A Thousand Farewells

Nahlah Ayed’s book A Thousand Farewells covers her many travels to conflicts the Middle East as a CBC journalist. In the book, Ayed discusses her experiences of war both as a child and as a journalist.  Ayed discusses not only what she has seen but also how conflict and travel affect her personally.

As a piece of storytelling, A Thousand Farewells works well.  It has its share of drama and tension, particularly when Ayed describes her near-death experience in Iraq.   With great detail, she describes the gunman who took her to Muqtada al-Sadr’s office.  The gunman punched her repeatedly in the head and came close to killing her (p. 146).  This was the one part of the book that stood out to me the most because Ayed did such a good job detailing how she got there and how she escaped.

I also enjoyed Ayed’s story of returning to Winnipeg after spending seven years in a refugee camp in Amman, Jordan.  She fills it with lots of interesting details that really hook the reader, such as hugging her father upon returning or being called a “Paki” at her high school.

Considering how much Ayed went through, I expected her prose to be engaging, vivid, and revealing.  Unfortunately, it turned out to be rather technical and mechanical for the most part.  Consider, for instance, the following passage by Ayed: 

"Baghdad was coming apart.  At the height of the carnage, the violence had sifted its people according to religion and sect, pulling them swiftly apart the way DNA separates in a dividing cell." (p. 151)     

                                                                                                                                                    

The writing is competent and clear, but Ayed does too much telling and not enough showing.  Showing the exact details of carnage is much more effective than just calling it ‘carnage’.  In addition, I felt Ayed should have been more creative with her prose.  It is true that a simple, straightforward reportage can be effective for communicating to an audience.  But it’s also important to consider the medium.  Ayed’s prose style works great for a newspaper feature article, but a 340-page book should go further than basic reportage. 

Ayed should have used more metaphors and similes (like the DNA example) and other elements found within creative fiction, such as a stream-of-consciousness narrative.  I found the narrative in this book to be rather choppy.  Ayed tends to jump back and forth from historical exposition to a dramatic travelogue, and the result is often jarring.  As a whole, Ayed seems to be emotionally detached from  her writing, which can sometimes be alienating to the odd reader who wants to know more about her feelings and experiences.  But maybe that was her intention.

One book I find similar to A Thousand Farewells is Michael Herr’s Dispatches, which is about Herr’s experiences in the Vietnam War.  Like A Thousand Farewells, Dispatches is linear and chronological, yet is also episodic.  The chapters function as segments with a thesis connecting each of them.  The biggest difference between both books is that Ayed explains the history of the conflicts, whereas Herr focuses more on the action itself.

A Thousand Farewells is important reading for aspiring journalists who want to work overseas.  When reading the book, they will see that reporting in a war zone can be a high-stress job.  While working in Lebanon, Ayed experienced dizzy spells due to the sheer amount of stress (p. 241).  Ayed also offers a useful message to journalists in this passage:

"People are not quotes or clips, used to illustrate stories about war and conflict.  People are the story, always.  And you cannot know what people are thinking by reading the reports.  You must come to know them somehow.  Speaking the language, as I did, helps tremendously, but it is not a prerequisite.  Taking the time to speak to people off camera -- at length -- is." (p. 324)

There are moments throughout the book that feature interesting profiles of people in war.  In Baghdad, Ayed befriends a woman named Reem and discovers her poetry, which works as a great hook (p. 134).    She even meets opium dealers in Pakistan (p. 77).  These little bits are the strongest parts of the book, and it is essential for journalists to spend extended time with their subjects to get the hooks needed for their stories.  

When reading this book, I kind of felt disoriented.  Ayed goes to Egypt, leaves, and eventually returns to a new scene in Tahrir Square.  I've always pictured the Middle East as a place of conflict and confusion with vast patches of deserted landscapes, and A Thousand Farewells seemed to confirm those suspicions.  However, when Ayed goes from one town to the next and mentions a whole plethora of names and locations, I feel like I'm in a land I still don't understand despite reading a great deal about it.  The main thing I can take away from A Thousand Farewells is that the Middle East, like all regions, is not easy to simplify.