Ishmael Beah Quotes

We all find joy and radiance and a reason to move on even in the most dire of circumstances. Even in chaos and madness, there’s still a beauty that comes from just the vibrancy of another human spirit.

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.

It’s exhausting writing nonfiction, particularly when it’s personal. It’s tiring, always speaking about things that are not necessarily fun retelling.

Shakespeare is absolutely big in Africa. I guess he’s big everywhere. Growing up, Shakespeare was the thing. You’d learn monologues and you’d recite them. And just like hip-hop, it made you feel like you knew how to speak English really well. You had a mastery of the English language to some extent.

There’s so much focus and interest about what happens during war, but very little about what happens when people return to homes and communities that have been destroyed. There’s a renewal that happens, but it’s a very difficult one.

We all have that capacity to lose our humanity when circumstances force us to do so. It’s not specific to people who live in Africa or Latin America or Asia. And equally, we are capable of regaining ourselves.

I had gone to a talent show – I was interested in American hip-hop music – with my older brother, to another town, and my town was attacked. I went from having an entire family to the next minute not having anything. It was very painful.

The thing that really gets to me is that countries are in the news only when things get out of hand. That’s when it’s newsworthy. When the war ends, it’s not newsworthy anymore; no one wants to think about it. Actually, the aftermath is the most important part. It’s when people have to rebuild.

I believe that there is a God, and coming from an African tradition, I believe also that there are gods.

I had a very simple, unremarkable and happy life. And I grew up in a very small town. And so my life was made up of, you know, in the morning going to the river to fetch water – no tap water, and no electricity – and, you know, bathing in the river, and then going to school, and playing soccer afterwards.

I was one of those children forced into fighting at the age of 13, in my country Sierra Leone, a war that claimed the lives of my mother, father and two brothers. I know too well the emotional, psychological and physical burden that comes with being exposed to violence as a child or at any age for that matter.

The places I come from have such rich languages, such a variety of expression. In Sierra Leone we have about fifteen languages and three dialects. I grew up speaking about seven of them.

I grew up in Sierra Leone, in a small village where as a boy my imagination was sparked by the oral tradition of storytelling. At a very young age I learned the importance of telling stories – I saw that stories are the most potent way of seeing anything we encounter in our lives, and how we can deal with living.

As a kid in Africa, you were so connected to nature itself because you went farming, watched the moon out at night, observed how the sky was different, and how the birds chanted different songs in the evening and the morning.