2023-04-29 08:00:21
A former child soldier, Sierra Leonean Ishmael Beah made a name for himself by publishing the path travelled, a poignant autobiographical account of the Civil War, its darkness and its brutality. He is also the author of two novels: Tomorrow the sunpublished in 2015 and The little family which has just been published in French translation.
« Where I come from everything has been destroyed. It was by becoming aware of the restorative power of words that I started writing. Writing my books, especially the autobiographical account of my years as a child soldier, allowed me to reconnect with my humanity and overcome the impact of the tragedies I experienced. Writing allowed me to come back to life and imagine freedom. Every morning when I sit at my desk to blacken the pages, I train for freedom so that I can no longer be chained. On the wings of my imagination, I fly to destinations that call me. »
For the Sierra Leonean-born writer, Ishmaël Beah, which we have just heard, writing has been a school of freedom and survival. This former child soldier likes to repeat how the practice of the poetry of words enabled him to tear himself away from the traumas of war.
evocation power
Ishmael Beah made himself known in February 2007 by publishing his autobiographical story Le chemin traversed, in which he recounts with rare evocative power his years as a child soldier against the backdrop of the terrible sierra leonean civil war. In 1991, when the war broke out, the teenager was just 11 years old. Forced into the government army, enlisted, trained to take revenge on the rebels who had killed his parents, he had become a killing machine under the influence of powerful drugs, amphetamines and particularly effective brainwashing.
His salvation, Ishmael Beah owes it to the Unicef teams who rescued him from the hell of the civil war, before entrusting him to a rehabilitation center so that he could rebuild himself. His rebirth in life, his adoption by an American, his life then in the United States where he returned to adolescence, studies and normality, the writer recounted them in his account of testimony which was a success. global. The book has been translated into forty languages and sold nearly a million copies.
Now in his forties, the man has matured and returned to his native continent where he settled with his wife and children. He is also the ambassador of Unicef and gives conferences around the world to draw attention to the cause of child victims of war. Above all, he continued to write, moving from testimonies to historical and social fiction which, he explains, “gives him greater leeway to play with words, language, structure. […] The testimony was more painful to write because I knew the end, whereas in novels there is room for invention and imagination,” he adds.
Ishmael Beah is now the author of two novels. Her second novel, La petite famille, was recently published in French translation by Albin Michel.
A lush nature
“If you walk towards a field on the edge of the small town of Foloiya after the sun has risen in the sky, you will hear the breeze whistling over the tall grasses, spreading their dry, green strands as it goes. Unless you think it’s the rustle of someone hiding in the vast thickets. At the end of this field, your eyes suddenly land on the face of a boy in the middle of the grass, who is immersed in the observation of something. You try to find out what, to track his gaze, but you don’t notice anything…”
So begins The little family. The excerpt is representative of Ishmael Beah’s poetic and precise writing. The passage is part of the prologue which is an invitation to readers to enter the preserved universe of the novel’s protagonists, far from the noise and dust of big cities. We are somewhere in an unnamed African country, in the heart of lush nature. The latter is signified in the narrative by “ tall grass » et « clearings surrounded by palm trees and baobabs “. The site is nonetheless marked by the social violence and brutality symbolized by the plane wreckage that the author imagined to serve as a home for his protagonists.
The plane really exists, as Ishmael Beah explains: “ If it’s still light when you land at Lungi airport in Freetown and you look out the left side windows of the plane, in the direction of landing, you will see, in the bush, the carcass of an airplane, with the Sierra Leonean flag drawn on the cabin. I feel like he was always there. I am so inhabited by this abandoned plane that when I wanted to write my novel La petite famille, the idea came to me spontaneously to make it the home of my adolescent characters brought together by their misfortunes. Since the publication of the novel two years ago, travelers disembarking at Lungi, who have read my book, have not failed to cast a glance towards the shoulders of the runway to see if the device is still there. . Before, no one paid attention to him… »
a roman dickensien
The plot of the novel is built around five boys and girls who have taken up residence in the abandoned plane. Orphans, they have all been victims of the vagaries of life, even if the author has chosen to define them by their here and now rather than by their history. Elimane, the eldest of the group is an avid reader of Shakespeare, described as “ Mr Head by his comrades. Khoudiemata is rebellious and maternal, Ndevuei and Kpinda are feisty and athletic, and the very young Namsa, freshly arrived, is fragile.
Together, they created an alternative, quasi-utopian society, based on a subsistence economy and governed by the values of solidarity. However, will this alterworld resist the repeated assaults of the big city whose din and superficiality threaten its balance? This is the question at the heart of Ishmael Beah’s beautiful second novel.
A Dickensian novel, La petite famille strikes with the lucidity of its criticism of the unequal African society where the most vulnerable are abandoned to their fate. Its economy of means, its controlled narration and its empathy for ordinary people impose its author as the rising heir of the Ngugi wa Thiong’o, the Nuruddin Farah, the Mongo Beti, indisputable masters of the African social novel.
The little family, by Ishmael Beah. Translated from English by Stéphane Roques. Albin Michel, 320 pages, 22.90 euros.
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