TITLE: WAR AND ME
AUTHOR: Faleeha Hassan
PUB DATE: 08.01.2022 Now Available
SYNOPSIS: Swipe Above

Powerful
Eye Opening
Uplifting

I was weary reading about war and the casualties of those who lived through the horrors. I knew that it would be difficult and maybe even triggering, but I am glad I did. I love reading nonfiction especially memoirs that shed light to many issues in very unique perspectives.

I found the memoir interesting and hard to put down. I felt uplifted. In reading this memoir, I am changed - thank you to Faleeha Hassan for sharing her incredible story. It certainly has touched my life.

In War and Me, the first memoir by poet Faleeha Hassan, popularly known worldwide (thanks to Oprah’s website) as the “Maya Angelou of Iraq,” the author describes a life in which war follows her like a shadow. Bloody armed conflicts led by former President Saddam Hussein and provoked by the Ba’athist regime; the devastating losses of family and friends; struggles within a society resistant to the idea of a woman having agency—these conflicts laid a devastating, yet fruitful foundation for Hassan’s work.

Hassan knew loss even in her earliest days, when she was the only surviving infant of a set of twins, making her the first child born to her large family. She grew up in Najaf, Iraq, roughly 150 kilometers south of Baghdad. A simple error she made during her childhood—not closing a door tightly enough—condemned the author to forever feel responsible for the death of her young brother Ahmad, who crawled through the opening and fell into a cooking fire outside. Thereafter, Hassan writes, she was viewed by her chronically ill mother as a “harbinger of misfortune” for their family.

But the young girl could hardly shoulder the blame for the misfortunes to come. In September 1980, brewing tensions erupted when Iraqi forces surged into Iran, starting a war that Iraqi citizens like Hassan were assured would last only ten days. It would rage on purposelessly for the next eight years. The author, only thirteen years old at the time of the invasion, likens the claustrophobic, nauseating feelings she had at the start of the war to being consumed by something vile:

“From the beginning of that ninth month of 1980, I was obsessed by a feeling of revulsion—as if a large snake had swallowed me. At every moment of the day, I felt I was nearing its gastric juices, even though I frequently struggled to ignore the vicious sensation. The announcement of this war made me feel disgusted by everything—even myself.”

The war felt personal, but Hassan points out that citizens did not have the right to vote for it, even though young Iraqi men were expected to fight in it. Descriptions of the bodies of “martyrs” being returned to their families as their mothers wailed with grief demonstrate the conflict’s ability “to grind up young men and transform memories of them into words on black posters.” Bodies piled up as the people of Iraq struggled to find any sense of normalcy amid a volatile situation.

Hassan uses gut-wrenching depictions to illustrate the suffocating feelings of life in Iraq during her early years, but despite the frequently challenging nature of the book, it is worth noting how welcoming Hassan is throughout. She aims to be brutally honest about her experiences, many of which clearly remain painful, but her tone invites us in. Her readers are never the target of the occasionally (and justifiably) bitter feelings she expresses, nor does she presuppose that we have any prior knowledge about the region and its conflicts.

She explains how feelings of hopelessness grew during the Iran-Iraq conflict as “years passed during which every beat of their waking hours sounded like the drums of war.” But then, to the astonishment of Hassan and her fellow Iraqis, the fighting abruptly ended in a stalemate during the summer of 1988. This calm was short-lived. On August 2, 1990, citizens woke up to the news that Saddam Hussain’s forces had invaded Kuwait under the pretense of wanting to liberate the small nation from the purportedly “corrupt cabal of collaborators that ruled them.” Hassan compares the state of shock and horror that washed over her when she heard the news to what Gregor Samsa must have felt when discovering himself in the body of an insect. Unfathomably a new war had begun before “we had time to enjoy inhaling even a sniff of peace.”

Economic sanctions punishing Hussein’s illegal war trickled down to the people of Iraq, many of whom went hungry. “We poor people were left to our own devices,” Hassan writes, “held prisoners by this embargo, while our government and wealthy people became richer and more avaricious at every moment.”

As a modern reader, it’s difficult not to think of Russia’s war in Ukraine when reading about how much harder life became for an average Iraqi due to actions taken by their authoritarian government. Hassan, while exploring her outrage at how brutal these years in Iraq were, wonders whether there would have been a way to punish Hussein, the true culprit, without depriving the innocent citizens of the things they needed to live. It’s one of many places in War and Me where Hassan’s history evokes important questions about today’s geopolitical power structures.

The blockade eventually ended in late 2003, when US troops entered Iraq. The global community no longer held Hassan and her people economically captive once Hussein was removed, but it came at the cost of yet another seemingly endless war in Iraq.

Through all this bloodshed, chaos, and fear, Faleeha Hassan came of age and miraculously managed to not only excel in school, but to go on to become a teacher, fulfilling her father’s wishes. She had always hoped to pursue a higher education and realized that dream in 2006 when she earned a master’s degree in Arabic language and literature from the University of Kufa. Throughout the memoir, her dedication to her studies is the one constant in her life; her only condition for entering what eventually turned out to be a disastrous marriage was that she be permitted to keep pursuing her degree.

The author’s poetry is what earned her the reputation as the “Maya Angelou of Iraq,” but she proves how apt the comparison is in War and Me, a book highly reminiscent of Angelou’s first and most famous memoir, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Both authors aim to tell the stories of their early lives and the hardships they endured; these books are documents of truth containing no balm to soothe the heartbreak inside. As such, neither is intended to make for easy reading in the emotional sense; rather, their power is in seeing each author’s worst days transformed into art.

The resemblance to Caged Bird goes beyond this conceit. Just as Maya Angelou’s mentor, Mrs. Flowers, introduced her to the world of books, so too did reading and learning became a respite for Hassan. She recalls falling deeply in love with the works of Gabriel García Márquez and eagerly anticipated her turn with the limited number of copies that were secretly circulating among members of Najaf’s Writers and Artists General Union. She used her time with those borrowed books to copy, by hand, word for word, her favorite Marquez novels into notebooks provided by the school in which she was teaching. In one of War and Me’s most powerful and illustrative images, those notebooks featured Saddam Hussein’s image on their covers. Nothing could better symbolize Faleeha Hassan’s commitment to a creative life than compiling the words of her favorite author behind the watchful dictator’s back.

The author’s entry into the literary world proves to be the lightest and most inspiring section of the book. It’s disappointing that Hassan doesn’t spend much time describing her creative process, but there does come a moment of realization, as she begins discussing her efforts to get her poems published, that she, through all of life’s struggles, had never stopped writing.

Hassan went on to publish several collections of her poetry which were at first openly challenged by the all-male poetry community of Najaf. Her work gained her a standing in the literary world, yet that notoriety also spelled out the beginning of the end of her time in Iraq: Hassan heard through the grapevine that her name had been placed on a list of writers and artists worthy of execution. Fearing for her life, she fled the country, and eventually sought refugee status in the United States, where she immediately faced harassment merely for being Iraqi.

It’s here that Hassan ends her harrowing memoir. A 2014 profile of the author in the Philadelphia Inquirer seems to imply that she has found some much deserved peace, but perhaps she’s saving her more recent stories for a second memoir.

In the early pages of War and Me, Hassan states her purpose for writing the book was simply to tell her story, but the memoir’s accomplishments go far beyond this goal. Her skill as a poet creates haunting phrases that draw a deep emotional response from the reader—William Hutchins’s artful translation preserves the beauty and impact of those words. Hassan gives the citizen’s view of life within Iraq during those years defined by war and shows the restrictive nature of being an Iraqi woman, trapped in an abusive marriage as the legitimacy of her poetry is questioned because of her gender.

The most powerful revelation of all is the strength of character Hassan built during those years. In response to the horrors around her, “all I could do,” Hassan writes, “was fashion a spirit of dent-proof stainless steel and to don it—a spirit capable of confronting events that were both unexpected and unavoidable.” War and Me is a remarkable demonstration of what a woman can do to survive.

War and Me, by Faleeha Hassan is a memoir of the author's growing up and living in Iraq nearly constantly torn by war starting with the Iraqi-Iran war in the 1980s. At times the language is beautiful and ornate and at times simple, sometimes too simple, so it reads a bit unevenly.
I also wish there was a bit more explanation of the political situation, and dates, because I got confused sometimes as to when certain events were happening. I also had to look up modern history of Iraq, but I didn't mind that, because any book that makes me learn more is welcome.
I also admired the author for her sheer courage and grit to just keep going.
Faleeha Hassan is presumably well known in Iraq, as the first woman to publish a collection of poetry, and a couple of her poems that she included in the volume, and one that I could find in another source are beautiful. I've looked for translations of her poetry in English, but there is very little out there. I wish there was more.
I do recommend War and Me, especially if you want to learn what it was like living in Iraq for the civilians caught in the nearly constant conflicts.

"War and Me", by Faleeha Hassan, translated from Arabic by William Hutchins, and published by Amazon Crossing, is a powerful memoir of a lifetime during war. Set in Iraq, and starting from her childhood, into her adulthood with children of her own, Faleeha Hassan recounts in detail how her life and that of her family was affected by the series of wars Iraq has been fighting since the 80s. The personal stories are intertwined with explanations of the political events of the time, much of which I was not familiar with. I found the memoir to be very interesting, and Faleeha Hassan to be a strong, inspirational woman.

While Faleeha's life story was fascinating, I did find the pacing to be a little slow and the writing a bit too detailed. Still, Faleeha's resilience kept my interest throughout the whole book. I would recommend "War and Me" for fans of memoirs and readers who like to travel to different countries through their reading.

Thank you to @Faleehahassan for sharing your story with us readers, William Hutchins for translating it and making it accessible to English readers, and thank you to @OTRPR and @AmazonPublishing for my gifted gorgeous review copy of "War and Me". All opinions are my own. If you want to check out more opinions and giveaways for "War and Me", check out the second slide to see the other participants of the book tour.

This is a really beautiful book. Faleeha Hassan shows us through telling her story, how she existed in and beyond war in Iraq. This is a slow moving book as it has been translated, but it is worth it to keep with it and continue to hear her story. I learned so much about Iraq and Iraqi customs and how it connects to culture through war. But also how it creates who Hassan is after the war.

Thank you NetGalley for a chance to read this beautiful book!

Hassan grew up in Najaf, Iraq, as part of a large, but close, working-class family. She was in middle school in 1980 when the Iran-Iraq War began, and she spent the rest of her time in Iraq (until she was forced to flee in 2011 after becoming a target on a militant group’s death list for her writing) under the shadow of constant war. Despite this, all the terror and loss and tragedy that war entails on a day-to-day basis (and the compounding strain of its seemingly never-ending reality), she continued to work towards her educational and career goals, including earning a Masters in Arabic Literature and becoming a published poet. This memoir follows Hassan from her youth through starting her own family and closes with her arrival in the United States after her asylum application was approved.

Let me start with the major issue I had while reading. I cannot write this review without addressing it, but I also want to get it out of the way and end with the positive, because there is a lot of it. It’s just unfortunate that the big issue was such a pervasive one. I hate to say this, especially because I myself cannot speak/read Arabic well enough to translate it, but I really felt like this was an iffy translation. I know enough of the language to understand that this was likely quite poetic/flowery in the original language, but a lot of it seemed to have been translated too directly for that to carry over, and the phrasing often felt stilted and clumsy in English. And then, despite my wish (often) that the translator would used some more natural and flowing phrasing/language in English, the couple times he did try to add in colloquialisms felt poorly chosen and jarringly out of place (for example, when he used “any Tom, Dick or Harry”). Anyways, there is a chance that part of this was some immature/jumpy writing in the original, as Hassan’s writing background is more short-form. But there are definitely elements of the awkward language that I feel confident come back to the translation.

I want to make the point here that the content, Hassan’s life, is still absolutely worth reading. It took me some time to get over some of the writing flow issues, but it is worth doing. Obviously, knowing the history that Hassan lived during, it should go without saying that there is *a lot* of trauma and triggering content here, so much (familial) death, violence and injury, missing/loss/unknown fates, domestic (emotional/psychological) abuse, and grief. Hassan does a lovely job presenting the events without holding back on the emotional and life impacts, but also never dramatizing anything. It’s a lot to read, thematically, and it’s impossible to imagine and comprehend living it, but I am grateful for the opportunity to witness through Hassan’s words. There were also many important points made about the politics surrounding everything that has happened to the Iraqi people in the last decades; the way the “normal” people suffered so much as a result of dictators and international (UN) sanctions alike – there was little day-to-day difference in the difficulties for people regardless of the source. An important point for all (western) readers to remember.

I loved reading about Hassan’s experience and process of writing and publishing her first collection of poetry, and the reception it received (negativity based often on her gender and not the quality of the writing itself, though popular nonetheless). It was so interesting to see how the process worked, and where the strong support for her work was coming from. Relatedly, her family’s and friend’s support for her education across the board was such a highlight. Especially when put in such sharp relief to her experiences with her husband and mother-in-law, when that part of her life unfolds.

Overall, this was a difficult but worthwhile read. It’s hard to really conceptualize the everydayness of mortar fire in the streets, the way people go to work and children to school through it because that’s just…life. It’s just nonsensical, what people are forced to endure, and thus adjust to enduring. And how Hassan managed to write and publish during it all, to chase her dreams and fight to protect and love her family despite everything, was a beautiful bright spot throughout it all.

Highly recommend War and Me to lovers of memoirs and beyond. Faleeha Hassan had beautifully and painfully poured herself into telling her story, existing in and beyond war in Iraq. I learned a lot about Iraq and Iraqi customs but also how war has affected how Hassan has connected to her culture. This story has been translated and I urge you to continue even if it takes time to adjust to the translation, her story will stick with you, thank you for sharing it!
Thank you also to Net Galley for a chance to read an advanced copy!