Nabeel's Song
A Family Story of Survival in Iraq
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- USD 9.99
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- USD 9.99
Descripción editorial
In the winter of 1979 Nabeel Yasin, Iraq's most famous young poet, gathered together a handful of belongings and fled Iraq with his wife and son. Life in Baghdad had become intolerable. Silenced by a series of brutal beatings at the hands of the Ba'ath Party's Secret Police and declared an “enemy of the state,” he faced certain death if he stayed.
Nabeel had grown up in the late 1950s and early '60s in a large and loving family, amid the domestic drama typical of Iraq's new middle class, with his mother Sabria working as a seamstress to send all of her seven children to college. As his story unfolds, Nabeel meets his future wife and finds his poetic voice while he is a student. But Saddam's rise to power ushers in a new era of repression, imprisonment and betrayal from which few families will escape intact. In this new climate of intimidation and random violence Iraqis live in fear and silence; yet Nabeel’s mother tells him “It is your duty to write.” His poetry, a blend of myth and history, attacks the regime determined to silence him. As Nabeel’s fame and influence as a poet grows, he is forced into hiding when the Party begins to dismantle the city’s infrastructure and impose power cuts and food rationing. Two of his brothers are already in prison and a third is used as a human minesweeper on the frontline of the Iran-Iraq war. After six months in hiding, Nabeel escapes with his wife and young son to Beirut, Paris, Prague, Budapest, and finally England.
Written by Jo Tatchell, a journalist who has spent many years in the Middle East and who is a close friend of Nabeel Yasin’s, Nabeel's Song is the gripping story of a family and its fateful encounter with history. From a warm, lighthearted look at the Yasin family before the Saddam dictatorship, to the tale of Nabeel’s persecution and daring flight, and the suspense-filled account of his family’s rebellion against Saddam's regime, Nabeel's Song is an intimate, illuminating, deeply human chronicle of a country and a culture devastated by political repression and war.
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In this biography of the Iraqi poet Nabeel Yasin, freelance writer Tatchell offers a portrait of a courageous family, a devastating political regime and a writer's escape and exile. Before the Ba'athist "crackdown on writers, poets, and artists," Yasin had been "one of most celebrated poets"; in March 1976, however, he was officially declared an "Enemy of the State." Tatchell divides the book in two sections, tracing Yasin's life in Iraq from the 1950s to 1980 in the first and his exile in the second. Even as the Ba'athist regime impinges, through multiple arrests and torture, upon the Yasins, the first section is particularly rich in its evocation of family life and tradition. The stress and anxiety of exile occupy the second as Yasin with his wife and children seek a place to settle (Prague, Damascus, Budapest, Leipzig, among them) before landing in England in 1992. Straddling the imagined and the historical, Tatchell's novelized biography takes the reader inside the thoughts and reproduces the dialogue of a wide cast of characters. While this approach is usually enlightening and compelling, here it makes it difficult to distinguish the speculative from the factual. Given Yasin's status as a poet, the biography reveals little more about his poetry than names of his most famous works: "Brother Yasin" and "Brother Yasin Again."
