Review by New York Times Review
WHAT YOU FALL FOR FIRST, reading Ishmael Beah's new novel, is its setting - the small village of Imperi, in the rural grasslands of Sierra Leone. The sky above it is wide and colorful. A giant mango tree sits at its center. A river flows nearby. In better times, villagers farmed coffee behind their homes. In the evenings, school-children shucked their uniforms on the riverbank and noisily splashed around. Yet Imperi, as glimpsed in the book's opening pages, appears as a desiccated wasteland, a collection of charred houses and strewn bones, the site of an abrupt massacre seven years earlier when rebels attacked the village without warning. Such atrocities were commonplace across Sierra Leone during its notoriously brutal civil war, which stretched from 1991 to 2002, causing some 70,000 deaths and separating more than two million people from their homes. "Radiance of Tomorrow" is not a story of exodus, though, but rather a rare look at the phenomena of homecoming and reclamation, written with the moral urgency of a parable and the searing precision of a firsthand account. It begins with the limping, solitary return of one of Imperi's village elders, a woman named Mama Kadie, who has spent seven itinerant years living in refugee camps. She encounters another villager, Pa Moiwa, who, like her, felt called back to the barren village. When she happens upon him, he's busy clearing human remains, collecting bones and tying them up "as one would a bundle of kindling." Both have seen their families slaughtered and their homes destroyed. Both are weak with age and hunger, disconnected from the lives they once knew. At first, they cannot look each other in the eye, afraid to see the sorrow mirrored back. Despite this, and with little conversation about the past, they set to work like a pair of stalwart pioneers, tending the land and gathering what's left of the dead. Mama Kadie inspects the bones of children, wondering if they belonged to her grandkids. Pa Moiwa roams the forest, finding bodies strung up in the trees. As a reader, you can't help rooting for them - and for Imperi, an underdog community if there ever was one - to regenerate. Beah, whose 2007 book, "A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier," told of his own dislocation as a child in Sierra Leone and his subsequent conscription into a government army that thought nothing of furnishing a 13-year-old with an AK-47, a steady flow of drugs and a vicious mandate to kill, seems intent here on exploring the ragged realities of his homeland and the broader resilience of survivors. He writes about the predicament of uncertainty that governs in any war, but this time, rather than concentrating on his own wandering existence, Beah tells a tale of rootedness - one small community's stubborn effort to anchor itself. Beah's voice is more expansive and lyrical here than in his memoir. As he explains in an author's note, he has marshaled the cadences and figurative imagery found in Mende, his native language. In the novel, the sky, the sun and the earth are animate forces. The wind carries moods with it. At night, the stars over Imperi grow "drowsy, dulling the brightness of the sky and causing it to nod." Slowly, too, the village starts to breathe again, as residents find their way back and new arrivals drift in, drawn by the hopeful cluster of humanity growing there. "The road spat out people from refugee camps, towns, villages, hiding places deep in the forest that had become homes," Beah writes. In Imperi, houses are repainted in vibrant colors; caved-in roofs are rebuilt. Birds sing in the trees. Women use nets to catch fish from the riverbanks, and farmers once more sell cucumbers by the side of the road. The horrid violence of the past is not much discussed, but the trauma remains unshakable. A man named Sila has returned with his two children; all three of them have had an arm hacked off by a young soldier with a machete. "The war has changed us," Mama Kadie tells her friends. "But I hope not so much that we'll never find our way back." A primary school opens and seems to thrive under the leadership of two devoted teachers, Bockarie and Benjamin. But the stirring of prosperity in the village also attracts a more ominous return, that of a foreign mining company, which had only just begun construction in Imperi when the war broke out and shut it down. Before long, the landscape is disrupted by bulldozers and electrical wires. White Toyotas rip through town, packed with foreigners and relentlessly kicking up dust in the faces of the villagers. Imperi's communal ideals begin to slip in the aftermath of the new invasion - this one more insidious but no less sinister than the last. The river is poisoned by mine tailings. The trees disappear, along with the birds. Some village women turn to prostitution to get by. Men take dangerous mining jobs that leave them ragged and diminished. Bar fights erupt. A child dies, hit by a speeding mining truck. When the village elders make efforts to address injustices and corruption spawned by the mining company's presence, they're met with humiliating dismissals. "The town grew tense with the people's quiet fury," Beah writes. "The atmosphere was so stiff that the wind didn't move." As the novel unfolds, Beah's mourning for his country grows more overt, more doleful. His statements occasionally veer toward the didactic, breaking the surface of an otherwise smooth and affecting narrative. ("Poverty is worse than nightmares," Benjamin whispers to Bockarie, his fellow teacher. "You can wake up from nightmares.") But there is an allegorical richness to Beah's storytelling and a remarkable humanity to his characters. We see tragedy arriving not through the big wallops of war, but rather in corrosive increments - in a newly imposed rule that kids cannot attend school unless they buy a more costly school uniform; in the deformed fish washing up on the riverbanks; and in a wrenching moment when the local cemetery, where Mama Kadie and Pa Moiwa so carefully brought the remains of those killed in the war, is razed to make way for the mine. The people of Imperi do manage to fight back. A couple of the young men take up an unsparing vigilante campaign against the foreign workers. The teachers make heroic sacrifices to keep their school open in the face of inching desperation. The elders never lose their fortitude. Nonetheless, another exodus begins. The message carried in their departure is distressing: War is more survivable than the attack of a corporation bent on tearing up the earth. As some of Imperi's residents ultimately resettle in the urban chaos of Freetown, Sierra Leone's capital, and immediately confront a new raft of struggles, they continue to survive, with the astonishing adaptability that has propelled them from the start. "The world is not ending today," says one character toward the end. "You must cheer up if you want to keep living in it." Tragedy arrives not through the big wallops of war, but rather in corrosive increments. SARA CORBETT is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and a co-author, with Amanda Lindhout, of "A House in the Sky."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 26, 2014]
Review by Booklist Review
In his best-selling A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier (2007), Beah wrote of his traumatic experience as victim and perpetrator in Sierra Leone's civil war. Now he works with Human Rights Watch and UNICEF in New York, and in this searing first novel, he tells of a young immigrant returning with his family to his native village seven years after the recent civil war. He finds both hope and horror, the latter driven by the overwhelming internal corruption, the former by the resilience of the people he encounters. He sees skulls and chopped hands, the remains of massacre. But there is the wonder of clean drinking water. A foreign company's diamond mining, supported by the government, is leaving the village people displaced, houses shattered, the air thick with pollution, ancient burial grounds destroyed. A parent must see her child go to bed hungry, night after night. How much will people do for jobs to feed their families? The power of the story is in the close-up, heartbreaking detail of the struggle for survival, the cruelty, and also the kindness.--Rochman, Hazel Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Reviewed by Edwidge Danticat. In his 2007 memoir, A Long Way Gone, Ishmael Beah writes of those waiting for war to invade their lives: "Families who had walked hundreds of miles told how relatives had been killed and their houses burned. Some people felt sorry for them and offered them places to stay, but most of the refugees refused, because they said the war would eventually reach their town." The decade-long war in Sierra Leone between government forces and Liberian-funded rebels did eventually reach Beah's and other towns, and he was swept up in the conflict as a child soldier, a story he vividly recounts in his memoir. This time Beah has written an actual novel-his first-not about the war itself, but about its aftermath. What happens when those who have committed atrocities or have been the victims of them return to what is left of their homes? We get our answer via several residents of the devastated Sierra Leonean town of Imperi, where an older couple, Mama Kadie and Pa Moiwa, and a young schoolteacher named Bockarie are among the first to return. Recalling the Friday afternoon the town was attacked, they remember the rocket-propelled grenades that brought down the chief's compound, heralding a new order while "killing many people, whose flesh sizzled from the explosions." Those who escaped, and eventually made it through the war in good enough shape to return, considered themselves lucky, save for the survivor's guilt that forced them to seek comfort, even in the most horrifying places. Looking at the piles of human bones that still litter the town, Mama Kadie imagines that she might be able to identify the remains of her grandchildren among them. The pain of not knowing whether or not they had survived the war is too much to bear and she wants some finality. The town eventually falls into some kind of routine. Other survivors flood in from refugee camps in neighboring countries. Burned houses are rebuilt and a school is opened, allowing Bockarie to teach there. The notion that the town might return to its old, familiar ways soon vanishes, however, when a mining company, in search of rutile-used as a pigment in paint, plastic, and food-sets up shop, polluting the town's waterways. Bockarie's best friend also dies a senseless death while working at the mine. Bockarie eventually decides to return with his friend's wife to her hometown, only to find life even more unbearable there, in the shadow of a diamond mine. This leaves only Freetown, with its Chinese-run hotels, drug runners, and "false life" Europe- and U.S.-based returnees, who missed the war all together. This part of the novel leaves us wondering what might happen next to some characters to whom we've grown attached. However, as Beah reminds us on the book's final page, "It is the end, or maybe the beginning of another story.... Every story is a birth." In Radiance of Tomorrow, Beah has produced a formidable and memorable novel-a story of resilience and survival, and, ultimately, rebirth. Edwidge Danticat is the author of several books, including, most recently, Claire of the Sea Light, a novel. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
For Mama Kadie, returning to her village, Imperi, after the seven-year civil war in Sierra Leone, home is the dirt sifting between her toes and the scent of coffee flowers. For Pa Moiwa, it is burying the bones of those who did not escape the destruction. Slowly, others return, hoping to mend the fabric of lives sundered by war. First Bockarie and later Benjamin, former teachers in the village, arrive with their families. Then Sila and his children, missing arms and hands, find acceptance there. Even Colonel, leading a band of former child soldiers seeking to reclaim their humanity, is embraced by the elders. But hardship persists. Bockarie and Benjamin work months without a paycheck while the school principal cooks the books. A mining company rapes their land yet entices villagers with big salaries while downplaying horrific working conditions. Still, each physically and psychically damaged person in Imperi will learn to trust again. VERDICT Beah, who broke our hearts with the haunting memoir of his life as a boy soldier (Long Way Gone), will render readers speechless with the radiance of his storytelling in this novel of grace, forgiveness, and a vision of a tomorrow without conflict. [See Prepub Alert, 7/8/13.]-Sally Bissell, Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Fort Myers, FL (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
This first novel from Sierra Leoneborn author Beah (A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, 2007) features characters who face the challenges of returning to normalcy after the horrors of civil war in Sierra Leone. At times, it's hard to discern what predominates, the savagery of war and its aftermath or the promise of the book's title. As Mama Kadie explains, "The war has changed us, but I hope not so much that we'll never find our way back." The place she, her family and her friends are trying to find their way back to is Imperi, a village that has been devastated by the war. Reminders are everywhere: Sila and his children, for example, whose hands were chopped off by the ruthless Sgt. Cutlass. At the center of the return to Imperi is Bockarie, a teacher who wants to resume his life in the village along with fellow teacher Benjamin. Both men struggle against astonishingly high odds, including children who seem to have no future and an administrator who's embezzling money that should go toward their salaries. When a company starts to mine rutile (a mineral with many desirable uses and whose presence usually presages the discovery of diamonds), many of the students abandon school for the steady paycheck mining provides. The promise of riches also brings foreigners into Imperi, and they have no respect for the traditions of the native culture. In fact, they show their contempt through raping the local women--at least till "Colonel" puts a stop to it by responding to this brutishness with his own brand of aggression. UNICEF Ambassador Beah writes lyrically and passionately about ugly realities as well as about the beauty and dignity of traditional ways.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
