PraktikTess

I’m not sure when this novel is taking place, but I would guess that it is somewhere around 1990 since Ishmael is born in 1980 and was around 10 when it all started. The war takes place in Sierra Leone, a country situated in the western part of Africa.

The unique thing about the setting of the story is that it’s taking place in Sierra Leone, a country far, far away from ours. It’s not only far away from Sweden in a geographic aspect; the country also has another kind of politic and social standard, so the grade of poverty is also far away from ours. Sierra Leone has a whole different culture and it´s interesting to hear about the country from the inside and not from the view of the newspapers, the way we usually here about the countries in crisis nowadays.

So the special thing about the book is that we get to hear about the war in Sierra Leone from Ishmael’s point of view and not from the twisted truth you get from magazines or bowdlerization. This gives the novel another kind of power (you get more affected when the story is true) as well as people recieve general knowledge by reading the book. Besides this was the whole reason behind the book; Ishmael wanted people to be aware of the horrible war and how young boys are recruited into child soldiers. When Ishmael came to the USA he realized that nobody knew anything about the war in Sierra Leone and as a result of this he wrote “A Long Way Gone” from his perspective so that people could get the whole truth about the situation.

I’m not sure how to imagine this story taking place in Sweden since the whole novel circles around the war in Sierra Leone. If the war would happen in Sweden I guess that they would have a stronger military which could help.

The author concentrates on both environment and characters, but he describe the people very generally (the villagers, the refugees, the rebels and so on) the specific persons he eventually do describe separately only have their actions and personalities formed while their shallow looks are more up to the reader to decide.

In order to give the story power and an impact on the reader the novel has to focus on the villagers as well as the environment. The book is very much based on this concept since it’s supposed to portray all the horrible things happening in the war. When Ishmael tells us how everything (the environment) is ruined and then describes how the villagers (characters) are hurt, he gives us a versatile picture creating sympathy among the readers.

But it’s when Ishmael describes how the villagers are reacting that his environmental descriptions are put into reality. The extreme reactions among the villagers is what wakes me up and forces me to believe that what is happening is true, and that this was Ishmael´s life during the war.

I´m reading ”A long way gone” by Ishmael Beah. Because of the fact that the book is an autobiography it´s told from Ishmael´s perspective. Considering no one is an “evil” person in the book it is hard to describe who the antagonist may be. But one big threat in the book is the “rebels” who are invading their village. They have brought misery into Ishmael´s life as they separated him from his family. They are now the reason to why this 12 year old boy is running for his life in the swamp hoping that these gunshots will be the last he´ll here. Based on this I would say that the antagonists are the rebels.

The book is about Ishmael´s life when he is caught in the middle of the war going on in Sierra Leone. I would say that the actions of the characters aren´t quite normal, but who would be themselves in a war like this?
In the book you get to hear Ishmaels own thoughts and how he perceive people in the war. But his descriptions aren´t the most pleasant ones. When he´s on his way back to his hometown in order to search for his own family, he portrays the damaged people who are fleeing in haste as though they are people from horror movies. One father is continuously talking to his dead son and the next second a woman with a negligent look on her face is passing by. She is rocking her baby in vain since she is too shocked to notice that blood is dripping from her dead daughter.
As you can see the people in this village are too traumatized to act sane. “In a matter of seconds, people started screaming and running in different directions, pushing and trampling on whoever had fallen on the ground.” This is a sentence from the book where we can get a clear picture of how the citizens behave when they are too scared to care about anyone but themselves. But how would you react? Maybe this is how people should behave in a war. So far I like the fact that the people are different from anything I could imagine, their emotional instability makes the whole book far more powerful, since it is a sincere reaction from their side. This makes me believe in the story. So I would say that the actions of the character are plausible.
Ishmael is also very guarded and truly scared which is pretty obvious in a situation like this. But one thing that struck me as a little bit odd was when the villagers had received plenty of messages concerning the rebels plan to attack their village. They ran away from the village for a couple of days only to return again when they thought that nothing would happen. It doesn´t feel very plausible that they would return and live their life as normal and ignore the messages they had received, especially when they know the power of the rebels.

I have a hard time trying to relate to his situation in the war since I live in Sweden far away from these kinds of conflicts. However I can relate to his reactions in the book. He is very young and just like me he has never been touched by war before. “The only wars I knew of where those that I had read about in the books or seen in the movies such as Rambo as well as heard on BBC news.” Ishmael had no idea what to do when the rebels where coming. But all he did know was that his family is all he has and all he could visualize in this horrifying situation was the tragedy of not finding his family. He is too young, too scared to handle this on his own without the love and shelter from his loved ones. His only safety and comfort right now, when the world as he knows it is falling apart, is his family. I guess this is how many people feel when they are lost and confused and sometimes when my life is upside down I find a lot of support in the people I love as well.

So far in the book the characters haven´t made any direct moral choices, but in the very beginning of the book when Ishmael and his friends found out about the attack in their hometown, they decided to search for their families in the village. This could count as a moral issue since this decision is about life or death as well as it could determine if they would ever see their families again. It would be more right to return home and help their family than to run for their own life. They put everything at risk by going back to where “hope is gone”.
When people started to arrive from the area of which they were heading to, they were struck by the chaos – parents in seek of their children, lost babies crying in vain and blood everywhere.
As I mentioned earlier I believe that they headed back home to find their families mostly because they need the shelter and safety rather than to save them from the rebels. Therefore the deed isn´t just about right and wrong, it´s more about family and love. It´s hard to say what I would do in a situation like that. Many people like to think the best of themselves and would probably decide to do the heroic deed here, but when you´re actually there I don´t think that you would be so cocky. A part of me would off course like to return to home and find my family, but I wouldn´t have had the guts to do so. The picture in my head of the home-village is too frightening and the people Ishmael has seen are all warning him to not go back there.