A refugee courageously recalls his persecution in a book with some iffy details.
A survivor of an Asian military dictatorship recalls his brutal childhood and, later, human rights activism.
Habiburahman was a boy when Myanmar outlawed his ethnic group, the Rohingya, stripping its members of citizenship and turning them into a stateless people. His book is a rare account of growing up during the subsequent catastrophe for the Rohingya, more than 700,000 of whom have since fled across the border to Bangladesh. Writing in a spare and unrelenting present tense—as if to emphasize that the disaster is ongoing—the author describes how he and other Rohingya were reviled as “black infidels,” sent into forced labor, and trapped in villages they couldn’t leave without a permit. As a young adult, writes Habiburahman, he had to use fake identity papers to study at a technical institute, where he worked with pro-democracy companions until someone betrayed the group and he was arrested, tortured, and imprisoned. After a jailbreak, he fled to Thailand and Malaysia and then, via a smuggler’s boat, to Australia, where he spent more than 30 months in detention. Eventually, he lost faith that the needed help for the Rohingya would come from Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s de facto head of state, and he became an activist. Written with French journalist Ansel, the book doesn’t explain how Habiburahman reconstructed his memories of events that occurred when he couldn’t have been taking notes; at times, the facts are open to question or appear to conflict with remarks he has made in interviews. Most notably, he writes in an afterword that he has cut ties to his mother, believing his family needed “to become self-sufficient,” a statement that’s hard to fathom after he’s shown repeatedly how hard it is even for a young Rohingya man to achieve self-sufficiency. Despite such inconsistencies, accounts by journalists and other observers support the broad outlines and some particulars of the moral outrages he describes, so his story is a useful addition to the literature of human rights abuses.
A refugee courageously recalls his persecution in a book with some iffy details.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-947534-85-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scribe
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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