President’s Reading Series. Beah, a former child soldier who fought in his country’s civil war in the early 1990s, discussed his childhood and writing career and read from his new novel, Radiance of Tomorrow.
“People don’t understand what war really is,” Beah said. “We have studied very young people who have fought in wars throughout time, but these stories lie very far in our past.”
Beah also talked about how he was misunderstood by his peers when he came to America because many of them had only heard highly sensationalized reports of the conflict.
“I thought he did a great job opening my eyes to an issue I had never heard of before,” freshman Carlos Concepcion said. “He was very eloquent and had a great hold over his audience.”
Beah read excerpts from Radiance of Tomorrow in which he tried to convey the healing process his country had to go through following the civil war.
“I wanted to show not only what the violence and the war is, but also the strength of the human spirit and the ability to move on from tragedy,” Beah said.
Beah also discussed the difficulties he faced writing in English about characters from his home, who would speak Mende, his native language. The literal translations of Mende expressions are much more figurative than standard English expressions.
For example, Beah said that to show a person’s thoughts are scattered, a Mende speaker would say that his mind was an anthill filled with smoke.
Beah’s writing style combines the visual and the tactile. In the passages he shared, he invited readers to picture someone running when he makes repetitive, consonant-heavy sounds to mimic the sound of footsteps.
Freshman Nehal Aggarwal said she felt that he posed a very unique view on storytelling, which blurred the line between fact and fiction.
“Ishmael Beah did a great job at showing storytelling from a non-western perspective,” Aggarwal said. “I never assumed there was another way to tell the truth.”
Beah’s childhood experiences heavily influenced both his novel and his memoir, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs Of A Boy Soldier. As a teenager, he was forced to fight in the Sierra Leone Armed Forces when the civil war erupted. After several years of fighting, he was rescued by UNICEF and was eventually adopted by an American family living in New York City.
Approximately 10 percent of Sierra Leone’s population died during the war, and over half of the population was displaced. Beah’s memoir is a collection of stories from the author’s childhood in which he shows the horrors of war from his viewpoint of a young adolescent.
“They used to call us the Lost Generation,” Beah said. “People assumed we, the child soldiers, would never be able to recover, never be able to move on from what we experience.”
After moving to the United States, Beah went on to graduate from Oberlin College in 2004 with a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science. It was during his time in college that he first began to write down recollections of his childhood.
“Initially, I did not want to talk about my past. Everything about my previous life was completely destroyed,” he said.
While at Oberlin, Beah entered a short story competition with a prize of $3000, in which he submitted a memoir of people trying to cook rice in the streets of Sierra Leone’s capital during lulls between bombardments and firefights. After the story was well received by his peers and professors, Beah to decided to write more about his memories from the war.
