Ethical Dialogues: Youth, Memoir, and Trauma

Abstract

This article maps the reception of an African soldier memoir, Ishmael Beah's A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, and in response explores what an ethical reading of this youth-authored trauma text might require. This case study offers a mandate for ethical scholarship in the study of youth-authored trauma narratives.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For instance, youth-studies scholars have focused on research methodologies—questions about the appropriateness of studying youth and how such research might be completed ethically (Bennett, Cieslik, and Miles; Best). Some of these ethical challenges include the competing agendas of the different disciplinary areas from which youth-studies projects emerge, the unequal power relationships between researcher and subject, and the possibility of youth research being co-opted by the media to promote negative stereotypes of youth subjects. There is also the tendency for researchers to look at the minority of “spectacular” youth (influenced by media and government discourses around youth) rather than the majority of everyday youths. And, inevitably, there has been a Western focus (particularly US, UK, and Australian) in these projects. Even though my work here in literary studies is not an empirical, qualitative study of youth authors themselves, because I am engaged with youth-authored texts I must be attentive to ethical methodologies and also ethical responses to these texts.

2. Chaon continues, “I didn't have any questions about the accuracy of the content. I was acting as a writing teacher.... it wasn't as if, during the writing of this book, that Ishmael imagined in his wildest dreams that he was writing a bestseller that would appear all over the world” (Nason and Gare).

3. As Iweala reminds us, “[a]ccording to the United Nations, there are 300,000, if not more, child soldiers around the world. The majority of these children—some as young as six—live and fight in sub-Saharan Africa, and their plight has largely been ignored by the west. Beah's book stands as a vivid testament to his time as one of the nameless and faceless 300,000.”

4. The autobiography of childhood, commonly a site of flawed prose and imperfectly recalled memories masquerading as photographically remembered narrative, has become a staple of popular literature over the past fifteen years. Its popularity has made it one of the most heavily scrutinized literary subgenres. The autobiography-of-childhood form has created franchise literary celebrities such as Frank McCourt and Dave Pelzer, and exposed hoax authors such as Margaret Seltzer and Anthony Godby Johnson. For a developed discussion of this genre in the late 1990s and early 2000s, see Douglas, Contesting.

5. Sherman outlines the genesis of the controversy in his piece for Slate: “The story begins last fall when an Australian mining engineer stationed in Sierra Leone named Bob Lloyd learned that one of his employees at the Sierra Rutile mine near Beah's village claimed to be Beah's father. Lloyd had read A Long Way Gone and was especially moved by Beah's tragic account of his parents' deaths in a rebel attack on the village of Yele. Elated at the possibility of reuniting Beah with his father, Lloyd tried contacting Beah.... In addition, Lloyd explained in his e-mails that workers at the mine were telling him that the book's chronology was wrong: Rebels had taken over the mine in January 1995, not 1993 as Beah describes in A Long Way Gone. If true, that would mean Beah served as a soldier only for several months when he was 14 going on 15.” It turned out that the man was not Beah's father, but the investigation into the veracity of Beah's story continued. Thus began a series of hostile exchanges between Beah's camp—his agent and publishers—and the journalists from the Australian.

6. Peter Wilson writes of aid workers who also became suspicious of Beah's story (presumably after being informed of the “controversy” by the Australian). Wilson writes that “several aid workers in the country's capital said yesterday they were not surprised by the discovery of factual flaws in the book.”

7. Wilson quotes an anonymous social scientist working with a United Nations agency in Freetown, who is struck by the choices Beah makes in his writing, particularly what he chooses to focus on: “‘The first 100-odd pages are devoted to Beah's nine or 10 months as a refugee, then the timeline speeds up dramatically to cover his two years as a soldier in just 30 pages, then it returns to the original pace over the remaining 90 pages on his life after the military with a further 10 pages of flashbacks to the army life. I also thought it was very odd that he tells how he was dehumanised and became a killing machine but there is not a single mention of him taking part in, or even witnessing, rapes by the soldiers he was with,’ the social scientist said. ‘That is extraordinary for what went on in that war.’”

8. Chaon has since suggested that his words were misquoted to imply that Beah's story could be exaggerated and thus fraudulent. Perhaps what Chaon wanted to say was that A Long Way Gone was structured as a memoir—and, in suggesting this, Chaon may be pointing to an understanding and acceptance of memoir as necessarily fragmented—affected by memory loss.

9. Nason and Gare report that “efforts by The Australian to have the timeline discrepancies explained by Beah, Crichton... or his New York agent Ira Silverberg have been met with evasiveness, unreturned calls and, at times, unrestrained hostility.” One might also interpret this evasiveness as a way of rallying around Beah in support.

10. According to Sherman, “[t]he standoff has spanned four continents and bled into cyberspace, as both sides have entered competing changes into Beah's Wikipedia page. [In 2008, Peter] Wilson [a journalist for the Australian] tracked Beah around London during his European book tour, trying to land an interview after repeatedly being rebuffed by [Beah's publisher] FSG [Farrar, Straus and Giroux]. Wilson even planted questions with a student reporter from the Oxford University newspaper after the Oxford Union banned him from attending Beah's reading there.”

11. Of course, the US has a more distinctive political history with Africa than Australia does. However, there is a lot we might speculate on here about the differences between national contexts and their reception of trauma stories. It is perhaps Australia's colorful history of susceptibility to the hoax memoir that was the driving factor in the Beah exposé. For a summary of this literary history, see Whitlock.

12. As Sanders argues, one of the primary problems with such labels is that they destabilize narrative truth as non-forensic and non-verifiable, privileging the act of narration over the content or potential “truth” of the story. This, in turn, sanctions certain forms of testimony over others (152).

13. Beah turns himself from victim to survivor “through acts of speaking out that shift attention to systematic causes of violation” (Schaffer and Smith 28).