Nabeel's Song

Author: Jo Tatchell
Genre: Biography
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Date: 2006
Place: London
ISBN: 0 340 89748 1 (paperback)
Price: $8.74 (Amazon.com)
Page No: 369 pages

Reviewed by Brenda Daniels ©

The date of the book sale was pencilled into my diary. Plans were made to arrive at the store early enough to browse through the best books on offer. But, not one to do well at sales at the best of times, on the day in question I found myself listlessly fingering the spines of untidily stacked books, disappointed and confused by the jumble of titles. “How strange and serendipitous life is,” (to quote from Nabeel’s Song) that, having given up rummaging and settled on merely the latest issue of Newsweek, I should spot one copy of Nabeel’s Song by Jo Tatchell nonchalantly propped up behind a pillar and bearing the humble price of R35. This book wasn’t on my list of recommended titles. I’m glad it wasn’t – I might have missed it otherwise.

Nabeel’s Song recounts the story of well-known Iraqui poet, Nabeel Yasin, who reluctantly fled his homeland to live in exile in Britain. Brought up in a humble but principled Muslim family, Nabeel and his six siblings were educated in a formerly progressive Iraq and encouraged early on to speak their minds. The family began to prosper when Nabeel’s father, Yasin, purchased a stationery store. This period was short-lived, however, and the children’s individualistic traits proved disastrous when Sadam Hussein and his Ba’athist regime came to power. One by one, each of the Yasin brothers falls foul of Hussein’s neurotic laws, resulting in imprisonment, beatings, military drafting and lives spent on the run. Nabeel, who became a poet and a writer, spoke his mind and paid the price. Able to evade capture, he and his wife Nada and young son, left Iraq and settled in Britain where Nabeel continued to put into writing the anguish he experienced over the homeland and family he loved. His poems wend their way back to Iraq where they are secretly distributed by a relative to a people starved of literature and free thought.

Written by Jo Tatchell, a journalist who spent many years in the Middle East, Nabeel’s Song is a clear reflection of the erosive effects that a government can have on a family and a nation. Despite the sobering nature of the recorded events, however, this eye-opening, beautifully told story also portrays how love and hope can bind people together.