Nabeel's Song: A Family Story of Survival in Iraq [Hardcover]

Jo Tatchell (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 19, 2007

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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 [Baghdad's] 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." (June)
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From Booklist

Although tales of horror and injustice under Saddam Hussein's Iraqi regime are commonplace journalistic fodder, such harrowing stories of torture, abuse, repression, and deceit take on an otherworldly quality when they can be directly associated with the lives of one average yet audacious family. Coming of age during the 1960s when the seeds of revolution were lying dormant throughout the country, Nabeel Yasin could pursue his dream of becoming a poet and speaking out against oppression without undue fear of reprisal. All that changed when Saddam's Baath Party came into power. Known as Iraq's most famous and beloved poet, Nabeel immediately attracted the attention of Saddam's secret police, who coerced, beat, and imprisoned members of Nabeel's family before finally declaring Nabeel himself an enemy of the state. Forced into exile, Nabeel, his wife, and his young son flee to Europe, where they helplessly watch their country deteriorate as Saddam further strengthens his tyrannical power. Tatchell's electrifying account of one family's will to survive humanizes the stories behind the headlines. Carol Haggas
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Doubleday (June 19, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385521219
• ISBN-13: 978-0385521215
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.6 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,636,885 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars A universal story of courage and resistance, September 14, 2010

By 

Mal Warwick (Berkeley, California) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Nabeel's Song (Kindle Edition)

The celebrated Iraqi poet Nabeel Yasin and his family were front-row witnesses to the brutality, the indignities, and the humiliations of life under Saddam Hussein for more than three decades. In this lovingly written family biography, Jo Tatchell, a British freelance journalist and friend of Yasin, tells the story of Nabeel and his three brothers and two sisters, from the arranged marriage of their parents through the liberation of Baghdad in 2003 and the tragically sad years that followed.

In exploring the unique character of its subjects, Nabeel's Song relates not just the tale of one remarkable family but the human history of the Iraqi nation during the final third of the 20th Century and the opening years of the 21st.

Nabeel Yasin, known to this day as "The Poet of Baghdad," achieved acclaim as an artist early in life. The passion he invested in his poetry was matched by the fervor of his opposition to the regime of Saddam Hussein, but Nabeel was hardly alone in his discontent. Both his older brothers, one an Arab nationalist, the other a Communist, suffered even more at the hands of the regime, cycling in and out of Saddam's prisons and emerging again and again emaciated and wounded both physically and emotionally. Their siblings, too, were victims of the dictatorship, with a younger brother drafted into the carnage of the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s and a sister, a brilliant physician, forced to practice her profession in the country's very worst hospitals because she refused to join Saddam's Ba'athist Party.

Nabeel's Song neatly unfolds in two parts. The first, concluding in 1980 with Nabeel and his family's nerve-wracking flight from Iraq, covers the years of his childhood, youth, and early artistic success. Part 2 relates Nabeel's peripatetic exile, moving from country to country in an often futile search for work as a journalist or in academia before he, his wife, and children finally settle in the U.K., where they still live today.

This book gave me a fuller and more understandable picture of life in Iraq under Saddam Hussein than years of newspaper and magazine stories had managed to do. Nabeel's Song is well worth reading.

(From Mal Warwick's Blog on Books"

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This is now being published at The Poet of Baghdad, December 16, 2008

By 

Mariyah R "Mariyah" (Cortaro, AZ United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Nabeel's Song: A Family Story of Survival in Iraq (Hardcover)

This is a true biography of a man and his family who lived before, during, and after the reign of the despotic ruler Saddam Hussein in Iraq. You can read how he and his family suffered through beatings, incarcerations and murders of near relatives and friends and the activities of the terrorist regime of Saddam. Written with compassion and wit, a wonderful book! It is now being published as the Poet of Baghdad.