Cassettes

Ishmael and his friends had arrived in a government-occupied village called Yele, and said they finally felt safe in that village. However, the longer they spent in the village the more they began to feel unsafe again. Eventually, the lieutenant of the group in the village announced that all the boys and men in the village would have to report to him tomorrow and get their gear because they needed more men to fight. So, the next morning as he is changing into his new uniform his pants are taken and put into a fire of everyone’s belongings. 

“I took off my old pants, which contained the rap cassettes. As I was putting on my new army shorts, a soldier took my old pants and threw them into a blazing fire that had been set to burn our old belongings. I ran toward the fire, but the cassettes had already started to melt. Tears formed in my eyes, and my lips shook as I turned away.” (p.110)

 In the book, the cassettes are very representative of childhood. After his cassettes are burned, he loses a lot of his innocence and his childhood is essentially taken away from him. He is brainwashed by the Sierra Leonean forces to become a killing machine. He is convinced that the rebels are at fault for all of his problems and he is encouraged to kill as many of them as possible, even though some of them are only children like him and are in completely the same position as him.  He becomes addicted to not only the drugs he is being given to him by the army, but the gunfights and killing that comes with being a soldier. He even states that he lost all sense of his surroundings once he killed that first person in his first gunfight and how easy it was for him to slit a man’s throat in the competition he participated in to kill the rebel the fastest.

Once Ishmael is picked up by the UNICEF officers and taken to their facility. He arrives there and is very defiant. He and most others who have been taken from the battlezones are extremely resistant to any attempt to normalize them again, Ishmael is confused by what is happening. He believes that he should still be fighting because he is so severely affected by all of the lies and propaganda spread by the military. He meets a nurse who works at the facility and she becomes the first person he has opened up to. They become friends and eventually she buys him a gift.

“She threw a package at me. I held it in my hand, wondering what it was and why she had gotten it for me. She was looking at me, waiting for me to open it. When I unwrapped it, I jumped up and hugged her, but immediately held back my happiness. I sternly asked, ‘Why did you get me this Walkman and cassette if we are not friends? And how did you know that I like rap music?’” (p.154)

The cassettes here represent childhood as well, after he receives the cassettes he starts to accept the fact that he was being fed propaganda in order to make him a better soldier. The workers at the UNICEF facility always said, “It’s not your fault,” whenever they did something harmful, but the kids always hated it. Although after the cassettes were given to him, he began to believe what they were saying was true. He also began to dream about his family after he received the cassettes. They were like a lifeline to his childhood and when he saw them he returned to his normal self, like a ghost leaving the body of Ishmael.

The plot of the book revolves around the cassette tapes. Once he loses them, he becomes a monster, with no empathy, but when he has them he is just a boy again and he regains his innocence. He was without his cassettes for the darker parts of the story, and with them he seemed like a normal kid living in a rough place. Ishmael’s sanity relies on his cassettes as they are the link between him and his childhood and innocence.