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Jared F

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A Thousand Farewells

by Nahlah Ayed

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read in January 2013

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Jared F said: " It’s become commonplace to read Western views on the Middle East, stories of war-time journalists close the action, and of the struggles of Western women in the Middle East, but each of those stories exists as a separate entity, largely unconnected t It’s become commonplace to read Western views on the Middle East, stories of war-time journalists close the action, and of the struggles of Western women in the Middle East, but each of those stories exists as a separate entity, largely unconnected to the other. Though in Nahlah Ayed’s A Thousand Farewells all of those stories come together as she tells of her life as a Palestinian-Canadian journalist, bouncing from conflict to conflict and trying to find her place as a citizen of the West and the Middle East.

The book follows Ayed’s journey through a nomadic childhood as her parents emigrated from Palestine to Canada, only to relocate their family back in to a Palestinian refugee camp in Amman a few years later. It also provides a short yet sweet history lesson to provide the reader with context for the stories and gives her multi-national journalistic perspective on most major Middle Eastern conflicts in her professional career.

Part autobiography, part history lesson, and part human-interest story, A Thousand Farewells obviously has a lot going on at the same time, and would arguably be a very difficult piece to write. Not often are heartbreaking personal experiences packed tightly with factual data on the history of the Arab Spring. Though, for a book that could very well be three separate books, the content is surprisingly well organized and flows quite naturally. At times however, the reader is left wanting more as certain sections and stories seem cut short in the interest of packing more information in to the text. In fact Ayed could easily produce 300 pages on her personal stories from Baghdad and still have to let interesting pieces fall to the editing floor.

2012 is an interesting time for A Thousand Farewells to be released as the landscape for journalism, especially female journalists in the Middle East, is changing rapidly. Nearly twenty years ago Anne Sebba released Battling For News, a history of women reporters overcoming sexism, and is now re-releasing the book with a new foreword cautioning young female journalists about the dangers of reporting in the Middle East. In an interview with The Atlantic’s Emily Chertoff, Sebba points to the sexual assault of Lara Logan during a Mubarak protest as proof that women are becoming targets in the Middle East, especially in Muslim culture, and that the process and speed of modern news reporting is only making things more frantic.

A Thousand Farewells hints at these problems throughout though the story doesn’t have the same agenda that Battling For News does. Ayed however, may be an outlier as she can approach each case from a Palestinian or a Canadian perspective and use the experience to become more in tune with the situation. In several stories Ayed demonstrates this as she can tell when a situation is about make a turn for the worse before it does by reading the people, and uses her knowledge of the language and the culture to protect herself or even blend in.

Young female journalists should be inspired by the passion and drive of Ayed, but also heed the caution of Sebba and realize that Ayed does possess a certain set of skills that allow her privileges which may not be bestowed on most Westerners in the same situation. Though even then, Ayed tells of an experience in Iraq when the situation became too much and almost resulted her being beaten to death.

The ultimate truth that flows throughout A Thousand Farewells, and one that can be translated to any number of story telling outlets, is her motto that “people are the story, always.” In each story and experience Ayed details the people she was with and the people that she meets, and it’s those details and their experiences that really make A Thousand Farewells cohesive as a story teller’s story. Without it, it would literally be part autobiography, part history lesson, and part human-interest story, and nothing more. ...more "

Feb 28, 2013 07:22PM · see review