Ishmael Beah
Ishmael Beah
Ishmael Beahis a Sierra Leonean author and human rights activist who rose to fame with his acclaimed memoir, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. His most recent novel, Radiance of Tomorrow, was published in January 2014...
NationalitySierra Leonean
ProfessionAutobiographer
Date of Birth23 November 1980
CityMattru Jong, Sierra Leone
believe i-believe tradition
I believe that there is a God, and coming from an African tradition, I believe also that there are gods.
pain awakening be-careful
This days one must be careful to avoid awakening the pain of another.
moon please-me childhood
I get a chance to observe the moon now, I still see those same images I saw when I was six, and it pleases me to know that that part of my childhood is still embedded in me.
thinking radiance glimpse
We must live in the radiance of tomorrow, as our ancestors have suggested in their tales. For what is yet to come tomorrow has possibilities, and we must think of it, the simplest glimpse of that possibility of goodness. That will be our strength. That has always been our strength.
letting-go fragility stills
I was still hesitant to let myself let go, because I still believed in the fragility of happiness.
soccer morning school
I had a very simple, unremarkable and happy life. And I grew up in a very small town. And so my life was made up of, you know, in the morning going to the river to fetch water - no tap water, and no electricity - and, you know, bathing in the river, and then going to school, and playing soccer afterwards.
expression dialect fifteen
The places I come from have such rich languages, such a variety of expression. In Sierra Leone we have about fifteen languages and three dialects. I grew up speaking about seven of them.
war years two
In early 1993, when I was 12, I was separated from my family as the Sierra Leone civil war, which began two years earlier, came into my life.
thinking forget-everything people
A lot of people, when they say forgive and forget, they think you completely wash your brain out and forget everything. That is not the concept. What I think is you forgive and you forget so you can transform your experiences, not necessarily forget them but transform them, so that they dont haunt you or handicap you or kill you.
children resilience suffering
...children have the resilience to outlive their sufferings, if given a chance.
boys imagination age
I grew up in Sierra Leone, in a small village where as a boy my imagination was sparked by the oral tradition of storytelling. At a very young age I learned the importance of telling stories - I saw that stories are the most potent way of seeing anything we encounter in our lives, and how we can deal with living.
journey ends my-journey
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.
school kids thinking
I guess what I'd like to say is that people in Sierra Leone are human beings, just like Americans. They want to send their kids to school; they want to live in peace; they want to have their basic rights of life just like everyone else. I think we all owe an obligation to support people who want to do that.
heart knowing childhood
My childhood had gone by without my knowing, and it seemed as if my heart had frozen.