Ishmael Beah...

Well, today was the day that Ishmael Beah came to campus. Our class was lucky enough to go spend some time with him at the library, prior to his talk in the evening. I thought I might put down a few of my impressions.

I thought he was awesome.

I'm not sure there's much more to say than that. As in any situation where you are meeting someone "famous," I must admit that I was a little star-struck with Ishmael. I mean, here he was, just feet away, answering my questions and smiling at me. A particularly odd moment was after his talk. Usually when you go to these things, the featured speakers stay sort of "onstage" after their talk...they "third wall" isn't broken with the audience. They are whisked off by their host, out of site of the rest of us who go back to our dreary, boring lives.

But after his talk in the library, Ishmael just ventured out of the building with us and I ended up holding the door for him on his way out. This was a bit odd. But, it humanized him a bit. I was struck, as I have often been when meeting famous people (did I mention that I met Bono in an airport in Chicago in May 2006?), by how short Ishmael was. Why are people who end up becoming famous always short? I don't know. I once stood next to Bruce Willis at a urinal in a seafood restaurant on Martha's Vineyard. Not only was he short, but he had chicken legs.

Anyway.

I enjoyed Ishmael's talk. One woman asked him to speak about his "destiny." It was a sort of "ishmael-worship' moment. It's always the middle-age women who gush the most at these author-events and this woman was no exception. She said something to him like--I think you're on a journey or its your destiny to be doing what you are doing. I can't help feeling that that sort of question would make anyone feel uncomfortable, but who knows. He answered graciously with, I thought, a good response. He spoke about the chaos of war and of battle zones. He spoke of the way, in a battle zone, nothing really makes sense. He spoke of a kind of inherent illogic to all that happens. I've heard others talk about this--Tim O'Brien, especially, in The Things They Carried, for example.

A few students in our class asked questions, and this made me feel good. I was a bit struck when one student asked him to comment on the end of the book, the metaphor about shooting a father or a mother--I don't recall it off the top of my head. Anyway, his response, and I'm struggling to remember what his response was, was not at all what I was expecting. I think that in class we had talked about the end of the book as a kind of metaphor for why he wrote the book--he wrote the book with the hope that, by telling his story, others would not have to live it. I'm blanking on the exact translation of this to the story about the child who must decide which parent to kill.

Anyway, a student in our class asked him to comment on this and I believe his response was something along the line of, once you pick up a gun or a rifle, things are out of your control and bad things will happen? I don't remember, exactly. This is something I'd like to debrief with the class on, maybe next week.

I think that the thing that interests me most about Ishmael is his pacifism. In his responses to questions tonight, and in his answers on Open Source, with Christopher Lydon, I got or get a real strong sense of his moral stance against violence--any kind of violence. In this vein, it seems he joins a long-line of thinkers--Gandi, MLK, JC and others. There is, in him, a complete repudiation of violence as means of solving problems and this is refreshing and interesting because I don't know of anyone today who speaks so forcefully and with such great conviction and certainty about the dangers of violence. I was really struck by this. I think that Americans just accept violence as a part of their life--violence, as Beah pointed out, "over there" or "out of sight." So many of us, sitting in that room with Beah tonight, have so little direct experience with violence. And because it is an abstraction to us, we are, I think, okay with it, have sort of made peace with it. We don't necessarily associate the bombs we drop on the earth with violence. We think of them as...what? I don't know... Getting rid of the bad guys? It seems to me that Beah is right. We have no experience with violence, so we don't abhor it, as we should. His abhorance of violence is natural, given his exposure to it. But must we be exposed to it in order to feel a sense of abhorance about it? This is an interesting question and I believe it was Beah's question, or a point he was making tonight.

With all the military might we have in this country, and the number of bombs and bullets we have fired around the world over the past five years, it was interesting to come face to face with a man who repudiates violence, who cannot and does not abide or tolerate it. In this, I felt, perhaps most especially, that I was standing in the presence of someone truly exceptional or special. Certainly someone different than anyone with whom I come into contact in my day-to-day life. I admire his clarity and certainty. The price he has had to pay for it, however, is too great.

Thanks to the students who asked questions today during the talk--you did great!

Next time: more on writing conferences. And, a request for input on how to create contexts or content for student writing.