Revista Brasileira de Literatura Comparada (Jun 2022)
LITERATURE AS A PLACE OF MEMORY: AN ANALYSIS OF A LONG WAY GONE, BY ISHMAEL BEAH
Abstract
The article proposes a reflection on the relationship between memory and archive from an analysis of the work A long way gone: the true story of a child soldier, by Ishmael Beah (2015), in which the author narrates his trajectory since the murder of his family during Sierra Leone’s Civil War until he fled to the United States after being forced to act as a soldier in the conflict. Based on the theoretical perspectives of Heloísa Bellotto and Terry Cook on the nature of the archive and on the theories developed by Márcio Seligmann-Silva, Walter Benjamin, Paulo Ricoeur, Michael Pollak and Diego Antonello on the mnemonic operations in the testimony of trauma, we will examine Beah’s narrative considering literature as a place of memory (NORA, 1993).
