ABSTRACT
In A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier (2007) Ishmael Beah remembers childhood days he spent before and during the Civil War in Sierra Leone. His memoir throws light on how extreme conditions during a civil war and exposure to mindless violence make life of pre-teen and the teenage children physically precarious and emotionally vulnerable. His growing familiarity and identification with the peacetime values of family, relationship and hierarchies, are abruptly and adversely reversed by war-time values, detrimental for children’s growth. The age of Ishmael falls in Erik Erikson’s category of adolescence (between 12 and 16 years of age), crucial for child’s smooth transition from child to adult, is fraught with “role confusion,” distrust about and by the society and unrelatability. Continuous nightmares about being shot, loss of family and friends, and uncertainty about the future role continues to traumatise Ishmael even after he is away from the war.
