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
handicap haunt transform wash
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 don't haunt you or handicap you or kill you.
context destroy family happened happens order war
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.
exhausting speaking
It's exhausting writing nonfiction, particularly when it's personal. It's tiring, always speaking about things that are not necessarily fun retelling.
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.