Transnational Migrant Identity in Ishmael Beah's a Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier

chapter 4 Transnational Migrant Identity in Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier

The previous chapters have examined the process of forced migration and its effects on the migrant. This chapter examines in more detail the roots of forced migration as mediated in Ishmael Beah’s memoir A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier.1 This representation of the African child soldier and its transfor- mation is a contribution to a body of narratives telling of the phenomenon such as Bernard Ashley’s fictional Little Soldier (1999) and China Keitetsi’s autobiographical Child Soldier (2004). Such narratives tend to emphasize the survival of their protagonists by re-locating them in new social and cultural settings far away from their homes embedded in violent conflicts and ethnic hatred. In this chapter it is my aim to discuss the representation of the African child soldier and his long path of migration to the West with particular reference to Ishmael Beah’s memoir. I show how this autobiographical text places its narrator in discourses of violence, trauma, and globalization in order to construct a subject ready to enter Western modernity and “America”, thus transnational- izing his identifications and making him another migrant aspiring towards the West. In other words, while the memoir is not a conventional refugee narrative, Beah’s text is highly relevant in the context of global mobility and intercultural identity construction as it negotiates displacement and places its narrator in the context of migration. I suggest that the memoir’s construction of universalized childhood is linked with a story of its protagonist’s trauma and migration. Beah’s book addresses the roots of forced migration by charting the life and movements of its narrator, the young Ishmael, who loses his family amidst the violence of Sierra Leone and is forced to join the Sierra Leone Armed Forces to fight against the “rebels”, the Revolutionary United Front, a group of whose soldiers one half have been estimated to have been ca. 8–14 years old.2 Fol- lowing the life of Ishmael from his first awareness of civil war, at the age of 12 in 1993, to his successful escape to Guinea and subsequent life in the Unit- ed States in the late 1990s, the narrative unfolds a period of social turmoil by showing violent armed conflicts, death of civilians, and a chaotic coup. During

1 Ishmael Beah, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, London: Fourth Estate, 2007. 2 Ilsa Glazer, rev. of Armies of the Young: Child Soldiers in War and Terrorism, by David M. Rosen, Anthoropological Quarterly, LXXIX/2 (2006), 377.

Transnational Migrant Identity in Ishmael Beah 57 the narrative Ishmael transforms from a young school-boy into a ruthless and drugged soldier and finally becomes a sensitive and intelligent representative of his nation’s youth at a UN-sponsored meeting in New York. An international success, the simply-narrated book has not only been on the top of the New York Times Bestseller list but it was also the book of the week on bbc Radio 4 in May 2007. The text has also generated a debate whether all of its details are true and whether its author has spent such a long time in the army and experienced all that he claims.3

From Local to Global

Beah’s text reveals the local problems that function as the roots of its protagonist’s migration and contribute to the somewhat idealistic image the memoir constructs of him. Beah’s autobiographical text resembles some other narratives in the genre which tell of a child’s experiences in extreme conditions of fear, violence, and war and call for empathy in reading. In an article examining narratives of what she calls “ethnic suffering”, Sidonie Smith claims that by telling and making their stories available, these witnesses to terror and abuse are positioned in a contradictory situation as they hand over their stories to

journalists, publishers, publicity agents, marketers, and rights activists whose framings of personal narratives participate in the commodifica- tion of suffering, the reification of the universalized subject position of innocent victim, and the displacement of historical complexity by the feel-good opportunities of empathetic identification.4

While in Beah’s narrative ethnicity is addressed in the context of displacement and migration, the memoir’s use of a child narrator links it to the texts examined by Smith, Zlata Filipovici’s Sarajevo-based Zlata’s Diary (1994) and the

3 The debate is described in Gabriel Sherman, “The Fog of Memoir: The Feud over the Truth- fulness of Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone”, Slate.com, 6 Mar. 2008, available at: , accessed 9 Aug. 2016. See also Allison Mackey, “Troubling Humanitarian Consumption: Reframing Relational- ity in African Child Soldier Narratives”, Research in African Literatures, XLIV/4 (2013), 99–122. 4 Sidonie Smith, “Narrated Lives and the Contemporary Regime of Human Rights: Mobilizing Stories, Campaigns, Ethnicities”, in Transcultural Localisms: Responding to Ethnicity in a Glo- balized World, eds Yiorgos Kalogeras, Eleftheria Arapoglou, and Linda Manney, Heidelberg: C. Winter, 2007, 144.