86 pages • 2 hours read
Ishmael BeahA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
In New York City in 1998, Ishmael recounts a brief dialogue between himself and school friends at the United Nations International High School in which they encourage him to reveal more about his past in Sierra Leone.
Ishmael describes his initial childhood perception of the war in Sierra Leone as something happening in a distant country. Eventually, it becomes obvious that the refugees passing through his hometown of Mogbwemo are exhausted, undernourished, and traumatized; their children are afraid of the everyday sounds of the village.
An avid fan of rap music, Ishmael walks to the town of Mattru Jong with his brother Junior and their friend Talloi in order to enter a talent show in January of 1993. The boys intend to return the next morning, so they do not advise anyone of their plans. On the way, they stop to visit their maternal grandmother, Mamie Kpana, in her village of Kabati. Upon their arrival in Mattru Jong, the trio meets old friends: Gibiralla, Kaloko, and Kahalilou. Their friends return from school early the following day, explaining that they were released because the rebels attacked Ishmael’s home village of Mogbwemo. Sudden bursts of gunfire caused pandemonium, and children were separated from their parents. Ishmael, Junior, and Talloi decide to walk back to Mogbwemo to find their families. Ishmael recalls having seen his father several days earlier, noting that “another stepmother had destroyed our relationship again” (10) and implying that he and his brother resided independently.
As the boys paddle toward their village, they see many displaced people fleeing the rebels. Their grandmother’s village of Kabati is deserted. A grown man weeps as he exits a van filled with the dead bodies of his wife and children, and a young woman carries a dead baby on her back. Having realized that none of their family members would still be in their village, the boys return to Mattru Jong. That night, Ishmael has terrible dreams of being shot and struggles to distinguish his dreams from reality. He tries to conjure pleasant memories, including the beauty of the forest and his grandmother’s adage about the moon. She advised her grandsons to emulate the moon, which makes everyone happy when it shines.
Ishmael describes a nightmare in which he pushes a dead body to a cemetery in a wheelbarrow. Upon removing the face cloth, he realizes that the body is his own. Ishmael wakes to realize that he is now in New York City, but he recalls firing an AK-47 at a group of boys on a Sierra Leone coffee farm and a soccer field. After the slaughter, he and his companions sat on the bodies and ate the food that the victims carried with them.
Ishmael is terrified of both his dream life and his waking life, which often triggers traumatic memories.
The narrative shifts back to Mattru Jong, where Ishmael and his companions return in hope of hearing news of their families’ fate. People who survived attacks bring letters indicating that “the rebels were coming and wanted to be welcomed” (21). The rebels carved the initials RUF—Revolutionary United Front—on the body of one young survivor with a hot bayonet and severed eight of his fingers. Many townspeople hide in the forest, but Ishmael and his group remain in their mutual friend Khalilou’s house to guard the family’s property.
When the rebels don’t invade the town immediately, many of its inhabitants return. On evening walks, Ishmael reminisces about his mother teaching him to cook as he watches the mothers in the village prepare dinner. The rebels finally arrive as Ishmael cooks dinner; gunshots are followed by chaos, lost children, and separated families. The rebels surround the village and “danced their way” (23) toward the inhabitants while firing their weapons. Realizing they were outnumbered, the soldiers in the village already left in advance of the attack. The rebels seek to capture the women and children in the village to avoid military intervention. Desperate to avoid capture and forced recruitment into the RUF, the boys run across a clearing while the rebels fire grenades, machine guns, and AK-47s at them. Still pursued by the rebels, the boys flee into the bush. They run for an hour and avoid capture.
Ishmael and his companions walk on a narrow path through thick brush for several days. He wonders about the wellbeing of his family and whether he will see them again, but he is too hungry to cry. At night, they sleep in abandoned villages. A good climber, Khalilou picks as much fruit as possible in one of the villages, but the boys still experience stomach pain and blurred vision due to their insubstantial diet. They return to Mattru Jong to retrieve some money they left behind. The village is decimated, and the group sees an old man executed by a bullet through his forehead and the mutilated bodies of two men chopped up with a machete.
The boys reach Khalilou’s house and find their money, but the house is looted, and no food remains that they can easily carry. They escape through a flat clearing with some other villagers, but the rebels fire on them from a tower when one group member makes a noise. Ishmael describes crawling through “dead bodies everywhere and flies” (28) surrounding them.
Upon reaching a village, the boys are happy they have cash to buy food from the stalls; however, none of the vendors are in operation. The author reflects that it would have been preferable to avoid the long trip to Mattru Jong to recover money that proved to be useless. That evening, the boys’ hunger leads them to steal food from sleeping villagers.
Ishmael’s memoir traces the trajectory from his happy early childhood in Sierra Leone to his enforced enlistment by the rebel forces of that country when he is 12 years old. Through the use of flashbacks, he illustrates the incongruity of the circumstances of his relatively safe life in New York City following rescue by United Nations forces and the horrific conditions of his mandatory conscription as a boy soldier in Sierra Leone. The dichotomy between the two highlights the magnitude of Ishmael’s trauma.
Ishmael illustrates the difference between these two lives in the introductory page titled “New York City, 1998” with the use of a short dialogue between himself and new high school friends. He emphasizes the sharp divide in their levels of maturity when his friends respond, “Cool,” after he affirms that he witnessed actual warfare. Rather than recount gory details, Ishmael merely smiles and agrees that he will discuss the war with them at some point, much as an older adult would divert little children from an unpleasant line of questioning.
Ishmael’s relatively pleasant experiences as a beloved child raised in a benign village sustain him through the horrors of the rebel attacks. Clearly, his conception of warfare prior to this time was that of a protected young boy; he notes his peripheral awareness of war in the neighboring country of Liberia. His own military experience up to this point is confined to Rambo movies and descriptions he read in books. Ishmael also points out the lack of a frame of reference and perspective that an adult might bring to this situation. After relocating to New York City, Ishmael experiences horrific nightmares regarding violent acts that he committed, including some in which he is the victim of such aggression. He develops the same attachment to the healing, cleansing powers of daylight seen in medieval literature: the sunlight dispels evil and the darkness of his memories.
Even though Ishmael does not reckon with the causes of the war, it is worth considering briefly the social and political factors that contributed to the conflict. Under President Joseph Momoh, Sierra Leone's ongoing economic and infrastructural decline continued to worsen. By the 1990s, much of the professional class left the country, while the collapse of the public education system created a generation of aimless youths with few economic prospects. Sierra Leone also fell victim to what scholars call “the resource curse.” Even though the country was and continues to be rich with precious minerals including diamonds and gold, the proceeds from these exports were unfairly distributed, leading to massive income inequality. Moreover, other economic sectors declined thanks to the country's single-minded reliance on mining industries. Finally, diamond sales directly funded the RUF, which used these proceeds to purchase weapons and ammunition from neighboring countries. The RUF even purchased some of its weapons from the Sierra Leone military itself, emphasizing the deep corruption at the heart of the country in the 1990s.
As conditions worsen and the boys witness a rebel attack on a village, Ishmael experiences the dichotomy between his innocent childhood and the brutal holocaust now before him. The joyful nature of his prior existence is now marred by terror. Ishmael and the other boys risk everything to avoid being branded with the sign of the rebel troops, “RUF,” with a hot bayonet; this mark would cause their immediate murder by the Sierra Leonean army and militant civilians. Extrapolated, the branding would represent their being cast out by the very community that nurtured them in the past.
The demarcation between the past and present is further clarified as Ishmael’s basic needs are no longer met. The boys exile themselves from their decimated village to avoid the rebels, whereupon they are denied food, rest, and safety. The ethical teachings with which the boys were raised fall victim to their starvation. The author confesses that the group steals food from sleeping villagers when their hunger becomes unbearable. A journey that begins as a casual trip to a talent show ends in a loss of the familiar trappings of the young boys’ formerly civilized existence.