A Thousand Farewells by Nahlah Ayed

I recently read the book A Thousand Farewells by Nahlah Ayed (for school), and so now I'm writing about it (for school).

It was a decent book. I found it boring much of the time, the writing is very dry. It pulled me in at first, then worked diligently at alienating me. It felt like an engaging, 65-page coming-of-age story followed by three hundred pages of appendices.

The early chapters work well. Nahlah started her life in the neighbourhood I live in, followed by her parents deciding to move the family from Canada to a refugee camp in Jordan. They eventually return to Canada, but the backward-seeming move instantly hooked me. Unfortunately, once her early life has been established, I was left wanting throughout the rest. I liked reading the perspective of recent political and historical events from the people on the ground where they occurred, but I felt like Nahlah disappeared after the beginning.



What doesn't work is the overabundance of information being presented. I like to learn, but this book presented me with information that fell primarily into two categories: important things needed for context (that I already knew much of from past news coverage), and superfluous details that can only add up to confusion and word count. When she includes too much background, she distracts from what's important.

I found plenty of compelling historical events, but a compelling writer's voice was missing. It doesn't read like someone's first-person perspective, much of the time it reads like it has been passed through a dozen filters.
This book would benefit from finding a more traditional story structure. It reads like a list of things that happened, the end.

What journalists can learn from this book is that the best coverage of any story is told with an intimate understanding of local culture. That journalists have to be on the ground where the news is happening, and they have to talk to the regular people, probably many of them for a long time, if they want to be true to the story. Journalists can also learn the value of reporter diversity. A major international news story is likely to have a complex puzzle behind it, and a diversity of perspectives is more likely to find a solution.

There's another non-fiction book that I read a few years ago that takes place in the Middle East, Generation Kill. It was written by Rolling Stone journalist Evan Wright about the invasion of Irag in 2003. Wright was embedded with a platoon of marines from the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion, and he only spoke English, so his story is about the American soldiers and their experience of the invasion. I found it to be very entertaining and educational about what modern warfare looks like from the perspective of a grunt. A Thousand Farewells isn't 20% as entertaining to read, but the perspective that Nahlah can share because of her background is much more valuable. She didn't need to put her trust into interpreters, and she was able to report from a more objective position and that has seemed scarce in Middle East reporting at times.

It's ultimately an informative read for someone looking for perspectives on the big changes of the past ten years in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt. It's just not very exciting.