Theme Of Innocence In A Long Way Gone

Children as a population are born with a miniscule set of abilities that either stay throughout our existence, or pave the path for the existential future while slowly deteriorating away. This is the abysmal fate that a young one's innocence will take as they age and experience new trials. What ends up defining a person does not solely rely on if they lose their innocence, as this will be an occurrence in society as a whole, but rather what will terminate the bond between the child and their blissful gift that is innocence. This will differ from child to child, as does the magnitude of what they lose. As is the case between the two authors of The Bite of the Mango and A Long Way Gone. Mariatu Kamara and Ishmael Beah both lose their purity
Beah starts his child life unaffected by what would soon become of his home, Sierra Leone. However, he is soon confronted by the terrors of war due to the rebel soldiers taking over the relatively peaceful country. Beah is soon forced to flee from his town with a few of his best friends and other acquaintances he encounters along the way. After he flees the village, he is soon captured by the presidents soldiers. This is where his loss of innocence begins, but at a much of a different variety that Kamara does. The president's army penetrated his defenses, forcing him into a robot of sorts, programmed to stay in line against the revolt. As referenced in the poem, Tyger The by Michael Siedel, Ishmael’s brain is molded into what the president needed it to be. “In what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil? What dread grasp Dare its deadly terrors clasp”(Siedel 4). Those deadly terrors are constantly shifting his mindset in order to further progress their needs, almost as if they are brainwashing him. The drastic shift in his mindset ends up carrying on with him further into his life outside of Sierra Leone. “These days I live in three worlds: my dreams, and the experiences of my new life, which trigger memories from the past.”(Beah 20). This reveals that even after his time as a child soldier that his mind has been warped to a point where it could be compared to a
Kamara was captured by rebels from the Sierra Leone War. However, unlike Beah, she was not a child soldier who ended up serving for the president, rather she ended up being a devastated victim of the conflict that she was not ever involved in. A prime example of this happened when the rebel soldiers decided to sever Kamara’s hands so she was no longer able to vote. “Many things have changed because of the war. And witchcraft can’t change the past. I wish a spell could have stopped the attack on you. But you have turned your hurt and pain into something positive. When those demons reappear, think about all the angels who have come into your life since then”(Kamara 204). This is her talking about her haunted past that had a large impact due to the main point of the