By DPA
Sydney : African author Ishmael Beah is untroubled by claims that his autobiographical “A Long Way Gone” is not the true story of a child soldier in Sierra Leone.
The Australian newspaper alleges Beah was 15 not 13 when he was recruited and that his war service was a couple of months rather than two years. It says a gun battle described in the book that left six dead inside a UN-supervised rehabilitation camp in Freetown, the capital of the west African country, was made up by the 27-year-old author.
“I don’t worry about it. For me, my story is accurate and I presented it accurately and I stand by it. I’m not worried about it,” Beah said after painstaking research on three continents blew big holes in the best-selling memoir.
Others see cause for great concern in Beah, his literary agent and his publishers being so blasé about the accuracy of a book that has sold close to 700,000 copies – one in seven of them at cafes owned by the Seattle-based coffee retailer Starbucks.
Beah, who lives in the US since he fled Sierra Leone when he was 17, complains that he has been defamed by The Australian newspaper.
New York publisher Sarah Crichton of Farrar, Straus and Giroux has rebutted the claims but she has not come up with anyone to corroborate Beah’s account of his torrid childhood. Like Crichton, agent Ira Silverberg is standing by Beah. But he is refusing to submit to questioning.
Starbucks’ chief Howard Schultz, who said on the release of “A Long Way Gone” that “we were all inspired by this tale of determination and hope and knew it was an important book to share with our customers” is also unavailable for questioning.
The newspaper has been at pains to balance its criticism with the observation that Beah has been an inspiration to many. He’s the face of the UN campaign against the recruitment of child soldiers and his story is indeed inspiring.
“The Australian has insisted throughout its coverage that it believes that Beah suffered a terrible ordeal during his country’s civil war,” it editorialised. “However, a book sold to hundreds of thousands of readers as non-fiction should accurately recount that ordeal.”
The first error in Beah’s account comes just two pages in when he writes that he was 12 when the civil war caught up with him in January 1993 and he fled his village and 10 months later became a child soldier.
According to his teachers, he was in school in 1993 and 1994. Those also displaced by the rebel attack that left Beah an orphan and changed his life attest it came in January 1995.
Peter Wilson is the reporter assigned by The Australian to the story. He reckons that “at every step of the way Ishmael was given incentives to exaggerate his story” and that a young and impressionable writer simply complied.
Shelley Gare, who also worked on the story, interviewed creative writing professor Dan Chaon, from Ohio’s Oberlin College, where Beah earned his degree and where the pair worked on his narrative.
“If it turns out there are factual errors, I wouldn’t necessarily be all that concerned about it,” Chaon told Gare. “I don’t think the book is being presented as a piece of journalism. It’s being presented as a memoir.”
The blurring of the distinction between fact and fiction was evident in the reaction to the paper’s revelations by professional storyteller Laura Simms, who sponsored his departure from Freetown and became Beah’s guardian when he arrived in New York in 1997.
She said Beah should be judged not on the veracity of his account but on the world’s reaction to it. Her view is that it doesn’t matter the chronology is shot.
“This young man has literally changed the world and how human beings look at children in war – really changed the world,” she said.