A Thousand Farewells begins with Ayed's journey from St. Boniface, to Amman, Jordan, where her parents forced her to spend seven years of her childhood to teach her about her culture and people. It then speaks of her return to Osborne Village to work in a store with her family, before going to Ottawa for journalism school. The majority of the book however revolves around her experiences as a reporter as she covers the war in Iraq, unrest in Lebanon, and the revolution in Egypt.
This book works great because of the subject matter and the way that it is presented by Ayed. Ayed is living a journalist's dream for the most part. She was one of the first reporters in Afghanistan after America invaded, as she was for the Iraq war. She also happened to be in Lebanon during the Israeli hostage crisis, and the more recent Egyptian revolution. I think the stories of mosque bombings, shoot-outs, and interviews with people describing incredible and usually horrible events make the book hard to put down.
What didn't work for me though was the bouncing back and forth between Ayed's personal experiences and the political and historical conflict that she was involved in. It was done as well as it could, but I was so struck with a witness's testimony about Iraqi torture houses, that I really wanted to hear more about it. But by that time, Ayed was talking about funerals, and after capturing that so well I naturally wanted to hear more about it, but by that time, she was writing about her time covering the mass exodus from Iraq to Syria. She's a reporter, so it's her job to just touch on things and give a three-minute news piece about it, but I would've loved more detail on some subjects and less details on others.
One of the only things missing from A Thousand Farewells was a definite conclusion, and that's hardly Ayed's fault. It's hard to put a bow on a story about the Middle East, and I felt like her epilogue only raised a ton more questions. It was like her book ended on a question mark and that was pretty unsatisfying, but it's non-fiction, and I guess that's the way it is sometimes.
I think journalists can learn a lot about talking to people and how to get something when you know they don't want to give it to you. As a female reporter in the Middle East, it must have presented difficulties for Ayed that would have been tough to overcome, but she somehow gets interviews from a lot of people. One of my favourite parts in the book is when she's interviewing an Iraqi man who just got one of his relatives out of a mass grave made under the Saddam Hussein regime, and then man asks where she's from. After finding out she's a Sunni, he gives a disapproving look and people gather and start rabbling. Then Ayed pushes back and says, "I've lived most of my life in Canada. I know what he did and it was wrong. Do you want to do this interview and tell the world what's happened to your family or not?" And the man relaxes and does the interview. Ayed says early on in her Jordanian refugee camp house how she felt angry when boys got preferential treatment over girls, and that shows today. She knows when to push back, and when to be kind, and this is information journalists could definitely use.
A few years ago, I read Faith at War by Yaroslav Trofimov and that was a terrific book. It also took a look at the Middle East and featured interviews with civilians affected by the war. I feel that book though, had a certain topic that it was focused on, while A Thousand Farewells, rather than focusing on war in the Middle East, focused on Ayed's experience while covering war in the Middle East.
This book affected me in several different ways. My heart broke for her as a child, to be uprooted from her cozy Canadian life and cast into a Jordanian refugee camp is pretty heartbreaking. During her adult years though, I felt a mix of emotions. Heartbreak for the people of Iraq and Afghanistan, joy and sadness for Egypt, and all this with an underlying pride that Ayed was able to be there for it all.
Plus, she's from Winnipeg, so that really seals the deal.
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