He used to be a boy soldier, a 13-year-old who learned to slit a man's throat without flinching. He was one of hundreds of thousands of children, hopped up on drugs, killing without remorse, fighting grown-up wars.
The power of Ishmael Beah's story, though, isn't just what he was forced to do but how he learned to undo it. He chronicles these transformations in his book, "A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier." If you are a latte drinker perhaps you have seen the book for sale at Starbucks, where it is the current reading selection. The book also sits near the top of the New York Times best-seller list.
Beah, now 26, grew up in Sierra Leone, in a small town without electricity or running water. Before the war, on summer nights and during the rainy season, he says, he and his friends would spend hours listening to grown-ups tell stories — folk tales that linked the children to their ancestors and taught them how to be good.
Laura Simms also grew up hearing stories, although these were mostly ones passed down by her Eastern European Jewish family in Brooklyn. As an adult she became a professional storyteller, and in 1998, two years after meeting Beah in New York at the United Nations' "First International Children's Parliament," she unofficially adopted him.
This week, mother and son will be in Salt Lake City to talk about how stories can heal. Although Beah has been touring the country to talk about his book, and Simms is always on the road telling stories, this is the first time they will take the stage together. Their presentation, as well as other events featuring Beah and Simms separately, is sponsored in part by the Center for Documentary Arts at The Leonardo. Simms, a consultant for the CDA's Center for the Story, "awakens us to the stories we live in," says CDA executive director Les Kelen.
You might call Beah's story an epic, Simms says; the kind of story in which the protagonist "goes out into the world and suffers a great deal, and brings back a wisdom that has been forgotten or lost." In an epic, she says, the hero may encounter a monster, "or some immense unkindness."
Ishmael Beah's epic began on an ordinary January day in 1993, when he left home with his older brother and a few friends to walk 16 miles to a talent show in Mattru Jong.
At 7, Ishmael used to recite Shakespeare for his neighbors. At 12, on visits to the recreation center run by the mining company where his father worked — a half-hour's walk away but it might as well have been a different planet — he saw his first rap music video. He was entranced by all those English words spoken so fast, and before long he and his friends had started their own rap and dance troupe.
And so they were away from home, waiting to perform, when rebel soldiers attacked their town.
The war in Sierra Leone pitted rebels (the Revolutionary United Front, or RUF) against the government's army, with civilians caught in the middle. The fighting moved from village to village; at each one, houses were set ablaze, and villagers were burned or shot or bayonetted.
When news reached them that their town had been attacked, Beah and his friends tried to return home but discovered that everyone was fleeing. This was how the immense unkindness began: they saw a man vomiting blood; three dead children in the backseat of a car; a woman carrying a dead baby on her back, shot as the woman ran for her life.
Later, Beah and his friends began walking south, trying to find safety. Eventually, Beah lost his brother and his friends, and walked alone. Later still he found another group of wandering boys and walked with them. One day they heard rumors that their families were alive in a nearby town. As they approached, rebels again attacked, burning Beah's family alive before he could reach them. Eventually, hungry and lonely and scared, the boys were convinced to join the army.
But to abbreviate Beah's story in just a few sentences is like saying "The Odyssey" is about a man who went on a trip. The horrible beauty of Beah's account comes from the layer upon layer of searing detail, his ability to remember not only how the birds sounded but how exactly it felt, on his first day of battle, to watch two friends die.
He has a photographic memory, he says, and attributes it in part to all those hours spent listening to grown-ups tell stories. A young listener never knew when an adult might ask him to repeat a story, word for word, gesture for gesture. He also learned how to be a good observer and to engage his audience, "how to bring them to the landscape of the story."
The army officers fed the boy soldiers Rambo movies and drugs, including brown-brown, a mixture of cocaine and gun powder that both numbed them and made them feel invincible. The officers reminded them, over and over, that the rebels had killed their families, and this was their vengeance. The boys learned not only to kill but to laugh about it, to give each other high fives if they shot a rebel, to watch dispassionately as they forced prisoners to dig their own graves.
When he was 15, UNICEF workers rounded up some of the child soldiers and sent them to a "rehabilitation center" near the Sierra Leonean capital. It was here that Beah came down off the drugs and eventually came face to face with what he had witnessed and what he had done. It is a testament to the patience of the nurses and other workers that he eventually learned to trust people again, and to regain both his childhood and his humanity.
To "live well with the memory," rather than to forget, allows the memory to teach rather than be a burden, he says. To tell the story of what happened, he hopes, will remind people that war is not romantic, that violence is always the wrong choice, and that a traumatized child can recover.
"I have been rehabilitated now, so don't be afraid of me," he told the U.N. Economic and Social Council in 1996, when he was 15. "I am not a soldier anymore; I am a child."
After moving to New York to live with Laura Simms, Beah attended high school and then went on to graduate from Oberlin College in Ohio. He currently advises the Children's Rights Division of Human Rights Watch, and is creating a foundation to provide educational opportunities for young people in Sierra Leone. Of Simms he says: "She is my mother and I love her dearly."
As a storyteller, Simms has used scary fairy tales to help New York children process the horrors of 9/11. She has taught people to find the story in their own lives: to give structure and meaning to details that may seem at first to not add up to anything.
Some people, says Simms, live their lives stuck in one story, and sometimes the story we tell about ourselves is just a veneer. "But at some point we begin to listen to a much deeper, authentic story that doesn't reject anything." This is when we can heal, she says.
E-mail: jarvik@desnews.com