In August 2008, Amanda Lindhout, a novice journalist, and Nigel Brennan, her erstwhile lover and semi-pro photographer, made a trip into Somalia, hoping to uncover some human interest stories that would jumpstart their careers. Within four days, their vehicle was ambushed, and along with their three Somali guides, Lindhout and Brennan were kidnapped; the two Westerners held for over fifteen months. A House in the Sky is Lindhout's chronicle of the ordeal.
Beginning with an account of her tumultuous childhood -- Lindhout's parents split up when she was six and her father came out of the closet. He moved out with another man and her mother started an affair with her much younger foster brother, allowing him to move in with her and the kids, keeping him around despite his abuse and alcoholism -- when Lindhout described her move to Calgary from Sylvan Lake at 19 to work as a cocktail waitress, I could totally relate -- I moved from Lethbridge to Edmonton, at 20, where I became…a cocktail waitress. This was 10 years earlier than Lindhout -- it was more bust than boom at the time -- and while I didn't make a thousand dollars in tips per night, I did make a couple hundred -- and I kept my stacks of bills in a coffee can like she did, and I spent my time off at the Wee Book Inn…like she did. Perhaps if my own childhood had been as chaotic as Lindhout's, I too might have sought out adventures straight from the pages of National Geographic, but I blew my savings on a wedding and a down payment on our first house.
This first part of the book was interesting enough, but repeatedly I could sense the ghostwriting of Lindhout's coauthor, New York Times Magazine contributing writer Sara Corbett. The following passage felt like it was out of a semi-fictionalised book like In Cold Blood or The Executioner's Song instead of belonging in a straight-up memoir:
I'd landed in plenty of chaotic places before, but this one was different : The chaos here felt edgy, dangerous, as if we couldn't keep ourselves outside of it and were breathing it in, as if it sat already in the lungs of every last person in that airport, the cyanide edge of a nasty war.
And Lindhout's reaction to the first time she was raped by one of her kidnappers, reported here, seemed so obviously written by someone else that it drained the moment of true connection; I could feel a barrier between me and the woman who had experienced it:
I felt as if I'd been evicted from my body, like I no longer fit in my own skin. What had been outside me was now in, like some vicious flattening force. I was a ghost wandering the ruins of a wrecked city.
But soon after, something happened -- I don't know if the writing got better or if I just surrendered to the narrative, but I started to really care about Lindhout, and even though she was obviously freed eventually, the daily dangers she faced became real and heartbreaking to me. In one scene -- the pair makes an escape, eventually heading to a mosque where they hope to find someone who would help them. Although curious about the filthy, wild-eyed white people who burst upon their prayers, when the captors arrive, the hundreds of men present help to return them to their imprisonment. Only one middle-aged woman attempts to intervene, grabbing onto Lindhout's arms and throwing herself across the young woman's body. Her eyes are filled with horror and tears as Lindhout and Brennan are eventually dragged away -- the pathos was enough to bring tears to my eyes. I was totally invested by that point, and even though I knew they would be freed eventually -- or how else did she write the book? -- when Lindhout and Brennan were finally reunited with their families, I was freely crying.
In the end, Lindhout decided not to react with bitterness: in a way, she sympathised with her mostly teenaged captors; young men who had grown up in a war-torn and fundamentalist society; young men who wanted the kidnapping ransom to pay for their education or weddings. Pursuant to her ordeal, Lindhout founded "the Global Enrichment Foundation, a non-profit organization that supports development, aid, and education initiatives in Somalia and Kenya", and I completely admire her efforts. You can watch movies like Black Hawk Down or Captain Phillips, read the works of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, or note that the Somali druglords who once cheekily posed with that hilarious crackhead mayor Rob Ford have been disappearing each other of late, and wonder, "Well, what can be done about such a basketcase-failed-state as Somalia?" Few people take the next step towards actually doing something.
I should also note that there's been some controversy about whether Lindhout should have put her family and the Canadian government to such trouble trying to extract her when she had no real business going to Somalia in the first place. Here's some interesting reading I found on the topic:
In her defense
A look at the kidnapping from both victims' points of view
That second link also includes some quotes from Nigel Brennan's account of the kidnapping, The Price of Life. I am happy that I stuck with this book despite the early annoyances (which might very well be peculiar to me alone) and I think overall it is an important and impressive read.
And another fact that is probably only interesting to me:
I felt deflated when I read this line (during my early and unenchanted phase of reading this book):
Melissa Fung, the CBC television correspondent who looked so purposeful and confident, couldn't know that sixteen months later, on a return trip to Afghanistan, she would get kidnapped outside of Kabul and spend twenty-eight days as a hostage, kept half-starved in an underground room in the mountains.
Deflated because that's whose story I thought I was reading. Fung's book is called Under an Afghan Sky, and when I was done reading A House in the Sky, I went to the downtown branch of the library, where Fung's book was supposed to be available. Well, it wasn't on the proper shelf and I couldn't find it on a display shelf, but I did see a copy of Chariots of the Gods by Erich von Däniken. And what's weird about that is that I really did spend a lot of hours looking at used books at the Edmonton branches of the Wee Book Inn, and while Amanda Lindhout spent her tips on travelogues and National Geographic Magazines, I amassed a collection of all of the crazy old ancient-aliens-visiting-earth-themed paperbacks that I could find. Weird that that forty year old book would have been propped up on a display shelf while I had been musing -- earlier today -- about what different books Lindhout and I had picked up.
Another small insight -- I think I wasn't totally connecting with Lindhout at first because I really expected to -- what with our similar experiences when we first left our family homes, but she wasn't actually much like me at all. When I did finally engage with the story was when women of my current age began to appear -- the woman in the mosque or every time Lindhout got to talk to her mother on the phone and called her "Mummy". I must be too far from the young woman I was to put myself in the victim's shoes, but as a Mom of daughters, I think I was most affected when I empathized with the older women who were helpless; the Moms who could not protect the daughter.
