“Music is a total constant. That’s why we have such a strong visceral connection to it, you know?Because a song can take you back instantly to a moment,or a place, or even a person. No matter what else has changed in your or the world, that one song says the same, just like that moment” (Sarah Dessen, Just Listen). Ishmael Beah, a human rights spokesmen and author, was forcefully admitted into war that killed many, including his parents. He has come a very long way from the way he used to be. From a kind boy who would wear crapes to dance hip hop, to a boy who went around and killed for fun. Seeing Ishmael now, you would not believe the stories he would tell due to him seeming like such a kind person. Did not seem like someone who killed villages, or had been hurt many times. To most, music is just something that people listen to just because they have nothing else to do but for Ismael, it is much more than that. It is something that helped him keep strength during the hard times, especially around the times he lost his parents and saw many people being killed in front of him. Music has been used as entertainment, a safe haven, and recovery for Ishmael Beah.
“Since we intended to return the next day, we didn’t say goodbye or tell anyone where we were going. We didn’t know that we were leaving home, never to return” (Beah, 7). Ishmael Beah, a boy who was taken into the world of cold war at the age of 12, was not always nice and friendly. He used to enjoy listening to rap music and mimicking the American artist by learning the songs and writing down the lyrics. He was on his way to a town called Mattru Jong to participate in his friends talent show. He was very lucky to be away, but most weren’t so lucky. He walked 16 miles to get there but stopped in his grandmothers village, where he and his friends stopped and ate something. Once he arrived in the town of Mattru Long, they all decided to meet up with their old friends and stay over. The next day, he and his brother waited for their friends to get out of school, at 2:00PM but since unexpected events occured, his friends came home early. They came running back to explain to him and his brother, Junior, that their home, Mogbwemo had been attacked and school was cancelled until further notice. “According to the teachers, the rebels had attacked the mining areas in the afternoon. The sudden outburst of gunfire had caused people to run for their lives in different directions. Fathers had come running from their workplaces, only to stand in front of their empty houses with no indication of where their families had gone. Mothers wept as they ran toward schools, rivers, and water taps to look for
their children. Children ran home to look for parents who were wandering the streets in search for them. And as the gunfire intensified, people gave up looking for their loved ones and ran out of town. “This town will be next, according to the teachers” (Beah, 9). Ishmael was confused and shocked, something like this has never happened to him so Junior, Talloi and him waited for a couple of hours waiting to see their families or see someone who may have seen them but sadly, they started to see people they did not know. “ Junior, Talloi, and I took our backpacks and headed to the wharf with our friends. There, people were arriving from all over the mining area. Some we knew, but they couldn’t tell us the whereabouts of our families. The said the attack had been too sudden, too chaotic; that everyone had fled in different directions in total confusion. For more than three hours, we stayed at the wharf, anxiously waiting and expecting either to see our families or to talk to someone had seen them. But there were no news of them, and after a while we didn’t know any of the people who came across the river”(Beah, 10). They went walking and did something they never thought they would ever do, steal food from other people. The boys wandered around and found themselves in dangers and are forced to become what they were afraid of; a killing machine. They are forced to become heartless soldiers that commit violent and horrible acts. Ishmael is taught to believe that what he is doing, killing, doing drugs, and stealing, is good and he begins to believe that the people who are teaching him are his new family that will help him avenge the death of his real family. He commited crimes such as killing the innocent, doing drugs, and taking over land. “To gain complete control of the village, Alhaji and I shot the remaining RPGs before we descended on it. We walked around the village and killed everyone who came out of the houses and huts. Afterwards, we realized that there was no one to carry the loads. We had killed everyone. So I sent Kanei and Moriba back to base to get help. They left, taking some ammunition from the dead gunmen; some of them still clung to their guns. The three of us remained in the village. Instead of sitting among the dead bodies, the bundle of food, crates of ammunition, the bags of drugs, we took cover in the nearby bushes and guarded the village. Also, we took turns going down to the village to get something to eat and some drugs, and ammunition back to base”(Beah, 143-144). After being with his “family” for around four years, the lieutenant told him that it was time for him to restart his life, starting brand new, leaving his past life behind him. The lieutenant turned the boys in the
UNICEF, a group that will help the boys start a new life. Ishmael and the other boys acted like they were crazy but in reality, they really were but only because of their pasts. “At the end of every meal, the
nurses and staff members came to talk to us about attending the scheduled medical checkups in the
mini-hospital at Benin Home and the one-on-one counseling sessions in the psychosocial therapy center that we hated. As soon as they started speaking, we would throw bowls, spoons, food, and benches at them. We would chase them out of the dining hall and beat them up. One afternoon, after we had chased off the nurses and staff members, we placed a bucket over the cook’s head and pushed him around the kitchen until he burned his hand on a hot boiling pot and agreed to put more milk in our tea. Because of these things, we were basically left to wander aimlessly about our new environment for the entire first week”(Beah, 139). Ishmael never opened up to anyone and never told anyone anything, he kept to himself. That was true until he met someone named Esther, she helped him open up and taught him that what he became and what he did was not his fault. When Ishmael finally accepted that nothing was his fault, him and a few other boys were invited to go tell their story and found people who have gone through similar things and survived. After a few years, Ishmael Beah writes his story, A Long Way Gone; Memoirs of a boy soldier and becomes a Human Rights Activist to represent and give hope “to all the children of Sierra Leone who were robbed of their childhoods”.
“The first time that I was touched by war I was twelve. It was in January of 1993. I left home with Junior, my older brother, and our friend Talloi, both a year older than I, to go to the town of Mattru Jong, to participate in our friends’ talent show. Mohamed, my best friend, couldn’t come because he and his father were renovating their thatched roof kitchen that day. The four of us had started a rap and dance group when I was eight. We were first introduced to rap music during one of our visits to Mobimbi, a quarter where the foreigner who worked for the same American company as my father lived”(Beah, 6). Ishmael was introduced to music at the age of 8 years old, very different compared to Americans who have been listening or been around music ever since they were a baby. In the beginning, Ishmael didn’t really think that music would have such a big impact on his life, he just likes music. Doesn’t seem to need it at the moment but likes the feeling he gets when listening to it. “I loved the
dance, and particularly enjoyed learning the lyrics, because they were poetic and it improved my vocabulary”(Beah, 6). Ishmael seems to enjoy listening to the rappers and the beats of the music and
wants to be like them because he is impressed that “black fellows” similar to him are able to speak so fast, making him believe he could be like them one day.
“Junior, Talloi, and I listened to rap music, tryin to memorize the lyrics so that we could avoid thinking about the situation at hand”(Beah, 15). When Ishmael and his friends all had to leave the place they called home, they were constantly reminded of the haunting memories they had & would turn to music to block out the memories. They listened, learned, and mimicked the music the exact way it was being sung/rapped to forget what they have seen. “The chief stopped the music. He stroked his beard, thinking. “Tell me,” he said, turning to me, “how did you get this foreign music?” I told him that we rapped. He didn’t know what rap music was, so I did my best to explain it to him. “It’s similar to telling parables. But in the white man’s language,” I concluded. I also told him that we were dancer and had a group in Matteo Kong, where we used to attend school. “Mattru jong?” He asked, and called for a young man who was from that village. The bot was brought before the chief and asked if he knew us and if he had ever heard us speak parables in the white man’s language. He knew my name, my brother’s, and those of my friends. He remembers us from performances we had done. None of us knew him, not even by his face, but we warmly smiled as if we recognized him as well. He saved our lives”(Beah, 39). Ishmael always walked with his cassette tapes tucked away in his pockets and if he didn’t have them the day he met the chief, He would have been thought of as a child soldier and held captive or even worse, killed the most brutal way. After the chief acknowledged that they were not child soldiers, they were allowed to eat with everyone else since they did not seem to be a threat to them. This is where music Ishmael began to change his perspective on music because at first, he didn’t care much for music and only thought of it as something to do when he’s bored but after this situation, he thought to himself. Without Gavin the tapes that day, he would not be alive at the moment. He thought to himself “wow, without these tapes, I wouldn’t be here to tell my story, I wouldn’t be here to represent the child soldiers who were taken away from their homes just to take the lives of innocent people..”.
“It happened one night after I had fallen asleep while reading the lyrics of a song. I had not slept well
for months now, and so far I had been able to avoid my nightmares by busying myself day and night with listening to and writing the lyrics of Bob Marley’s songs” (Beah, 164). Ishmael and the others wake up from nightmares, pictures of the past coming back to torture them. “But at night some of us would wake up from nightmares, sweating, screaming, and punching our own heads to drive out the image that continued to torment us even when we were no longer asleep. Other boys would wake up and start choking whoever was in the bed next to theirs; they would the. Go running into the night after they had been restrained. The staff members were always on guard to control these sporadic outbursts”(Beah,149). After Ishmael stopped listening to music, he became sick in the mind. “I’d wake sweating and throwing punches in the air. I would run outside to the middle of the soccer field and rock back and forth, my arms wrapped around my legs. I would try desperately to think about my childhood, but I couldn’t. The war sometimes had formed a barrier that I had to break in order to think about my moment in my life before the war” (Beah, 149). Because of the war, Ishmael could no longer picture the times he spent playing, having rap battles with his friends, or even spending time with his family, his mind was already too far gone but his brain needs a little push to let the memories run free. It got to the point where he would not talk to anyone but his comrades, the people who would fight alongside with as a soldier. He would fight anyone except them, but when he stopped listening to music, he became a crazed man. The only time he would start opening up was when his nurse tried to become his friend and began letting him listen to music when she talked to him about his past, allow him to open up little by little.
“The calling of the humanities is to make us truly human in the best sense of the word”(J. Irwin Miller, Brainy Quotes). Ishmael Beah found his calling once he began telling his story and found others with similar pasts. He was once a child soldier but became a Human Rights Activist & a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador for Children Affected by War. He knew what it was like to be a child soldier and knows that no one should ever have to go through what he went through. He wrote his story, to give hope to people and the children that are going or have been through the same situation, he wrote this story to give hope to them. Without hope, he would not be the person he is today, he would most definitely still be a soldier if it was not for the Lieutenant turning him into the UNICEF, the organization that showed him that his actions were not his fault. The UNICEF, also known as the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund, was helping many people, few of those people being the child soldiers that probably needed the most help because of the brainwashing and the drug addiction. Ishmael found his calling. It would be being the voice for those who are not able to speak for themselves or what they believe it is best, the child soldiers. He is the voice of the UNICEF Goodwill for Children affected by war. He represents best since he has lived it and knows exactly what happens, how it happens, and what is the cause of it. Ishmael gives hope to those who are not able to speak for themselves. “If I chose to feel guilty for what I have done, I will want to be dead myself. I live knowing that I have been given a second life, and I just try to have fun, and be happy and live it the best I can” (Ishmael Beah).
Ishmael Beah gives many people a sense of hope, he even gives me a sense of hope. If Ishmael can change and become someone completely opposite than who he was before Rehabilitation, anyone can change. “One of the unsettling things about my journey, mentally, physically, and emotionally, was that I wasn’t sure when or where it was going to end” (Ishmael Beah).