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This opening vignette shows the narrator as he has arrived in the United States after his lost boyhood in Sierra Leone. He is attending high school there and his fellow students question him over and over about his life in his homeland. He observes that they haven’t begun to suspect his full story. Their inquisitiveness is ironic, because they think that his being in country at war is cool. He can only smile a little and say that he will tell them about it sometime.
Notes
This quasi-conversation opens the door to what becomes Ishmael’s “telling” of his not so cool experiences in Sierra Leone.
CHAPTER ONE
Summary
Ishmael and his family and friends have very little connection to the war that is taking place in their homeland until refugees begin passing through. There are families that have walked hundreds of miles to escape the fighting and atrocities and as they walk by, Ishmael is most impacted by the fact that the children would not even look at them. They jump at the slightest sound and they are tired and malnourished. It is evident that they have seen things that so plague their minds that if they explained it, Ishmael and his friends would refuse to accept it. He is only ten years old at this point and his imagination doesn’t have the capacity to understand what these children have witnessed.
The first time Ishmael is actually touched by the war, he is twelve. It is January, 1993, and he, his brother, Junior, and their friend Talloi decide that they will go to the town of Mattru Jong to participate in a talent show. They had organized a rap group when he was just eight and had been rapping together ever since. They had first seen that kind of music on television and met every other weekend to study it. They didn’t even know for a long time what it was called, but were...
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