On a freezing late autumn day in 1996 Laura Simms walked into the New York
headquarters of Unicef and found a pair of skinny African boys shivering in
a corner. She went home to get them some warmer clothes, and with that
simple charitable gesture a remarkable human drama was born.
“That’s how our friendship began,” chortles Simms, a small pale dark-haired
New Yorker now in her late fifties. “Little did I know that with a warm
winter coat went the rest of my life.”
One of the boys was Ishmael Beah, then a 15-year-old former child soldier from
Sierra Leone who had been brought to New York by Unicef to recount his
experiences at a conference on children in war zones.
A decade later Beah can afford to buy his own winter coats. He has written a
memoir about his harrowing childhood that shot to the top of US bestseller
lists. He has become an American literary celebrity, mesmerising audiences
around the country with his stories of the horrors he witnessed and the
murders he committed as a drugged-up, traumatised 13-year-old child.
He lost his parents after a rebel attack on their village in 1993 and was
eventually forced into battle as a government soldier. He has become both a
symbol and a beneficiary of America’s newfound celebrity-driven enthusiasm
for eradicating African suffering.
Beah’s book, A Long Way Gone, will be published in Britain next week. It has
been hailed by American reviewers as a “chilling but lyrical” account of
children who lose their humanity in war. At one point Beah describes how he
took part in a prisoner-killing contest to see how fast his fellow boy
soldiers could slit a rebel’s throat.
“The person whose prisoner died quickest would win the contest,” Beah writes.
“I didn’t feel a thing for the man, I just waited for the corporal’s order.
The prisoner was simply another rebel who was responsible for the death of
my family, as I had come to truly believe. The corporal gave the signal with
a pistol shot and I grabbed the man’s head and slit his throat in one fluid
motion . . . I dropped him on the ground and wiped my bayonet on him.”
With his boyish grin and his terrible past, Beah has been embraced in New York
as a victim of unthinkable trauma who nonetheless managed, in the finest
immigrant tradition, to live his American dream.
Yet he nearly didn’t come to America, and his book might never have been
written, had it not been for a telephone call to the woman he now calls his
“mother” almost a year after their brief encounter in New York.
“My only promise to him had been that I would keep in touch,” said Simms, a
writer and storyteller who collects myths and legends from tribal societies
and was hired by Unesco to work with the children attending the United
Nations international children’s parliament.
Simms discovered that Beah was an aspiring rap musician. She arranged to
record some of his songs with the help of a friend who was a drummer. The
two formed a bond, but it was not until Beah rose to address the Unicef
“parliament” that Simms really began to worry about his future.
“It was a stunning moment,” she said. “He had prepared a paper but like a true
orator he laid it aside and told his audience: ‘Please don’t be afraid of
me, I’m not a child soldier any more, I’m just a child’.”
Beah had been dumped into Unicef care by the Sierra Leone army during a lull
in the civil war. He was brought to the US on a temporary visa to attend the
Unicef conference and had no choice but to return to Freetown, the Sierra
Leone capital. He had no parents to protect him and an ever-present threat
that he would be conscripted again. “I just felt someone should save his
life,” Simms said. But she knew there was little she could do.
For a year Simms and Beah managed only occasional telephone calls as the boy
lived with an uncle in Freetown. “I was aware of the pressure on him to go
back as a soldier,” said Simms. “The hopelessness and poverty of his
situation was for me like an umbilical cord.”
The day she returned from a storytelling festival in Ireland her telephone
rang. It was Beah, who had persuaded the Sierra Leone operator to put him
through by saying that he was calling his mother.
“Hey,” Beah told Simms, “if I imagine getting out of here and getting to New
York, can I live with you?”
Simms casually replied: “Yeah, sure.”
“No, no,” said Beah, speaking very carefully. “I have to know the truth. Can I
live with you?”
Simms knew she had to be honest. It would have been easy to mutter something
about helping him to find somewhere more appropriate to live. But she
suddenly realised that if she was going to help Beah she might have to let
him live with her. “I made an internal adjustment. I said ‘yes’, he said
‘good’, and the phone was cut off.”
Simms, a childless divorcee, barely knew where to start. How do you get a US
green card for a self-confessed African child murderer? She telephoned the
State Department, where the response was “rather cold”. A student visa for a
boy soldier? “We don’t do that,” an official replied.
Then there was the question of a New York school. Simms had connections at the
multilingual school run by the United Nations, but it was initially “very
reluctant” to put a former child soldier among the offspring of diplomats
and government officials.
It took another year and a half of recruiting support before a US consular
official in the Ivory Coast finally issued Beah a student visa. Critical to
the process was the intervention of Walter Scheuer, who ran a foundation
bringing Third World musicians to America: Beah’s rap recordings proved
critical in qualifying him for the foundation’s help.
On June 4, 1998, Simms learnt that Beah’s visa had been granted, and she
telephoned him in Freetown to tell him she was searching for an
African-American family who might look after him. “There was silence down
the line,” she said. “Then he said, ‘You mean I’m not living with you?
You’re not going to be my mother?’” Simms recovered quickly. “I just said,
‘You’re right. I am your mother. You’ll live with me’.”
And that was how, on Beah’s first night in New York, Simms found herself
tucking a 17-year-old African youth into bed in her apartment off Broadway.
She sat on his bed and put her hand on his forehead. “And it was like a
moan,” Simms said. Ishmael told me, ‘It’s been so long since I had a
mother’s touch’.”
At the beginning she sometimes forgot she had a teenager in her house. “I
would forget to feed him,” she said. There was also inevitable friction over
what Simms described as “male and female roles in the world”. Beah has a
traditional African view of male importance; Simms was a New York feminist.
Simms freely admits that this was not your ordinary mother-child relationship.
“All relationships are odd,” she said. “This was heightened odd.”
Yet somehow it worked. Beah was accepted by the UN school, where, he writes in
his book, his new friends began to suspect he wasn’t telling them the full
story of his life.
“Why did you leave Sierra Leone?” they would ask him. “Because there is a
war,” he replied. “Did you witness some of the fighting?” “Everyone in the
country did.” “You mean you saw people running around with guns and shooting
each other?” “Yes, all the time.” “Cool.”
It was not until Beah reached university that his past caught up. Studying
political science at Oberlin College in Ohio he began to write about his
experiences, and presented his work to his professor as fiction.
The professor promptly smelt a rat. “Either you have a really sick imagination
or all this stuff is true,” he told Beah. Learning the truth, he urged Beah
to continue writing, and the seeds of A Long Way Gone were sown.
The success of Beah’s book owes much to a serendipitous combination of
conscience and Hollywood. Celebrity campaigners such as Bono and Bob Geldof,
with their attempts to persuade First World countries to cancel African
debt, have helped make it cool to worry about Africa.
With fashion designers and television producers leaping on the Africa aid
bandwagon, Beah arrived at a perfect moment for a literary prominence that
other African memoirists might envy. His book became only the second title
to be selected by the Starbucks chain of coffee houses to be sold in racks
next to its cash registers.
Yet for many readers of A Long Way Gone, the media hype is justified. In one
part of his book Beah describes how his fellow boy soldiers were
brain-washed by an army lieutenant into lusting for rebel blood.
The lieutenant produced two blood-soaked bodies, of a man and a child, who
were said to have been killed while trying to escape a rebel attack on their
village. “The rebels have lost everything that makes them human,” the
lieutenant rants. “They do not deserve to live. That is why we must kill
every single one of them. Think of it as destroying a great evil. It is the
greatest service you can perform for your country.”
After an hour or so in similar vein, Beah writes, “all of us hated the rebels
. . . I imagined capturing several rebels at once, locking them inside a
house, sprinkling gasoline on it and tossing a match. We watch it burn, and
I laugh”. Within weeks Beah had earned the nickname Green Snake for his
ability to sneak up on a rebel village and kill its occupants without being
detected.
Beah no longer lives in Simms’s flat, but he still carries her front door key.
The two have talked of writing a book together about aspects of his escape
from Sierra Leone that were not included in A Long Way Gone.
Simms describes her adoptive son as “remarkably ordinary,” given everything he
has gone through. Beah has told US interviewers that confronting his demons
as he wrote the book was “a difficult process”, but he eventually found the
experience “therapeutic”.
“Writing it helped me come to terms with certain things,” Beah says. “It
allowed me to look at [my life] more closely than I’m willing to on a daily
basis.” He has shown no obvious symptoms of posttraumatic stress, and he
insists to interviewers who try to probe his mental state: “I’m like any
other 26-year-old.”
Simms acknowledges that Beah has been through “unimaginable suffering”, but
she has seen no sign of the kind of volcanic psychological upsets that many
might expect from so scarred an African orphan. “It has been shocking,
engrossing, really interesting and something of the heart,” she said of
their relationship. She has come to regard her efforts to secure Beah’s
freedom as the defining challenge of her life.
“All that time I was sending faxes, lobbying, trying to get him out, it turns
out that I was actually gathering all the elements of my own mythic fairy
tale,” she said. “The only quarrel I have had with Ishmael is whether I
saved his life, or he saved mine”.
