A Thousand Farewells

Let’s take a break from the exasperating state of WWE to highlight a certain famous Winnipegger. No, I’m not talking about Chris Jericho. Ladies and gentlemen, I interrupt your scheduled WWE blog post to bring you my far-from-expert opinion on Nahlah Ayed’s book, A Thousand Farewells.

If you watch or follow CBC News, you may be familiar with Nahlah Ayed, a foreign correspondent who has spent years covering the Middle East. In A Thousand Farewells, Ayed gives a candid look into her life and her experiences in the region, providing extensive and sometimes startling insight well beyond standard reporting. Here are some of my thoughts on what I read.

Ayed provides excellent context, telling the circumstances of the Middle East and its people. Through her family’s hardships and sacrifices, and her own experiences as a child living in a refugee camp, the reader relates with the desperation so common in the region. Throughout her book, Ayed writes not only about her family, but about the rage, frustration, and grief of dozens of individuals, helping the reader comprehend the situation. By knowing their personal strife, we can better understand the underlying causes, the political turmoil, and the conflicting desire for stability and change.

The Middle East can seem so far away from Winnipeg, its problems and people just vague information in the news, but Ayed puts it into perspective by giving the poverty and oppression voices. We move from the comforts of Canada to the slums of Jordan with her, and the best parts of the book are when she connects the reader with the emotions of those coping with adversity that is hard to even imagine. 

What doesn’t work so well, however, are the frequently long, dry history lessons. With all the dates, names, and sometimes extraneous details, the history drags in parts and removes the reader from the narrative. While it’s important to know the reasons behind the revolutions later in the book—the senseless torture, futile elections, unwarranted arrests—the occasionally redundant explanations of political parties and religious groups could’ve probably been left out.

Also, it might’ve been nice to hear more from the people who were so close to Ayed during her years in the Middle East. She frequently mentions her driver, her fixer, her cameramen and producers, but rarely do they say or do anything—in the book, anyway. I’m sure they were very vocal during their time with Ayed. I get that she couldn’t exactly record them for quotes at all times, but she seems isolated and alone when really she’s traveling with a tight group. If something is missing from the book, it’s more interactions with her companions, because they often feel like faceless ghosts floating at her side.

And that’s weird, because at the end of the day, the book is about understanding people, which is why I wish there were less raw history lessons and more reactions and interviews. If journalists take anything away from A Thousand Farewells, let it be that stories are not about stark statistics or a chronology of events. Sure, those things can help create context for a story, but they are not the story itself.

For years I’ve watched stories about conflicts in the Middle East, but rarely have they felt so important or tangible than when I was reading A Thousand Farewells and learning about the people involved. The number of people who have died in a conflict is tragic. However, that statistic means little compared to the reactions of people witnessing all those dead getting ripped out of a mass grave. 

To any journalists reading this, the following was one of my favourite bits from the book, and I hope you can appreciate why.

Nahlah Ayed wrote: “You must also be able to put yourself in the shoes of anyone, anywhere, to truly tell their story. People are not quotes or clips used to illustrate stories about war and conflict. People are the story, always.”

And I think that’s why non-fiction television shows like The First 48 are growing in popularity. You turn on the news and you hear stories of crime every night. Someone gets robbed, someone gets assaulted, someone gets killed, but you don’t see or hear anyone involved outside of maybe a photograph and a brief clip or quote.

But with something like The First 48, you witness the mother's reaction to her son getting shot. You see the wife’s reaction to her husband getting arrested. You see killers and victims in their natural state, and it’s all much more powerful and meaningful compared to the objective news.

A Thousand Farewells and The First 48 share that spirit of journalism: people are the real story. Both cover stories we receive in the form of raw information from other sources, and both enhance those stories by giving us the emotion. Through interviews and reactions, the stories become personal and engaging in a way that straight facts simply can't reproduce. That's what makes them so intriguing.

That said, I don’t think people enjoy watching tragedies. I believe we empathize, and perhaps we feel obligated to know and tell these stories to honour the victims and acknowledge the events that affect our world. It does no one any good to ignore suffering simply because it’s uncomfortable. People will never make strides toward change or progress unless they can learn from the mistakes and choices of others.  

A Thousand Farewells affected me in that it opened my eyes to a world I’ve been guilty of ignoring. I would turn on the news to see young Arab people throwing rocks at riot police, and I’d just shake my head and change the channel, never bothering to wonder why. “That has nothing to do with me,” I might think, but the world is so much bigger than Canada, even if it all sometimes feels so far away.

I’m glad Ayed could enlighten me to the circumstances of the Middle East and its people. She helped me understand that even if I might curse Winnipeg as its winter winds scratch through my gloves and bite my fingers, I should never take this land for granted. I think most of us here in Canada know how fortunate we are compared to other regions of the world—but sometimes it’s nice to have a reminder.

Until next time, have a nice day, and don’t be a jabroni.