A Thousand Farewells

I enjoyed A Thousand Farewells by Nahlah Ayed immensely.

I had heard there would be points in the book that dragged on, but as I read through the last few pages, I realized I never felt like it did.

Maybe because I’m fascinated by the Middle East, bore out of frustration and enchantment with its cities, regimes, and people.

Ayed visited Cairo the year of its uprisings and I visited a year earlier during a vacation with my family in Egypt. I wish I could say when visiting the people working at the pyramids, perfume shops, and museums I could sense an uprising was on the way, but I didn’t.

However, that doesn’t mean I’m not surprised that it happened.

Ayed’s book works because she shows the reader why each upraising occurred. She doesn’t pretend it’s black or white or judge it through a Western perspective. She takes in every facet, whether it’s good, bad, or ugly. Ayed shows us the frustration Middle Eastern men and women who’ve faced under their ruthless dictators and feared regimes.

While reading the book I often became frustrated by the violence, the blinders some people wore, and the way religion was all-encompassing and surpassed the bounds of families as important.

There were a lot of good things about the book, although the one gripe I had was the chronology could be hard to follow. She jumped back and forth quite a bit between time frames, but that isn’t the end of the world, it was just confusing sometimes.

Also a diagram of her family tree would have helped.

However I wasn’t as bothered by this as I thought I would be. I often had to read back and check to make sure I understood whom she was writing about, but I reconciled my frustration by the understanding that these weren’t Canadian names. They were Middle Eastern, so of course I would have difficulty remembering them, which is no fault of Ayeds.

Yet, what I sometimes felt was missing from the book was Ayed. She gave us small bits of her accomplishments and regrets, but she spent so many years between Egypt, Lebanon, and Iraq, that I never got a sense of who she was and her desires outside of reporting.

I felt like a witness to the catastrophe through Ayed’s narration, but sometimes I felt I was reading through a faceless narrator who occasionally suffered from blackouts.

Learning from the book, I can read the journalistic skill of separating her feelings from the Middle East and the decisions and views of the people she interviewed. There was objectivity in her writing and I never felt it was sappy. It was factual. However I enjoyed that she used comparisons. It was interesting to read about the familiarities and differences between Winnipeg and the Middle East.

I think it would be hard to keep the judgment from affecting the book, but she managed to separate herself, even in moments where I would find it hard to, like when the man chose his religion over his kidnapped daughter. That was hard to stomach.

Ayed used people to tell her story and it reminds me of Michael Moore’s documentary Sicko. He used people to tell the story as well, the injustices that faced Americans without health insurance.

And while Moore’s had a bias towards the Bush government in the film, it didn’t cheapen the stories he told about the people who lost a loved one after they were refused treatment because of the wrong health insurance.

The people in the documentary were denied a basic freedom- a necessity in order to live- and even though the people in America and the people in the Middle East are worlds apart, you see these injustices and in that way, it’s comparable.

When Ayed writes, “people are not quotes or clips, used to illustrate stories about war and conflict. People are the story, always.” It’s perfect advice for a journalist’s success, and for the success of a documentary. People want to find an emotional connection- to feel anger, hurt, and joy- in order to engage with what they’re reading or watching.

Even if the topic isn’t new, the stories are. They’re all different. They’re all coming from people who go through and overcome different struggles. They’re the story.

As I said earlier, I enjoyed the book. I never felt that moments dragged or were boring. I found the whole book interesting and captivating.

This year, I have two friends who visited or are visiting the Middle East. It’s particularly disconcerting because once again there is major conflict in areas like Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine. Not that it ever truly ends either.

However, while I’m scared for them, I’m also excited. I want to visit the Middle East too. I want to go to Beirut, where I have friends who originate from there. And I want to explore and experience the culture.

Ayed’s book let me do that through the comfort of my home, and although it wasn’t always pretty, it ignited a sense of hope in me for these people. You don’t often see it through the headlines and the leaders of these countries, but Ayed managed to convey the hope of the people rather than the rhetoric of sensationalism.