SUNY’s ‘Common Read’ Author

Urges Students To Help Others

By LIBBY CUDMORE • for AllOTSEGO.com

ONEONTA – Before he even knew he wanted to be a writer, Ishmael Baeh was learning the fundamentals of storytelling.

“My father and I would play a game where he would put me on his shoulders and he would play he was blind,” he said.  “I had to tell him the world.  He would pretend to walk into the wall, into the fire, and I would have to explain those things to him.”

Such play – and books like “Treasure Island,” his favorite growing up – gave him the tools to write his memoir, “A Long Way Gone: Memoirs a Boy Soldier,” this year’s SUNY Oneonta “Common Read.”

Baeh gave the Mills Distinguished Lecture this evening before a full house of students and community members, taking the stage with a smile.  “I’m always smiling,” he said.  “I wake up and I’m smiling because I am alive, so I’ve already won that day.”

Baeh was just 11 when the Sierra Leone Civil War started in 1991.  After his village Mogbwemo was attacked, he fled, wandering with other boys until he was taken in by the military, who used him as a child soldier.  He rose to the rank of lieutenant, with 30 boys at his command.

But UNICEF negotiated the release of some of the boy soldiers, and he was sent to a rehabilitation center in Freetown.  Later, he was able to move to New York, where he attended the United Nations International School and later, Oberlin College.

“When I was looking at schools, they kept asking, ‘Where is your report card?  How do you not have a report card’?” he said.  “I was frustrated, because no one knew where I was coming from.”

It was from that frustration came his first essay, “Why I Don’t Have a Report Card.”  “It was a mini ‘Long Way Gone’,” he said.  “And it got me a scholarship.”

From there, he wrote more.  “In our yearbook, we were all asked to bring a baby picture, but I did not have one,” he said.  “But I knew I could write a poem about what I imagined a baby picture would have looked like, so I did, and they used that in that space.”

Though he had started school in Sierra Leone, “under a tree with some benches and the hot sun beating down on our backs,” being educated at the UN school was a life-changing experience for him.  He advised students not to squander the opportunity.  “My plea is that you use your higher education to discover something beyond the United States” he said.  “Use your privilege to do something better in the world.”

After a standing ovation, he then took questions from the audience, and stayed to sign books for a line that stretched the whole length of the Dewar Arena. “I am standing here because someone decided not to do something not for themselves,” he told the audience.  “Life is only valuable if you can use it for the benefit of others, and I have seen what goodness can do.”