Continuing on my pan-African reading binge, I recently finished listening to A Long Way Gone, as narrated by the author Ishmael Beah. You probably already know who this writer is - the Sierra Leone boy soldier who fought on the side of government forces against the Revolutionary United Front, or RUF, in that country’s civil war.

The memoir is roughly divided in half, with Mr. Beah’s wanderings as a child refugee in the first part of the book, and his rehabilitation into civilian society making up the second half. Though the book describes his induction into the army, along with a few flashbacks to his army exploits, the author passes off most of his experience as a child soldier in the book by mentioning he was a child soldier for two years, then moving on rather abruptly to his rehabilitation.

Many books written by or about refugees stop right at the part where our protagonist survives and makes it out alive. I always ask, then what? Being a refugee myself, I know that the story never ends with “And they all lived happily after.” Sometimes the hardest (but sometimes boring) part of being whisked off to safety involves having to rebuild one’s life afterwards. For example, what happened to the Jews after the Holocaust? Some did live happily ever after, but others went back to their homes only to be murdered in ongoing anti-semitic violence; most stayed in the camps for years before they immigrated to Israel. What about Darfur’s refugees? Those of us here in Vancouver will be surprised to know that many of them are among us, trying to figure out our banking system, how to get a job, and how to get their kids in school. Maybe in thirty years some local museum oral history assistant will realize that these refugees should be interviewed.

With Mr. Beah’s book, he tantalizingly offers us tidbits of his life after this book’s ending: “she was to be my new mother in New York,” “I went to high school in the United States,” etc. (All paraphrased: I don’t have the book in front of me.) How did he get from safety in Sierra Leone Embassy in Conakry, in neighbouring Guinea to New York? How did he get money for that phone call he made to New York? Did his New York contact pay for his airfare? Was it easy to get a visa for the US?

To me, that is just as interesting a part of the story as how he survived in the jungle on mystery fruits. Yet, because he ends at the point where he is about to leave Africa, the presumed North American reader can A) close the book with a smile because it has achieved its “happily ever after,” and B) not have to think about what immigration to the US (and Canada) entails.

A Long Way Gone ends with a story Mr. Beah remembers from his own village:

A hunter goes into the forest to hunt monkeys. He comes across a monkey sitting on a branch, eating away, and approaches the monkey, poised to shoot it with an arrow.The monkey then speaks up: “If you kill me, your mother will die. If you don’t kill me, your father will die.”

If you were the hunter, what would you do?

Unlike many other questions, Mr. Beah answers this last question to satisfaction. If you haven’t read A Long Way Gone, what do you suppose the best - and Mr. Beah’s - answer could be?

Update: I just noticed: the kid in the picture has a very floppy flipflop.