Handed A Gun At Twelve: The Haze (Of Ishmael Beah)

He knew his time was ticking so in a panic, he pulled their lifeline instead. He will never be forgiven. He will never be forgotten. He will never be himself again. He’s sorry. Society should be. He did not ask for it. Who is he? A boy. A boy soldier. A twelve year old boy soldier. The boy soldier walked from village to village watching the dead bodies which ran between street apon street like the same drab flag repeated over and over in this never ending war of mindless people. How truly innocent this dear boy had been. Emphasis on “had”. He was used to this now. Even worse, often, he was at the hands of it. Yes, sad but true, the unsuspecting, sweet, cheerful twelve year old boy he had once been was now gone. A leftover bullet on the streets of his old town is a constant reminder to those who once knew the real him of where that stripping of Beah took place. No. Better yet, it’s symbolic of how. The motif of guns reveals the theme of confusion/haze as a result of being so young while being forced into a situation where oneself as a person is no longer clear because of the things they are made to do.

Beah had no idea what was coming for him at the time. He was highly confused when being handed the gun. He contended, “The only wars I knew of were those that I had read about in books or seen in movies such as Rambo: First Blood, and the one in neighboring Liberia that I had heard about on the BBC news…” (Beah 1) He was absolutely speechless when it came to the idea of how he’d ended up in such a horrifying new world. Just yesterday he hardly even knew what war was. “My imagination at ten years old didn’t have the capacity to grasp what had taken away the happiness of the refugees.” (Beah, 2) Those days, however, would end very soon for poor Beah. Eventually the confusion, heartache, and pain in which Beah faced would cause him and the people around him to be faced with moral dilemmas, for they were being forced to do something they didn’t want to do, yet the other option would be the absolute death of them. “When he was close enough and behind a tree where he could clearly see the monkey, he raised his rifle and aimed. Just when he was about to pull the trigger, the monkey spoke: 'If you shoot me, your mother will die, and if you don’t, your father will die'.” (Beah 73) This imagery filled quotation depicts a hunter who is about to pull the trigger of a gun on a monkey and shoot him dead. Whether he pulls out the gun or not, however, bad things will still happen - much like in Beah’s case - only exacerbating the confusion. After a while of being in this situation, both he and many other unfortunate souls like him became numb to this neverending ache. They were so used to pulling the triggers of their guns that doing so no longer fazed them. They had to, after all. It was the only way to survive. It was all they could do at the time to adapt. They were confused on what to do so they decided to simply do nothing. To feel nothing. It wasn’t all that hard for Beah in all honesty since he was constantly in a drug-induced haze surrounded by literal haze from the warfare.

Despite all the pain and misery the war caused, the little things in life that made people happy before still acted as a relief to some degree. These beautiful memories seemed to give hope for that same beauty later on once it all came to an end. Such can easily be represented by the following quote: “But, she said, no one grumbles when the moon shines. Everyone becomes happy and appreciates the moon in their own special way.” (Beah 11) The joyful moments surfacing the memories of the people involved in this disturbing experience was a highly recurring theme in this memoir. Everyone was very confused about how all this love and light was taken away so abruptly. “Children watch their shadows and play in its light, people gather at the square to tell stories and dance through the night.” (Beah 12) This is the symbolic representation of the longing of life as it was, and the blindness and haze it caused towards the actual life one was living now, being more prominent than ever before. Beah had one visualizing this truly depressing notion more than the reader’s fair share like when he explained “Memories I sometimes wish I could wash away, even though I am aware that they are an important part of what my life is; who I am now. I stayed awake all night, anxiously waiting for daylight, so that I could fully return to my new life, to rediscover the happiness I had known as a child, the joy that had stayed alive inside me even through times when being alive itself became a burden. “ (Beah 14)

He was in an eternal state of confusion. He always went back to the past because what even was the present? It was like a dream. No. A nightmare at best. These surreal feelings made it so that the memories would only continue to manifest in Beah's mind for numerous events to come. One mentionable example of this is inspection day. He contests, “I took off my old pants, which contained the rap cassettes. As I was putting on my new army shorts, a soldier took my old pants and threw them into a blazing fire that had been set to burn our old belongings. I ran toward the fire, but the cassettes had already started to melt. Tears formed in my eyes, and my lips shook as I turned away.” (Beah 60) Why did he become so emotional? Did he really think he could’ve kept them? He was in a war! This just goes to show that nothing felt real to him. How could it after all? What kind of reality even was this? The confusion was the only thing that was real at the time and guns seemed to be the only answer to Beah’s endless questions. The author, Ishmael Beah often exaggerates these feelings to force one to become more down to earth with Beah’s emotions. He does so by allowing the readers to really understand what his highly unfortunate experience was like by being insanely descriptive in all the best ways possible. For example, take into consideration the following quote:“When walking in the night, the boys stop and see three people. They were wearing white shirts. Two of them were about the same height and the third was shorter” (Beah 81) This quote presents itself as a highly accurate example of how Beah persistently is on a mission to get the reader to visualize the scenario as vividly as possible. He does so to best get his message across and it works much more efficiently than if Beah had simply described the situation as “and then the boys saw some people”. After all, this vivid thinking was the only thing Beah could force himself to do (using his photographic memory) to attempt to drown out the confusion in the haze of warfare. He wants one to understand that in order to best understand and connect with his story and himself. Overall Beah’s creatively spectacular use of imagery helped emphasize his confusion and what he had to do at a very young age because of this haze. He stated, “I joined the army really because of the loss of my family and starvation. I wanted to avenge the deaths of my family. I also had to get some food to survive, and the only way to do that was to be part of the army. It was not easy being a soldier, but we just had to do it.” (Beah 81) This only adds onto the idea that Beah wasn’t in the right state of mind when he was thrown into war and that he was forced to do the unimaginable because of it.