Ayed's story is fascinating for many reasons, primarily due to her ability to tell the grassroots stories in an extremely tumultuous region. There is chaos constantly swirling around her and she is tasked with sorting through it and making sense of it all, as well as giving perspective to whatever she possibly can. As a journalist, her job is nearly impossible. But somehow, she pulls it off.
Near the beginning of the book, her parents take her away from her comfortable home in Canada when she is only seven years old, forcing the family to live in absolute squalor in a United Nations refugee camp in Amman, Jordan. Ayed herself says "though I endlessly questioned their decision and resented it for many years as a child, as an adult I understood the logic behind it - though I still didn't condone it."
Pardon me, but I don't condone or understand it. I think forcing a child to live in a slum and shit in a hole in the ground is child abuse and I couldn't fathom why a parent would subject their child to that.
That being said, this first experience in the Middle-East as a young child lays the groundwork for her to become an extremely strong and capable journalist. She understands what the people are going through and the frustrations they live every day, and this true empathy is a journalistic necessity.
...
The troubling parts of the book are her constant introduction to relatives, colleagues, towns, cities, and camps. The names of everyone and everything tend to get lost in the shuffle, specifically because she does so much and experiences so many different places, that it's difficult to keep track of everything.
The only thing I would have liked to see in the book that wasn't there, was some Canadian perspective from her colleagues back home. Once in awhile we are given some interaction between Ayed and the CBC, but for the most part she is just telling the story of her experience in the Middle-East, which admittedly, is an incredible one.
Reading this book as a prospective journalist, I think the most important thing I took away is the empathy Ayed shows towards her fellow human beings despite the inhumane living conditions they're forced to navigate through.
During one of the more disturbing points in the book, when a mass grave is being excavated, there are men, women, and children sifting through a massive pile of bones and corpses, looking for unaccounted for loved-ones. Ayed spots a woman weeping on the hill, rocking back and forth in agony.
She writes: "Much as I wanted to, I couldn't bring myself to approach the woman on the hill. How do you do that? No journalism class teaches you that."
--And she's right.
There are recent examples of putrid, pathetic excuses for 'journalists' that will sacrifice the dignity of their subject and/or the dignity of themselves to get a story or an exclusive interview, and bravo to Ayed for not crossing that threshold.
--But I digress.
...
This is one of the first non-fiction books I've read that depicts a history recent enough that I can actually remember what was happening, or at least what we were being told was happening.
It's shocking, and kind of terrifying, to see how these 'revolutions' played out at the ground level. Reading about the horrific acts of human-rights abuse and specifically, the violence and blatant inequality towards women, makes me wonder why the riots and protests and revolutions never happened sooner.
It's easy for me to sit behind a keyboard and chastise a culture for being behind the times, backwards, and even archaic in how they treat their citizens (and women in particular), but I couldn't help but become frustrated... by the fact that in today's world, people still allow these horrific living conditions to exist for massive amounts of people. It's a travesty.
Again, bravo to Ayed for writing this book and shedding some light on a very dark period in human history, which gave way to a potentially bright future for millions of the previously brutally suppressed.
...
-NxB
