Book Review The Resonance Today in The Radiance of Tomorrow by Alice Irene Whittaker-Cumming


I


shmael Beah’s first novel The Radiance of Tomorrow is at once


a fable, a documentary, and a story told in the oral tradition. The author


is a young person who,


as an ex-child soldier from Sierra Leone, has intimately experienced the horrors that come from war, failed


government, corruption


and violence. In this follow up to his stirring bestseller memoir The Long Way Gone, Beah tells the story of what happens after


the war, where victims come together to rebuild their lives in the face of lost hope and the breakdown of that heart of African life: community.


The novel begins as people cautiously return to their home village of Imperi after the end of Sierra Leone’s civil war. Families are fractured on both the individual and group level: physically through the loss of limbs to the rebel groups’ brutality; emotionally through the death of their family members; psychologically through the destruction of their ancestral home and the pervasive fear that war will return. Community builds slowly under the guidance of three elders, and we watch Imperi repopulate with older youth who were traumatized by the war, orphaned ex-child soldiers with no family other than each other, and young children who never experienced the devastation of war. Beah’s characters are rich and human, and we feel our hope grow as laughter, dancing and tradition slowly bring colour to a deserted village.


But then a force comes that is more destructive than any war. A foreign extractive company discovers rutile in their region, a highly sought-after mineral that is to become Imperi’s curse. The company builds pipes for water to serve their foreign workers, but the water source bypasses the villagers while mining byproducts poison their river and mutate their local fish population. A local bar is built for the miners, and the drunken roar drowns out the guiding voices of the ancestors.


Radiance of Tomorrow is told in Beah’s lyrical voice, and his rich, poetic style asks us to reexamine how the sky turns from day to night. The book is simultaneously modern and traditional: modern because of the timely examination of education, war, extractive


28 iAM Youth as... Storytellers


industry and urbanization; and traditional in how it brings to life the African storytelling that Beah remembers vividly as a young boy before the war. It is this tradition of sharing tales from one generation to another that allows elders to pass important knowledge to a community’s youth. This book forces us to pause and question: does the roar of modern life drown out these stories, and what implications does that have on the youth who have historically carried these traditions forward?


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It is up to us, the readers and listeners, to decide what we do with this acumen. We, like the community members of Imperi, can decide what to do with the essential truths and critical warnings that are embedded within these stories within a story.


Beah invites us to sit around the fire with the young people of Imperi and hear the wisdom of the elder Mama Kadie’s stories. It is up to us, the readers and listeners, to decide what we do with this acumen. We, like the community members of Imperi, can decide what to do with the essential truths and critical warnings that are embedded within these stories within a story. We can decide which type of youth we are: Colonel, the withdrawn ex- child soldier who listens from the fringes, willing to act but not to feel? Or Oura, the wise young girl who voraciously and curiously holds as many stories as she can remember, so that she can pass them on to the right person at the right time?


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This is an important book. The denouement of this heartrending novel is a testament to the essential role that youth must play in any society, if we are to battle the complex forces like mining companies and civil wars that are currently draining the heartbeat of our modern world. The Radiance of Tomorrow shows that youth should – nay, need – to tell the story.


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