Forgiveness In A Long Way Gone

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A Lesson in Forgiveness War destroys everything it touches. It has destroyed lives, countries, and even empires. In the stories of Ishmael Beah and Mariatu Kamara, it destroyed their innocence. The Sierra Leonean war was particularly inhumane, in which the rebels, fighting against the government, took Mariatu’s hands from her as told in The Bite of the Mango. The rebels were the same people who murdered Ishmael’s family, the author of A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. Once they were touched by the war, they were never the same. Although Mariatu and Ishmael’s experiences of the war varied, they learned the same lesson. Ishmael Beah, as a boy, had a different experience than Mariatu. When the war came to him, and he was forced to flee, …show more content…
This was a lesson so powerful that it gave them reason to share the stories of misfortune, simply to pass that message to their audience. The brutality that Mariatu endured at the hands of the rebels and boy soldiers, such as Ishmael, was immeasurable. Somehow, though, Mariatu was able to forgive them. Her aunt Marie told her once, “If you look back you will live your life with regrets… Always look forward” (Kamara 141). Because of this wisdom, Kamara was able to obtain closure which is exemplified when she imagines confronting a boy soldier and only saying, “I hope you are very sorry for what you did to me. But I forgive you” (Kamara 197). Ishmael explains, “I’ve come to learn that if I am going to take revenge, in that process I will kill another person whose family will want revenge… then revenge will never come to an end” (Beah 199). Ishmael applies this lesson when he shares the story of the hunter and the monkey as the conclusion of his book. He would shoot the monkey, resulting in the death of his mother, so that no other hunters would be put in the same predicament. What Ishmael is implying is that, if he could go back and do it over again, he would not participate in the cycle of revenge by avenging his family, in hopes that the cycle will not continue. There are very few with the ability to act so
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