Words matter. These are the best Ishmael Beah Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Whenever I speak at the United Nations, UNICEF or elsewhere to raise awareness of the continual and rampant recruitment of children in wars around the world, I come to realize that I still do not fully understand how I could have possibly survived the civil war in my country, Sierra Leone.
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.
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.
Shakespeare is absolutely big in Africa. I guess he’s big everywhere. Growing up, Shakespeare was the thing. You’d learn monologues and you’d recite them. And just like hip-hop, it made you feel like you knew how to speak English really well. You had a mastery of the English language to some extent.
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.
It’s exhausting writing nonfiction, particularly when it’s personal. It’s tiring, always speaking about things that are not necessarily fun retelling.
There’s so much focus and interest about what happens during war, but very little about what happens when people return to homes and communities that have been destroyed. There’s a renewal that happens, but it’s a very difficult one.
After I wrote my memoir, ‘A Long Way Gone,’ I was a bit exhausted. I didn’t want to write another memoir; I felt that it might not be sane for one to speak about himself for many, many, many years in a row. At the same time, I felt the story of ‘Radiance of Tomorrow’ pulling at me because of the first book.
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.
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.
The thing that really gets to me is that countries are in the news only when things get out of hand. That’s when it’s newsworthy. When the war ends, it’s not newsworthy anymore; no one wants to think about it. Actually, the aftermath is the most important part. It’s when people have to rebuild.
As a kid in Africa, you were so connected to nature itself because you went farming, watched the moon out at night, observed how the sky was different, and how the birds chanted different songs in the evening and the morning.
What happens in the context of war is that, in order for you to make a child into a killer, you destroy everything that they know, which is what happened to me and my town. My family was killed, all of my family, so I had nothing.
We all have that capacity to lose our humanity when circumstances force us to do so. It’s not specific to people who live in Africa or Latin America or Asia. And equally, we are capable of regaining ourselves.
