Beah’s credibility a long way gone, or is it?

March 7, 2008

The AP English course is completing an Independent Reading Project for quarter 4 based on a select number of non-fiction titles, on of which is Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone. The other day a former student sent me an article from an Australian newspaper entitled “Beah’s credibility a long way gone” about the anachronistic nature of Beah’s nonfiction experiences being forced to become a child soldier in the rebel armies at the height of the blood diamond trade. The book has been well received, has been a Starbuck’s book, and has come under littel scrutiny thus far regarding these issues. Some of the concerns are that the dates don’t match up and some information suggests they are as much as two years off. The priest from the village during the time period has been interviewed and Beah’s school records have been located from grades he received after the village was supposedly attacked.

I ask myself and you, does this matter? Did Frey’s A Million Little Pieces matter that it wasn’t all true. Tom Barone, a famous narrative researcher out of Arizona State University once old me a story of a narrative researcher interviewing a woman in a diner. In the final write up of the interview, the researcher wrote of the fire flies flitting around the car in the parking lot. Well, there were no dragon flies. He added them. Does it make the interview any less real? Does it change the final artifact? I would suggest that it doesn’t change things. Just like the dates don’t change the fact that atrocities happen in places like Sierra Leone every day, kids are recruited with drugs and guns, and African genocide runs rampant in today’s world.

Posted in irp, literature