British journalist Tatchell offers a sensitively composed account
of the beleaguered life and family of Iraqi poet Nabeel Yasin as
they weathered decades of repressive government regimes.Tatchell's
narrative enters seamlessly into the lives of these middle-class,
politically aware Iraqis struggling to keep their family intact
amid constant upheavals, from the late 1950s, when the army stormed
Baghdad and murdered King Faisal and his family, ushering in the
modernizing regime of General Kassim, through the brutal rise of
the Ba'athist Party in 1963, to the fall of leader Saddam Hussein
in 2003. The Yasin family, composed of shopkeeper father Yasin, his
seamstress wife, Sabria, and their seven children and numerous
relatives, enjoy relative prosperity living in an upscale Baghdad
neighborhood until the boys get older and dabble in political
events and the family's security is threatened by the National
Guard. First, one of the eldest sons, Juma'a, a teacher in his 20s,
is seized as a Communist and held and tortured in the notorious
football stadium; later, younger son Nabeel, a poet at the
university, begins attracting the regime's disapproval with his
outspoken criticism. Youngest son Tariq is eventually conscripted
into the Iran-Iraq war, while sister Amel, a doctor, is ordered not
to care for "enemies" of the state. Nabeel is relentlessly
persecuted by Saddam's regime, deprived of his livelihood,
blacklisted and driven underground until he's betrayed by an uncle,
when he is sent into exile, along with his wife, Nada, and young
son. They live in exile for 21 years, all the while the other
family members, either in exile or in Baghdad, try to survive the
hardships - mother Sabria's losses are particularly poignant. The
tremendous human suffering of a nation viewed through the plight of
one courageous family. Tatchell's work brings to light an important
Iraqi voice. (Kirkus Reviews)
Nabeel's Song is an epic true story of one family's experience of
life before, during and after the regime of Saddam Hussein. Nabeel
Yasin had an ordinary childhood, in a middle-class neighbourhood in
1950s Baghdad. He showed an early gift for poetry and as a young
man became famous for it. But by the end of the 1970s, Saddam's
rise to power was encroaching on his life, and that of his family.
Nabeel's brothers were arrested and he himself was denounced as an
enemy of the state and fled Iraq in 1980. Nabeel's Song tells his
story, and that of the family that he left behind; his matriarch of
a mother Sabria, his four brothers and their rebellion against
Saddam's regime, and his two sisters - all ordinary people living
in extraordinary and difficult times. This is a moving family story
of exile and endurance.Jo Tatchell's moving narrative, from
Nabeel's mouth, tells of endurance, literary resistance and the
courage of a loving, close-knit family opporessed by tyranny and
war. - The Times.
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