Chapter 1: What stories about learning from elders are shared in this episode?
This is the Moth Radio Hour. I'm your host, Angelica Lindsay Ali. I'm a storyteller and frequent host for the Moth's live events in Phoenix and around the country. In this hour, we'll be exploring stories about our elders. Anyone who knows me well knows that I have been preparing to be a grandmother since I was about eight years old.
My earliest best friend and role model was my grandma Bessie, a smiling woman from Montgomery, Alabama. I spent hours with my grandmother at her flat on the west side of Detroit, looking out the window at her weeping willow tree while she stirred something in the pot as she shared life's secrets. Always keep a quarter in your purse in case you need to make an emergency call.
Invest in a good slip and girdle. And always, always bet on the Detroit Tigers. To this day, you can still find me sitting with an elder, whether it's someone's great aunt at the family dinner, a stranger on a park bench, or my husband's 96-year-old grandmother. I have always been attracted to the walking libraries and life lessons that exist in the minds of those who have lived long lives.
Our first story is told by Ishmael Beah. The civil war that tore apart Sierra Leone was long and brutal, and it had a devastating effect on the population, especially the elders. Ishmael's award-winning book, A Long Way Gone, details how he was recruited into the army at 13 and became a boy soldier. In this story, we get to meet his extraordinary grandma. Here's Ishmael Beah.
At the end of the Civil War, 11 year Civil War in my country Sierra Leone, everyone was looking for somebody they knew before the war, before that madness. Family, friends, neighbors, somebody to be able to remind them of what their lives had been before that violent and horrific time.
I was 12 years old when the war started and my grandparents were really instrumental figures in my life, especially my grandmother. My grandmother always did whatever she wanted. She didn't conform to anything at all. And this was very uncommon in the community that I grew up in.
In fact, she was one of the only women who owned her own farm, a plot of land where she grew cassava, rice, and any other crop that she wanted. I would watch her sort of do it from scratch. And I would come along, not necessarily to help, because my help was not really much.
And I would stand back and admire my grandmother with a machete and axe in her hand when she would literally attack a jungle and cut down humongous trees fiercely and with ferocity. And then she would come from under the bush and she would say to me, now that's how you brush. Make me proud, my grandson. And I would look at her.
She had looked at this jungle that the sun couldn't even penetrate in before that was now flattened. She would look at it sitting just to catch her breath a little bit. And of course, just by holding the machete, my hands were already blistered. I hadn't already started cutting anything. And then I would go in there to do whatever little working I needed to do.
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Chapter 2: How did Ishmael Beah's grandmother impact his life during the Sierra Leone war?
And then he would come back on the veranda with his cassette tape, and he would press play, and he would sit, and he would play that music that my grandmother would love. The traditional music would begin to fill the air. And my grandmother would be sitting in the yard resting, and she would look, and my grandfather's eyes would be ready to meet hers.
She would look at her, and then she would get up, and she would go into the room, and when she returned, she was elegantly dressed, and my grandfather was waiting to hold her hand. She would refuse at first, be reluctant, and then they would start dancing, and they would start dancing, and I would admire them.
This was one of the last memories I had of my grandmother before the war began, where we lost everybody, and a lot of people died during that time. At the beginning of the war, Everybody was separated from their families. I didn't know what had happened to my brothers and my mother.
Eventually, I found out that my brothers, my two brothers, and my immediate family, my two brothers and my mother, were killed in the war. And so it happened to so many other people in Sierra Leone. During this war also, children were being sought after and recruited to fight as soldiers. And at that time, these children were forced to inflict violence upon their elders.
In my community, you couldn't speak back to somebody who was older than you. But the war used this as a way to terrorize the structures that had existed. So all through this time when I was running from the war, I kept thinking about my grandmother, whether she had survived because she was an elder.
Eventually, I was recruited to fight as one of those children that was used as a soldier to fight in this war. I came out of that war luckily for me alive, and I thought about my grandmother. I spent 10 years going back home to Kabati, to Sierra Leone, looking for my grandmother constantly.
But each time I would have leads and I would follow them and they would come to a dead end and I would lose her. I didn't know whether it was something within me. I always believed that my grandmother survived. That if anybody could survive, she was the one who did it because of how she was before the war. I'd been going around back and forth every now and then. Then one day,
I was back in Sierra Leone, in my country, and I went to the village and someone told me that my grandmother had returned. I didn't want to believe it because I'd done this so many times. Nonetheless, I began to walk back to the house that I knew my grandmother had lived. When I began to approach it, I saw somebody sitting on the veranda, and I recognized from afar that this was my grandmother.
She was looking somewhere else, lost in her thoughts, and as I got closer, she raised her head and she saw me. And she stood up, as strong as she had been when she attacked those bushes, and she began to wept as I came closer. She shook my hand, she held me closer to her, and she tried to pick me up. But she couldn't do it. And so she said to me, what has happened to you?
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