86 pages • 2 hours read
Ishmael BeahA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Several months after his admission to the Benin Home, Ishmael tells Esther that he has nothing to live for because his family members are all dead. In response, she tells him to think of her as his sister. He participates in a talent show by performing a monologue from Julius Caesar and a rap selection. Visitors in the audience from UNICEF and related organizations are impressed by his performance. The center’s director, Mr. Kamara, invites Ishmael to be a spokesperson on the “issue of child soldiers” (169), and Ishmael is excited to emphasize publicly that children can be rehabilitated. When Mohamed, Ishmael’s childhood friend, arrives at the center, both boys are overjoyed to be reunited and to reminisce about their youth in their hometown of Mogbwemo.
Meanwhile, Leslie works on a residential plan for Ishmael upon his release from the center. He locates Tommy, Ishmael’s paternal uncle, who resides in Freetown. Gregarious and goodhearted, Tommy immediately offers Ishmael a home with his own family and visits the center every weekend until Ishmael is discharged. Eventually, Ishmael meets Tommy’s wife and four adopted children. To spare Ishmael embarrassment, his foster siblings are not advised of his past as a child soldier, and the family members welcome him with great hospitality and affection.
While Ishmael is grateful for the opportunity to live with Uncle Tommy and his family, he is also anxious about the adjustment that awaits. He worries that he will appear ungrateful because he is so accustomed to independence. Moreover, he is concerned about the family’s reaction to his frequent, violent nightmares. Ishmael bids an emotional farewell to Esther, Mohamed, and Mambu on the day of his discharge; Esther provides her home address and an open invitation for him to visit.
Uncle Tommy carries Ishmael into the house “like a chief” (181) so that the young man’s feet do not touch the ground. Auntie Sallay prepares a chicken dinner which is a rare treat. Allie, an older boy at the compound, shares his bedroom with Ishmael and gives him dress shoes and a shirt. The pair go dancing at a pub and Ishmael dances with a beautiful girl. He suffers, however, when the event triggers a memory of a town he attacked where a school dance was in progress. Ishmael dates his beautiful dance partner, Zainab, for several weeks, but ends the relationship when he refuses to discuss his past life.
Leslie invites Ishmael to interview for consideration as a child representative of Sierra Leone who will appear at the United Nations in New York. Ishmael is amazed by the tall office building where the interview takes place, and other applicants laugh at him when it becomes clear he has never seen an elevator. He explains to the interviewer that he should be chosen to visit the U.N. because he has “not only suffered because of the war but I have also participated in it and understand rehabilitation” (187). Later, the administrator of the center advises Ishmael that the U.N. chose him to attend the U.N. conference. Mr. Kamara assists Ishmael in securing a passport and intervenes when a bureaucrat demands to see the boy’s birth certificate, which was lost when his village was raided by the RUF. He also provides clothing for Ishmael to wear to the conference.
Although Ishmael advises Uncle Tommy of his selection for the conference, the older man does not believe him and is concerned that the young man is misinformed. The narrator says goodbye to his aunt and uncle when leaving for the airport. They both wish him well but giggle when he mentions visiting America. The couple is certain that Ishmael’s destination is a nearby locale.
Ishmael derives his only conception of New York City from rap lyrics. For example, he expects to see unchecked violence on the streets. As he disembarks from the plane, Ishmael is stunned by both the falling snow and the relatively peaceable fashion in which the city functions. Everything is new and unfamiliar to him—from the height of the skyscrapers to the concept that he can lower the heat in his YMCA hotel room using a thermostat. Provided with lightweight dress outfits by the Benin Home, Ishmael shivers convulsively from braving the cold without a winter jacket. Laura Simms, the American author and humanitarian who eventually adopts him, provides a warm coat for him when she sees him suffer from the cold.
Ishmael telephones his Uncle Tommy from the hotel and lets him hear the street noises outside the window. Finally convinced that the young man is, in fact, in New York City, his uncle advises him to stay inside if the weather is too cold.
As part of the United Nations’ First International Children’s Parliament, Ishmael meets in a conference room with children from other countries, including Lebanon, Cambodia, Kosovo, Brazil, Norway, Yemen, Palestine, Northern Ireland, and others, as they commenced the United Nations First International Children’s Parliament. The group spends their days “intelligently discussing solutions to the problems facing children in our various countries” (198). On the final day of the conference, Ishmael abandons his prepared remarks and decides to “speak from my heart” (199). He recounts his experience in the army and the fact that his decision to join was caused by starvation. He explains, “I am not a soldier anymore; I am a child” (199), noting that his rehabilitation taught him that revenge is futile. The children enjoy an emotionally moving afternoon during which they sing and dance. That evening, Laura invites the young participants to a celebration in her Greenwich Village townhouse, where Ishmael notes traditional woven cloths from various countries, storybooks, and a variety of musical instruments. When he departs from the airport the following morning, the author is sad to leave but pleased to have met people from so many parts of the world.
Upon his return to Freetown, the author regales his family with stories of his trip, including details about the snow and the tall buildings of New York City. He and his childhood friend, Mohamed, eagerly register at St. Edward’s Secondary School. Sadly, the other students, who somehow know about the boys’ pasts as child soldiers, marginalize them.
On May 25, 1997, Ishmael hears gunshots coming from the area of the State House and Parliament. He sees soldiers and army trucks speed through the streets. The prison is opened and the inmates set free, armed with weapons provided to them by the new government. Some of the prisoners find the judges and lawyers who sentenced them and kill them in retaliation.
Johnny Paul Koroma, the leader of the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council, declares himself the new president of Sierra Leone, overthrowing the democratically-elected President Tejan Kabbah. Later, it is announced that the RUF assisted in ousting the previous government. The combined RUF/AFRC forces promulgate a period of lawlessness: blowing up bank vaults; occupying secondary and college campuses; and stopping civilians and taking their valuables from them on the street. Gunfire is constant, and stray bullets make it too dangerous to be outdoors.
Food shortages result from the chaos. With money saved that Laura sent him from New York, Ishmael and Mohamed venture into the city in an effort to procure overpriced staple goods in a secret market. Armed men drive a Land Rover into the crowd and start shooting. The boys run to another part of the city where anti-RUF student demonstrators are met with more gunfire and tear gas. Ishmael reminds himself not to lose his temper because he is now a civilian, not a soldier, and “[t]he result would be death” (205). The boys continue trying to make their way home as a helicopter swoops down toward the crowd and strafes it with gunfire; Ishmael and Mohamed crouch in doorways and hide in gutters for hours before it is dark enough for them to venture back to Uncle Tommy’s house.
Conditions worsen over the ensuing months. In the city streets, “gunmen roam in groups, looting, raping, and killing people at will” (206). Food provisions are scarce. The next door neighbor who listens to a pirate radio station opposing the new government is dragged from his house, shot, and killed, along with his wife and children. Their bodies are kicked into the gutter.
Uncle Tommy becomes very ill and develops a fever. No medical care is available, and all hospitals and pharmacies are closed. As Ishmael holds his uncle one evening, the older man dies in his arms. In his anger and grief, the author punches a mango tree in the back of the house, noting, “I was always losing everything that meant something to me” (208). The family conducts a well-attended burial the following morning. Several days later, the author reaches Laura in New York by collect call; she agrees to let him stay in her house if he can make his way back to the city. A week after burying Tommy, the author leaves Freetown. He fears that if he stays any longer, he is “going to end up being a soldier again or my former army friends would kill me…” (209).
Ishmael carries only a small bag with a few clothes to avoid being robbed. He avoids military checkpoints by crawling through gutters and boards a bus outside the city. The driver drops his passengers off about a day’s walk from another terminal where they await a second bus. The passengers sleep on the ground and finally board another bus which is stopped at numerous military barricades. Soldiers demand money from the passengers and bureaucrats in the passport office extort huge fees in return for stamping their passports; however, all the travelers are able to enter the neighboring country of Guinea. Eventually, Ishmael seeks sanctuary in the Sierra Leone embassy as he prepares for another trip to America.
The author concludes this section by recalling a parable from his childhood. A hunter is about to kill a monkey, but at the critical moment, the monkey says, “If you shoot me, your mother will die, and if you don’t, your father will die” (216). This difficult rhetorical question was posed to all the young children in the village, and the storyteller would always ask which choice they would make. At one point, Ishmael and his friends replied that they would not go hunting for monkeys, but the storyteller refuses to accept this response. Because the children’s parents were always present for these discussions, none of the listeners ever made a choice between the options offered by the monkey. As Ishmael ponders the question years later, he decides that he would shoot the monkey so that no one else would ever be forced to make the same excruciatingly painful choice.
Ishmael evokes images of his ascent toward life in a benign, loving environment in this section. He intersperses descriptions of this progress with those of flashbacks that occur without warning and mentions of the nightmares that continue to plague him. A portion of his angst is existential in nature; he ruminates frequently about why he is the only member of his family to have survived the war, often becoming so lost in his own thoughts that he does not notice when his companions leave him. He mentions that his friend, Mambu, is forced to go “back to the front lines, because his family refused to take him in” (180) following his discharge from the rehabilitation center. This situation represents a contemporary undoing of parable of the Prodigal Son, but more tragic because the boy is given no choice about his wrongdoing. The author is painfully aware of the good fortune that allowed him to reside with his Uncle Tommy, but he grieves over the random ill fortune that befalls others in his situation.
Normal activities such as attending a dance with his foster brother, Allie, trigger memories of having participated in an attack on a town while a school dance was in progress and leave him saddened and debilitated. Typical teenage activities, like dating a beautiful girl named Zainab, are curtailed when the young woman presses him for details concerning his past. Gathering firewood at his uncle’s home triggers the memory of executing prisoners by tying them to trees prior to executing them. These anecdotes are presented in a format that is close to a confession; absolution is found in the everyday courage the narrator displays by living an honorable life when he is finally freed to do so.
Ishmael and Mohamed are delighted when they have the opportunity to enroll in St. Edward’s Secondary School. The routine and return to an age-appropriate activity helps them feel normalized. Tragically, their classmates learn of their history as child soldiers and refuse to socialize with the pair in a repetition of an established pattern. The boys perceive themselves as having been victimized by their situation but are viewed by others as having willingly participated in the gory violence that characterized their military service.
Ishmael lovingly describes all of the healing forces he encounters during this time period. Uncle Tommy, whom he has never met, treats him as a son immediately and offers the unconditional positive regard so necessary for Ishmael’s recuperation from trauma. Esther, the instinctively therapeutic nurse at the Benin Home, allows him to describe his past without judgment, always reminding him that none of his actions were his fault. She is the first person to whom the author forms an emotional attachment; in retrospect, Ishmael realizes that “I loved her but never told her” (180). He reflects upon the altruism of all the people who sacrificed to help him and his companions at the rehabilitation center, and their forgiveness even when their efforts were met with violence from the newly admitted residents.
The author’s participation in the United Nations Children’s Conference in New York City, and his introduction to his future adoptive mother, Laura Simms mark a sea change in his life. He meets young people from a plethora of countries, and they confer for days about ways to solve the problems facing children internationally. He experiences “hope and the promise of happiness” (198); whereas previously, he regarded all happiness as transitory. Cynicism is replaced by youthful idealism, and Ishmael regains his capacity for joy. This event stands in tragic juxtaposition to the renewed outbreak of civil war in Freetown and the death of Uncle Tommy. Beah assumes adult responsibilities when he travels to the city to buy food for the family, braving gunfire in doing so. He is saddened by the terror of civilians who have not experienced war, but he is resolute in his quest to leave Sierra Leone. The author sees his terrible alternatives as either being recognized as a former soldier and killed by the RUF or being forced once again to participate in battle. He protects his rehabilitation as a recovered addict would protect his sobriety, steadfastly enduring more hardships while making his way to Guinea and to freedom.