Jean Sasson and Joanna al-Askari Hussain at the American News Women's Club
I went a few nights ago, this is what I was about to do when I unexpectedly hurt my back, but went ahead and had a nice time anyway and saved the owies for afterward.
There had been an accident and traffic jam on the George Washington Parkway (it's the favorite road of insane drivers, ever notice that?), so I reached there too late for the dinner, which was fine, I wasn't hungry anyway. I contented myself with a bottle of water poured into a stemmed wineglass. I walked up to a table with three elderly news women and asked if I might sit with them, so they invited me to join them and asked if I was a member of the club. I said no, I was just a guest interested in this book, Love in a Torn Land: Joanna of Kurdistan: The True Story of a Freedom Fighter's Escape from Iraqi Vengeance. (I am a news woman in a sense, I write for and edit a newsletter.) And I told them the story of how I'd been researching while writing the Wikipedia article on the name Joanna, looked in the Library of Congress database, and found the bibliographic record for Jean Sasson's book-- a good six months before it was actually published. So I preordered the book-- I only got it the week before this author event, and started reading right away. I liked it. While waiting for it to be published, I had linked to the book announcement from my Wikipedia article.
Right then it was time for Jean Sasson to begin speaking. She told the story of how she got involved in writing about Middle Eastern women. She included an anecdote about the first feminist she saw in Saudi Arabia; in the middle of this she paused to acknowledge the only two men in the room (from the Kurdistan regional government, I think) to reassure them that her feminist talk was nothing against men, she was glad they were there. Then she told how she met Joanna al-Askari Hussain-- the last Iraqi woman she had written about, Mayada, said you've got to meet my third cousin, who is a Kurdish peshmerga. The book is told in Joanna's first person voice, and the prose was crafted by Sasson out of many hours of interviews.
The remarkable thing about this evening was something I'd intuited but hadn't dared to hope-- Joanna herself was there as a surprise special guest. She was not looking as she did on the book cover, she was wearing a plain black top and black pants with thin little silver necklaces, and her expression was relaxed and friendly rather than fierce. But I always thought the book cover was such a great picture!
Have you ever seen anyone look so feminine and so tough at the same time?
She is a strikingly beautiful woman either way. She stood up next to Jean and they teased each other about their interviews, how they tried to describe the expression on the face of the mule that carried Joanna out of Iraq over narrow mountain trails with her perched on top of the mule's packs and the animal walking close to the edge of the mountain... She survived to laugh about it here, but at the time it was so scary. She survived a poison gas attack on her village, even though she hadn't prepared her gas mask. She was temporarily blinded but recovered. Jean teased her for that too.
One of the club women asked, since this was an audience of women, the book was promoted as a true love story, so what was Joanna's belief about love? She seemed surprised at the question but she said women know what it's like, maybe some men know too, when you fall in love when you're young and it seems like that's everything in the world for you... which is how she joined the peshmerga warriors, because she fell in love with one of them, and that was because of her passionate Kurdish nationalism. She was born and grew up in Baghdad, half-Arab on her father's side, but loved her summer vacations in the mountains of Kurdistan at her maternal grandmother's place. Her summer vacations were called the "happy times" because the rest of the year she felt discriminated against for being Kurdish in Baghdad.
Joanna also paid homage to the strong women she was in the struggle with, which is why the book was dedicated "To the brave wives of the Peshmerga."
When I told Jean how I'd learned of her book, she said she'd seen my Wikipedia article and liked it. She signed my copy "For another special Joanna" and then Joanna signed it "With love from Joanna Hussain al-Askari" reversing the order of her maiden name and married name--I don't know why, I was too shy to ask. She was so nice in person, and she was visibly pleased when I said I'd been reading the book already and found it so interesting, it was a real page-turner. Whereupon Jean spoke up and said to me "You know what they say, the easier it is for the reader, the harder work it was for the writer!" We all laughed.
There had been an accident and traffic jam on the George Washington Parkway (it's the favorite road of insane drivers, ever notice that?), so I reached there too late for the dinner, which was fine, I wasn't hungry anyway. I contented myself with a bottle of water poured into a stemmed wineglass. I walked up to a table with three elderly news women and asked if I might sit with them, so they invited me to join them and asked if I was a member of the club. I said no, I was just a guest interested in this book, Love in a Torn Land: Joanna of Kurdistan: The True Story of a Freedom Fighter's Escape from Iraqi Vengeance. (I am a news woman in a sense, I write for and edit a newsletter.) And I told them the story of how I'd been researching while writing the Wikipedia article on the name Joanna, looked in the Library of Congress database, and found the bibliographic record for Jean Sasson's book-- a good six months before it was actually published. So I preordered the book-- I only got it the week before this author event, and started reading right away. I liked it. While waiting for it to be published, I had linked to the book announcement from my Wikipedia article.
Right then it was time for Jean Sasson to begin speaking. She told the story of how she got involved in writing about Middle Eastern women. She included an anecdote about the first feminist she saw in Saudi Arabia; in the middle of this she paused to acknowledge the only two men in the room (from the Kurdistan regional government, I think) to reassure them that her feminist talk was nothing against men, she was glad they were there. Then she told how she met Joanna al-Askari Hussain-- the last Iraqi woman she had written about, Mayada, said you've got to meet my third cousin, who is a Kurdish peshmerga. The book is told in Joanna's first person voice, and the prose was crafted by Sasson out of many hours of interviews.
The remarkable thing about this evening was something I'd intuited but hadn't dared to hope-- Joanna herself was there as a surprise special guest. She was not looking as she did on the book cover, she was wearing a plain black top and black pants with thin little silver necklaces, and her expression was relaxed and friendly rather than fierce. But I always thought the book cover was such a great picture!
Have you ever seen anyone look so feminine and so tough at the same time?
She is a strikingly beautiful woman either way. She stood up next to Jean and they teased each other about their interviews, how they tried to describe the expression on the face of the mule that carried Joanna out of Iraq over narrow mountain trails with her perched on top of the mule's packs and the animal walking close to the edge of the mountain... She survived to laugh about it here, but at the time it was so scary. She survived a poison gas attack on her village, even though she hadn't prepared her gas mask. She was temporarily blinded but recovered. Jean teased her for that too.
One of the club women asked, since this was an audience of women, the book was promoted as a true love story, so what was Joanna's belief about love? She seemed surprised at the question but she said women know what it's like, maybe some men know too, when you fall in love when you're young and it seems like that's everything in the world for you... which is how she joined the peshmerga warriors, because she fell in love with one of them, and that was because of her passionate Kurdish nationalism. She was born and grew up in Baghdad, half-Arab on her father's side, but loved her summer vacations in the mountains of Kurdistan at her maternal grandmother's place. Her summer vacations were called the "happy times" because the rest of the year she felt discriminated against for being Kurdish in Baghdad.
Joanna also paid homage to the strong women she was in the struggle with, which is why the book was dedicated "To the brave wives of the Peshmerga."
When I told Jean how I'd learned of her book, she said she'd seen my Wikipedia article and liked it. She signed my copy "For another special Joanna" and then Joanna signed it "With love from Joanna Hussain al-Askari" reversing the order of her maiden name and married name--I don't know why, I was too shy to ask. She was so nice in person, and she was visibly pleased when I said I'd been reading the book already and found it so interesting, it was a real page-turner. Whereupon Jean spoke up and said to me "You know what they say, the easier it is for the reader, the harder work it was for the writer!" We all laughed.