Mattru Jong

A stolen childhood The meaning of war in the dictionary is “A military conflict between two nations or parties”, but in A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah war is not just a conflict between two nations or parties but it’s a conflict between death, revenge, and survival. Ishmael Beah is a victim of war that took place in Sierra Leone. His lieutenant easily turns him into a ruthless killing machine. The Lieutenant use a false promise to avenge the death of his…

The civil war in Mattru Jong has influenced and affected many of the native’s actions and thoughts towards each other. Due to the civil war people have lost trust in each other. On page 37, Beah writes “This was one of the consequences of the civil war. People stopped trusting each other, and every stranger became an enemy”. For example, in many of the situations Ishmael and friends encountered, many people had tried to hurt them on behalf on their “themselves, their families, and communities”…

Introduction Ishmael is 36-year-old African adult, born in Mattru Jong, Sierra Leone. Ishmael was referred to, have a physiological evaluation to determine his mental, and physical well-being. Furthermore, throughout the time Ishmael lived in Sierra Leone he has been imposed with many detrimental effects on his well-being. The prime reason for Ishmael’s condition is a crisis of his hometown, where he and his biological parents lived. On March 1991, the rebel group RUF invaded Ishmael’s…

collected enough information to conclude that you served as a child soldier for a little more than two months rather than two years. Not only was this information found to be inaccurate, the book’s timeline seems to be off in terms of the year Mattru Jong was attacked. According to people in your town, they have confirmed that the attacks described, happened in January of 1995 rather than January of 1993, as stated in your book. Peter Wilson has also reported that your former teachers gathered…

opens with Ishmael, along with his friends and brothers, performing rap and dancing in the streets of their home village in the African country, Sierra Leone. As young teenagers, the group of boys left their hometown to perform in a talent show in Mattru Jong, the next village over. While they were away, their hometown was attacked by rebels from the Revolutionary United Front (RUF). After hearing about the inconceivable violence, the group immediately started on their pilgrimage back home, in…

A Perfect Night to go to China by David Gilmour, and A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah, both share and have differences in their elements of fiction. While David Gilmour’s fiction story and Ishmael Beah’s non-fiction story both follow the theme of the loss of innocence, Ishmael Beah’s story adheres more closely to these conventions by allowing its main character to mature, while David Gilmour’s character experience has no real growth. As understood when comparing both…

Way Gone by Ishmael Beah and The Bite of the Mango by Mariatu Kamara, two children who experienced the war in Sierra Leone tell about the severe circumstances they were in along with the choices they had to make in order to live. Ishmael Beah of Mattru Jong explains how he was forced out of his home to become a child soldier at the age of twelve, hereupon killing countless civilians himself (48, 159). He wrote that he lost all his family very early…

Globalization can be seen in this book during the opening chapters. Ishmael goes to Mattru Jong because Mohamed, Junior, Talloi, and Ishmael had “started a rap and dance group” (Beah 6). Hip-hop was not a common genre of music in their culture. Since the hip-hop they heard was from The United States, the cause of this was globalization. Globalization…

A Long way gone: Family is significant in a child’s psychological development A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah is truly a fantastic and emotional read. It contains many life changing experiences for a young boy. Throughout the whole memoir, one major theme that is bestowed with Ishmael is family. Ishmael went from having an ordinary, happy family to being stranded alone in the forest with no one. When he finally encounters a group of boys that he once knew…