America, pants down
April 2008, Address to The Sydney Institute
Like all the best mysteries, this story starts off with just one thing going wrong. It was an email – a clumsily worded, insulting email. Because of that email, child soldier Ishmael Beah’s memoirs about his part in Sierra Leone’s brutal civil war, A Long Way Gone, have come into question, something which has now had ramifications around the globe.
The truth is that stories like this very rarely begin because of something big, or because of some major event. Instead, they begin because something very, very small goes wrong or comes to someone’s attention. It just strikes the wrong note, and that prompts curiosity. That then sets off other reactions and events far greater than anyone could have visualised at the beginning.
Very often, when the people involved look back and remember that one tiny thing that went wrong, they think: if only, if only ... If only we hadn’t done that ... Or if only, if only we’d fixed that ...
I like the Aesop’s Fable quality of all this; the sense that although humans are the most deceitful species on earth – and we all at times practise deception, sometimes for good reasons as well as bad – we know we labour under a kind of natural law that our deceitful actions will almost certainly come back to bite us. And when I think about this investigation into the veracity of Ishmael Beah’s memoirs –
an investigation that began with me sitting in a small attic office in East Sydney; to which The Australian newspaper then committed, putting on two of its own reporters; and which has now made the cover of one of America’s very well read journals, The Village Voice;
an investigation which is now quoted regularly on blogs and in interviews around the world;
an investigation which by the way has led to my two newspaper colleagues, David Nason, Peter Wilson and myself being called – “effing muckkraking hacks” – on a website read by millions of people.... (We’re actually so staid, so drearily diligent, that we’re thinking of having that printed on some T-shirts)
When I think about all of this, I like to also think that there might now be a few high-powered, high profile New Yorkers thinking: If only... If only... If only that email hadn’t been sent ... Then maybe Ishmael Beah’s best-selling tale of his descent into hell followed by redemption and a new life in America would not have been revealed to be, at best, a book with key errors and exaggerations; or, at worst, a book that contains many fabrications.
Few questions
Up until our stories broke in The Australian on 19 January [2008], there had been very, very little criticism or close questioning of Beah’s story of how at 12 he became caught up in Sierra Leone’s terrible civil war that lasted from 1991 to 2002. Of how he saw his parents supposedly being murdered and how he was forced to dodge death as a child on the run before being dragooned into the Sierra Leone army, turned into a 13-year-old killing machine, high on cocaine and dope and driven by a need for revenge.
A couple of reviews, one by William Boyd in The New York Times and another critique in The Wall Street Journal, lifted an eyebrow a little at the specificity of Beah’s memory but the only really sceptical questioning in the early stages was done on a blog called oneminutebookreviews by American critic Janice Harayda.
Here’s some background. The setting of Beah’s book is like something from hell. The civil war in this small West African country might have started with a bunch of youthful, ideologically driven rebels, the RUF (Revolutionary United Front), taking on a corrupt and weak administration but it soon disintegrated into a war about diamonds, about greed and control. Villagers were killed indiscriminately; tens of thousands were murdered; limbs, hands, feet, ears, lips were hacked off in terror campaigns; a third of the population was displaced – and children were forced to fight on both sides.
A British journalist, Anthony Loyd, described the Sierra Leone rebels who took on the government like this in one of his books, Another Bloody Love Letter: “The RUF was about as raving and insane as rebel groups get, its operations hallmarked by savage and wanton cruelty, utilising terror as a delight rather than as a tool.”
“Everyone should read this book” - Jon Stewart
A Sierra Leone refugee said to me the other day that the war went over any boundaries you can imagine. He said it affected every village, every town ... Everyone suffered. In one passage of his book Beah describes the expression in the eyes of captured and bound rebel soldiers just before he shot them: how their eyes gave up hope.
Now that’s the kind of observation which has garnered this book ecstatic reviews and mentions from around the world. From The Washington Post, The Guardian, Time magazine,Newsweek, The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, Entertainment Weekly. The Washington Post declared: “Everyone in the world should read this book”. American TV host Jon Stewart said in an interview that reading the book had made his heart hurt.
So our investigation from Australia – which has dared to point out that there are major discrepancies between the book and what witnesses and records actually reveal, discrepancies that seriously undermine Beah’s account, how old he really was, how long he really served – has caused an embarrassing ruckus and one which has become ugly as a result. Basically, it’s us, the reporters, on one side, throwing, I suppose, a bucket of cold water on some of the book’s more sensational claims and incidents.
On the other side are Beah’s American publisher and editor, Sarah Crichton who has her own imprint at the very important New York publishing house Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Beah’s agent, Ira Silverberg; and the woman who has become Beah’s unofficial guardian in New York, Laura Simms. Oh, and you can also throw in UNICEF (although even UNICEF has had to acknowledge there are problems with a part of Beah’s story-telling). The dispute has also been picked up in the blogosphere with interested bystanders joining in on either side.
The rattlesnake in the picnic basket
Beah’s admirers are pretty fierce too in their appreciation of this young, charismatic writer. (We could never get an interview with Beah so at one stage, to get access, Peter Wilson went to a talk given by Beah in London and he had to ask some tough questions in front of over a hundred adoring fans. And I said to him: what was that like? How did they all treat you? And I could hear the Cockney photographer cackling in the background: “Like a rattlesnake in a picnic basket.”)
So what is it about this story that made us pursue it? What mattered to me? What mattered to The Australian? Well, first, there are some basic issues here that affect us all: most generally, does a memoir have to be as truthful as say, an autobiography or a biography? What responsibility does the publisher bear for the truth of a non- fiction book? What is owed to readers? And there’s another element: to what extent has this controversy and how it has been received been affected by race? (And I’m not just talking about Ishmael’s; I’m talking about our Australian status as well, given that Ishmael Beah is a darling of America.)
And that leads to another question – was this young man encouraged by the people around him in America to exaggerate and make his story more gripping for Western readers? Or did he even do it himself, to win our attention? Given what he has come out of, given the horrors of the Sierra Leonean civil war - just watch the opening scenes of the film, Blood Diamond, or better still, the documentary Darkness over Paradise which was made here in Australia by some refugee Sierra Leonean journalists – if that were true, it would be obscene.
Are we saying that a young boy can be caught up in that and it’s still not enough for our Western tastes? He has to embroider his story in order to make it sell? What are we? A bunch of Romans watching African gladiators fight in the Coliseum? And there’s the final question – does truth matter? Especially now people feel almost embarrassed by the word truth and insist on sticking quotes around it.
The WA couple and what happened next
Now, it’s not at all surprising that there are things in Beah’s book that don’t match up with reality. After all, he was a young kid, he was on drugs, and confronted everyday with the kinds of horrors the rest of us might only see in a slasher movie. In this mayhem, Beah certainly wasn’t travelling with a notebook. But the trouble is that the publisher and the 27-year-old author refuse to countenance any suggestion that the memoir is less than factually honest and that it might need a gentle disclaimer upfront. What’s more, Beah has always claimed that he has a photographic memory to justify the way he includes precise conversations and the most minute details. And so our investigation has had to continue.
So back to this email, this small thing, this bit of irritating grit in the shoe that set this investigation going. It was 300 words long and it was sent in November 2007 from New York. It’s hastily written, accusatory, slightly threatening - and it got right up the nose of the people to whom it was sent; a comfortable, middle-aged couple from Busselton on Western Australia’s south coast. Their names are Bob and Peta Lloyd. They’re in their fifties and while they now own a bookshop in Busselton, their background is the mining industry. They’ve lived everywhere from Botswana to Vietnam and Siberia because of their work.
Now last July, Bob was headhunted to take over as general manager of a mine in the Southern Province of Sierra Leone. To his amazement - because at the time, he was reading an advance copy of A Long Way Gone which was about to come out in Australia - he found himself at the very mine where Ishmael Beah’s father had worked before the war and near where Ishmael had had his idyllic childhood growing up in the small village of Mogbwemo. Even more astonishing, he seemed to have found Ishmael’s father, Joseph, alive and well, actually working in a laboratory at the mine. And Ishmael Beah, remember, is the most famous orphan on earth.
No room for good news
So when this unfortunately worded email from New York hit the Lloyds’ computers, they were already pretty twitchy because, for the previous several weeks, they had been trying to contact young Ishmael with their startling news. They truly thought they were doing a good thing. But whoever they had approached – first HarperCollins here in Australia who are the local distributors for the book; then Farrar, Straus and Giroux - where Bob eventually got to talk to Sarah Crichton - they couldn’t seem to get anywhere.
It was very odd. And this hostile email was the last straw. It was signed in the name of Laura Simms, Beah’s adoptive mother. And what particularly frustrated the Lloyds was that, from their reading of the book and having seen Beah interviewed, they really admired Beah – and yet now they were being treated like rattle snakes.
It’s true that Ishmael Beah has done many admirable things. With his book, interviews and talks, he has helped focus attention on the plight of the 300,000 or so child soldiers caught up in wars in Africa, Asia and South America. Last November (2007), UNICEF appointed him as their first advocate for children affected by war.
He also sits on a children’s rights committee advising Human Rights Watch and he’s started the Ishmael Beah foundation, to raise money for other child soldiers. Tragically, these kids can find, after they have been rescued and rehabilitated, that they have so few prospects – because of poverty, or lack of education and training, or just massive unemployment in their countries - that they go back to being soldiers, mercenaries, all over again. At least there they get paid, they have a structure, they have camaraderie ... And these kids often can’t go home because their families have disowned them because of the terrible things they’ve done. Their lives and souls have been plundered.
Now Beah’s own story offers much more hope. It’s not just about a descent into inhumanity, it’s about redemption. Salvation. For, after two years in the army, Beah writes in his book he was handed over to UNICEF in January 1996 and sent to a rehabilitation camp. He then went to a UN conference in New York where he meets an extraordinary woman, who turns out to be Laura Simms, a professional storyteller and activist. Later, she helps get him out of Sierra Leone to Manhattan, and then she sends him to school and later to college in Ohio.
How a memoir can begin
And this is where he first starts writing his memoir. Although interestingly at that stage, he is writing it as fiction, as short stories, in a creative writing class. And he never dreams – he says – that his writing will end up being published. When he does eventually find a publisher, A Long Way Gone comes out in the United States in early 2007. It debuts at Number Two in The New York Times’s bestsellers list and it makes Beah – this dirt poor kid from Sierra Leone – a millionaire. Eighty per cent of his countrymen live on less than a dollar a day. It’s dizzyingly inspiring: Beah’s story is truly the American dream.
There have been other books about child soldiers before – David Eggers’ novel, What is the What; there had been other novels, Beasts of No Nation by the Nigerian-American Uzodinma Iweala and Moses, Citizen and Me by Delia Jarrett-Macauley. But what captured attention this time was that Ishmael Beah was relating his true life story. This was not fiction. These terrible events had actually happened to him – and he had still saved himself.
It has now sold over 700,000 copies and that figure will soar this coming August 2008, when the paperback is finally released in the US. Ishmael Beah continues to give interviews, to appear on TV shows and to give lectures and perform book readings. Except there’s one big difference now. When I first went to his website late last year, it listed his upcoming events, presumably so that fans could make sure they went along. Not any more. Mysteriously, since The Australian’s investigation started, the listing has been kept blank.
When, in January, Ishmael Beah spoke in front of the Oxford Union, which calls itself the most prestigious debating society in the world, “aiming to promote debate and discussion across the globe”, the press were barred. Peter Wilson, who’d gone along, was told that Beah’s publisher in Britain and here – HarperCollins – had requested the ban to “keep out a troublesome reporter”. And while Beah is used to giving hundreds of interviews, when The Village Voice recently decided to do this 6000-word cover story on him, his book and our investigation, using a journalist who has been a Pulitzer Prize-winning finalist, he refused to give an interview. As did his publisher and editor Sarah Crichton.
Good deeds and punishment
And the terrible thing is that, back in last November, the Lloyds, the couple from Busselton, had never intended any of this hoo-hah to happen. Certainly, they had never intended to go anywhere near the media. That wasn’t their style. They just wanted someone to listen politely to what they had to say about the existence of this man called Joseph.
Oh... and they had noticed something else. Bob said in one early and lengthy email to Laura Simms, sent on 11 November 2007, that the chronology in Beah’s book wasn’t right. The timeline was out. The events Ishmael described had happened two years later, in 1995. (Not 1993 as Beah had it.) And, said Bob helpfully, Joseph’s story of the war is quite different from the story in the book.
Now I can only imagine – in retrospect – the effect of that aside as that email was read in New York. Two years might not sound like much – but for this book two years makes all the difference. In his book, on its second page, Ishmael says the war came to him in January 1993 when he was 12, when there was a rebel invasion – of first the Sierra Rutile mine where his father worked and the surrounding villages – Mogbwemo, Kabati - and then, a few weeks later, the bigger township of Mattru Jong where Beah actually was at the time. It was this series of attacks that he describes that sent him hurtling towards his dreadful existence in the army. But, said Bob Lloyd, the locals told him all that happened in January 1995.
In the book, Beah wanders the country for almost a year, as a civilian refugee, has a birthday before going into the army, which makes it at least November – and then enters the rehab camp in January 1996. So if the attack happened in 1995, not 1993, then Beah can’t have been in the army for two years; it would have been more like two months. The real date also means that Ishmael would have been 14, not 12, when he was forced on the road and lost his family, and 15 – not the much more emotive and child-like 13 – when he was forced into the army. (I’m not saying that 15 isn’t ghastly and two months isn’t shocking – but in terms of marketing and PR, a 15 year old who fights for two months doesn’t have the POW! factor of a 13 year old fighting for two years.)
So this extra material about the date being wrong – which was just two sentences in Bob’s long email – must have come as a jolt ... to someone. After that, Bob and Peta didn’t hear anything for many days until Bob sent a reminder email. And then the 300 word email I’ve been describing arrived. It seemed to accuse the Lloyds of possibly being dishonest or people out to make trouble. Why are you getting in touch at this time, it asked. “Is there something that you want?” And it warned the Lloyds that they should not talk to anyone else. “We are deeply concerned that this issue not go further than you, Sarah – [that is, Sarah Crichton] - and myself.”
An oddly worded email
The email is also oddly phrased. Strange syntax. It has wording like this: “Why you said in my letter that this man came to you and why you told Sarah that you sought out the boy’s father. And why you are passionate about reaching him.” It is quite different from two other emails I’ve seen which have also been signed Laura Simms. The truth is it reads as if it has been written by someone whose native language is not English. Anyhow, the combined effect, the perceived rudeness, the jangling language, pushed the Lloyds over the edge. They ended up – through another series of coincidences involving a good friend, of mine Anita Jacoby, executive producer of Enough Rope with Andrew Denton – talking to me. And I have to say that originally, I went into it thinking this must be a confusion: maybe Bob and Peta hadn’t expressed themselves clearly to the publishers.
And then suddenly, I was the rattlesnake. I walked into the same wall of hostility, resentment, dismissiveness and plain rudeness. And I was really surprised. I could imagine the Dad angle the Lloyds mentioned might have been offputting, but why didn’t these people want to know about this crucial date?
Now the issue of fact-checking things like dates, or the soundness of someone’s story, is a bit of a sore point for publishers everywhere. There have been many scandals recently where memoirs have turned out to be fabrications or much exaggerated. How come the editing process hadn’t picked up these flaws? But in the past, when I’ve talked to book editors, I’ve been surprised by the low rates they’re paid and the short lengths of time given to any project. And major publishers will actually admit: we don’t do enough fact-checking; too costly, too time-consuming; we rely on the author for that.
And now, as I worked with what the Lloyds were telling me, it seemed that somewhere along the line, someone had forgotten to do the most basic fact-check on Ishmael Beah’s book, on the date around which his whole narrative was built. It’s not that hard to check. The events of January 1995 are well chronicled and it’s easy to find on Google let alone in various books and reports. However, I have yet to find any mention of such a serious attack in early 1993, either on record or from a witness.
So I was also puzzled by the attitude of the Americans. The truth is, it got up my nose too. And it made me suspicious. It still does. So eventually, over a period of about seven weeks, from late November, through December 2006, to early January 2007, I did my research and roughed my story up to a point where The Australian felt justified in putting two of its foreign correspondents on to the story to do the on- the-ground reporting. That had always been part my deal with them: that the story couldn’t run until that had been done.
The correspondent in New York was David Nason, and the Europe correspondent, Peter Wilson. Between them, they’ve done fantastic reporting. On 17 January, Peter flew in to Sierra Leone and within a few hours had established that the father angle didn’t pan out – but that the timeline discrepancy definitely stacked up. The events definitely took place in 1995. Our first big story – of almost 5000 words – ran that weekend.
The questions that had to be asked
Over the next fortnight, Peter wrote a series of stories pulling apart Beah’s narrative, even finding a document, a school report, that placed him in school when he said he was already out on the road, running for his life. Beah had also written about a deadly fight that had taken place when he’d first gone into a rehab centre in the country’s capital, Freetown, after being taken out of the army. It’s a key scene in the book, so vivid and shocking that it is often quoted in stories. The New York Times featured it when it ran a very large extract. The fight is between rival child soldiers who accidentally meet at the camp. Six of them are killed. One has his eye gouged out with a bayonet. The victorious children including Beah are jubilant.
But we cannot find any official record that this fight ever took place. Not from UNICEF, not from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, nor the local Ministry of Social Welfare, Gender and Children’s Affairs. And it would have been a big deal - six deaths in an officially run camp. It would have been recorded. A few weeks ago, UNICEF told The Village Voice that no, it could not confirm Beah’s account of the brawl that left six dead. (Although I hasten to say that UNICEF remains very loyal to Beah and his accounts.)
Every time, we made a finding like that – and that was an extraordinary one by Peter Wilson – we would go back to Farrar, Straus and Giroux or direct to Sarah Crichton and ask them to comment. And every time, they’d say the same thing: that they stood by Ishmael Beah’s book. To this day, they still will not accept – publicly at least – the fact that the attacks on the mine and Mogbwemo and then Mattru Jong happened in 1995, not 1993. And Beah insists: I didn’t mean that invasion.... I meant another one. But he has been very specific in his description of that series of attacks, right down to the appearance of a Catholic priest who had been captured by rebels and sent into Mattru Jong with a warning. Beah says, well, the rebels often used similar methods, a kind of formula, so this was a coincidence.
What the priest insisted
But the intrepid Peter Wilson actually tracked that Catholic priest down – his name is Moses Sao Kailie – and he said: “There is no coincidence at all because this only happened once ... in 1995. I know because it was me. And it was just impossible for it to have happened to any other priest in 1993 – I was the only priest in the region – from 1991 to November 1995.”
Now when Peter told me he had found the Catholic priest, the very priest who had figured in Beah’s own account, albeit at a different date, we were both elated. By this stage, the three of us had had almost a solid fortnight of not just denials from FSG, Crichton and Beah – but attacks. We’d been accused of distortion, unethical conduct, recklessness, harassment ... We’d had to issue our own statement correcting the record on this. I remember it was a Friday evening in late January. I don’t think Peter, who was writing out of London, had been to bed for the previous 20 or so hours. And I remember him saying: “What else do we have to do to prove our case! They won’t be able to deny this!”
Well, you know what? They did. This is what appeared on Slate. com when it did a story on the controversy. The reporter writes: “When I asked Crichton if the conflicting accounts by the Catholic priest who said he witnessed the only attack on Mattru Jong in 1995 gave her pause that maybe the book fudged at least some of the timeline, Crichton said no, that she believed Beah’s narrative to be true.”
The American response
The Americans are fiercely protective of Beah – and I would suggest, that they may be as protective of what his book has done for their careers and reputations. A lot of people have done well out of this book. Sarah Crichton only joined FSG in 2004. This book has made her imprint. Beah’s agent is Ira Silverberg. In early 2006, he was much embarrassed when another of his clients, J.T. Leroy, someone he’d defended hotly, was unmasked as a hoaxer. Any questioning of Beah must worry him.
Then there’s the Oberlin College creative writing professor, Dan Chaon, who first talked Beah into revealing that the pretty gruesome short stories he was writing in class were actually based on his real life experiences. Beah had kept that secret until then. He had never talked about it with his friends. Chaon was the first person to work closely with Beah on his manuscript, meeting once or twice a week, going through the manuscript line by line. At one stage, the professor told one of the college’s journals: “I still think about moments where I’d say things like, ‘the scene where the kid dies needs to be more vivid’. There’s something monstrous about that. But he got closer and closer to his emotional truths.”
The final manuscript from college was close to 400 pages long in typescript. It was then offered to a few agents who turned it down. Beah told a British reporter in mid-2007 that “Some people said, we should just have the war part; they were only interested in the violence. So to those people I said goodbye.” It eventually got to Ira Silverberg and was sold to Sarah Crichton in 2005. Crichton, who has been a co-writer on other books, including Mariane Pearl’s memoir A Mighty Heart, then met Beah, every Monday for almost a year, discussing the book and refining it. It came down to about half its original size.
So by this stage, you can’t help thinking: just who wrote this book? Who shaped this book? Under what kind of direction was Beah writing? And when was the timeline decided? And by who? Chaon told our New York reporter David Nason that he couldn’t remember seeing any dates in the memoir at the time he was helping Beah with it. And he told David that he thinks he would have remembered if there had been dates.
And, interestingly, in view of what Beah said about his earlier experiences with agents and his attitude to them, Chaon also told David Nason on tape that during this time with Silverberg and Crichton, when the manuscript was virtually halved and refined, that – and I quote from David’s transcript: “A lot of stuff was cut from the front part – his memories of childhood, growing up, his grandparents, his parents’ divorce and father’s remarriage, some memories of being at school ... You know, the final version focused the book primarily on his experiences in the war. It focused the book on what was originally the central, the middle part of the book. It’s substantially the same but with the first third lopped off and the last third lopped off.”
So clearly, the war material fascinated Beah’s publishers and that’s certainly how the book was marketed – the subtitle of A Long Way Gone is: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. And yet, even then, one of the curiosities of the book is that only 40 pages of 218 deal with his soldier experiences and they are written rather differently from the rest of the book. It’s almost as if he’s reporting dream sequences. In The Village Voice article, Neil Boothby, a highly regarded expert on children and war at Columbia University, a man who has worked with child refugees in Rwanda, Mozambique and Darfur, questions the fact that Beah’s account happens to include just about every possible trauma that can occur in the bleak life of a child soldier; that it would be extraordinary for all of those horrible events to happen in the life of a single person.
“Effing muck-raking hacks”
Boothby also commented on something else which the three of us at The Australian had discussed often: the pressure on such people to tell exaggerated stories. Boothby said the most sensational accounts tend to get the most attention. Orphans fleeing the Khmer Rouge who had the most horrific stories, for example, tended to be resettled much more quickly than other refugees.
Ira Silverberg is adamant that Beah was never encouraged to jazz up his account. In fact, he told me that my suggestion that that might have happened was “offensive”. (Possibly not quite as offensive as I found his description of us being “effing muckraking hacks” but that’s by the by.) So if Beah wasn’t being tempted to tell a few porkies and thus make his book even more marketable, what were his publishers doing to make sure that his story was accurate?
Well, as far as we can ascertain from our own research, not that much, although Crichton assured me in a letter that the book had been “significantly vetted”.
Now you have to ask yourself at this stage, how can all these sane people in these high powered, responsible jobs keep denying what we were putting in front of them? Well, you know why? Because, as with all examples of bad behaviour, they are doing it because they can. They are being allowed to do it.
I know I’ve cited The Village Voice’s cover story several times and that’s had a big impact and I’ve just mentioned Slate.com, but for the most part, the established American media have treated this story the way party guests might treat an interloper who’s just drunk all the rum punch and then thrown up on the floor. They have delicately stepped around it and pretended it wasn’t happening. Even The New York Times, which ran such a massive, excerpt from the book, supposedly fact-checked by their own people – an extract which included the fight that we’ve discovered never happened – has mysteriously failed to cover our allegations except to run Beah’s statement dismissing them. And this is supposed to be one of the world’s most serious papers of record.
There are actually, I think, several reasons for this po-faced denial of the bleeding obvious. First, many, many illustrious Americans and American journals have been caught with their pants down. Secondly, Farrar, Straus and Giroux is a very prestigious publishing house and most human beings don’t like taking on powerful – and prestigious – adversaries.
How reverse racism works
There is also an element of what I would call a kind of reverse racism. People do not want to be seen to be criticising someone who has supposedly been through terrible things and who is a black African. Africa is a continent which is much in the news at the moment because of the war on poverty, the genocide in the Sudan and the attentions of stars like Bono, Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt and George Clooney. It might be okay to criticise James Frey or the latest fabricator Margaret Seltzer, but to criticise young Ishmael Beah could look uncool and lead to accusations of racism. And – more seriously – it might damage Beah’s work. Boothby actually said this. Although he felt the book exaggerated, he said: “I’ve refrained from any sort of comment or criticism because I would hate to see something like this undermine the human-rights momentum”. Boothby’s attitude is also seen often in the blogs. And I know it’s well-meant but it does disturb me.
Would we have said the same if, say in 1955, someone had done the same thing with an account of his time, a decade before, in Auschwitz, a concentration camp that killed millions of Jews in World War II. Exaggerated his time there by a thousand per cent? Made up incidents? Would we say – oh, it doesn’t matter, one Holocaust survivor is the same as any other Holocaust survivor? I don’t think so. That would be atrocious.
Now, from the very beginning, all Farrar, Straus and Giroux would have had to do for this controversy to go away is to take responsibility, and say it intended to insert a small acknowledgement or preface or disclaimer into any new editions and especially the new paperback edition in the US. But Crichton has said there will be no such concession. She told Slate: “There will absolutely not be a disclaimer. A disclaimer is used when you say I’ve changed names, he hasn’t; moved locales, he hasn’t. So, no, there will not be a disclaimer.”
“Sweet Salone”
A very senior Sierra Leonean from the commercial sector was talking to me recently. We were talking about the elasticity of truth, especially in places like Sierra Leone where people are still just trying to survive each day and where there is a strong story-telling tradition that plays with time and facts. Sierra Leone’s infrastructure was devastated during the war. Even Freetown still doesn’t have 24 hour electricity. Medical and education services are minimal. But the people are determined to rebuild their country – one of the poorest in the world. They are devoted to it, calling it Sweet Salone.
And the two of us were saying: if you want to restore infrastructure and get the schools and hospitals established, you need truth. It’s not some abstract notion to be debated over a couple of lattes in an inner- city café. What is truth? When somebody says the water supply to ten villages has been put in place, you want to know that that’s true. If somebody says they’ve delivered the wiring to a hospital so they can have power, you want to know that is true. You want to know that the prices you are being quoted are true.
In these circumstances, truth is not a luxury; it’s a necessity. Truth is what keeps our society on the level. We need it. Without truth – and an appreciation of truth – how do we know what we believe in? How do we know who or what to trust? Without the rigour of truth, people get away with things.
There is one post-script worth mentioning: Ishmael Beah has announced that his next book will definitely be fiction.
This is a talk given for The Sydney Institute on April 15, 2008, and then published in the autumn 2008 issue of The Sydney Institute Quarterly. Subsequent investigations and interviews re the existence of Ishmael Beah’s father, and family, led to this writer receiving threats of violence via Facebook from someone, presumed to be in Sierra Leone, who thought I was travelling there to do more research. The Australian newspaper reported those threats on July 26, 2010. Many Sierra Leoneans are fiercely proud of Beah who, while now living in the US, has visited his country of birth since the end of the war. Ishmael Beah’s novel Radiance of Tomorrow was published in January 2014 under the Sarah Crichton Books imprint for Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The Washington Post ran a favourable review which included these words: “As a novel, Radiance of Tomorrow, won’t have to suffer the interrogation that Rupert Murdoch’s Australian reporters unleashed to prove that the traumatic memories in A Long Way Gone contained factual and chronological errors.”
