Metro (UK)
Friday, April 8, 2014
Amanda Lindhout: A lot of the worst stuff that happened isn’t in the book (Picture: Steven Carty)}
IT was important for me to find a dignified voice,’ says Amanda Lindhout. ‘That was our goal when writing those dark, difficult, personal scenes about abuse and torture.
Lindhout’s powerful, riveting memoir, A House In The Sky: A Memoir Of A Kidnapping That Changed Everything, is full of potential indignities.
In the course of the 460 days she was held captive in war-torn Somalia, she was kept in squalid conditions, semi-starved, repeatedly raped and tortured.
Yet she emerges from the story with grace. This is no misery memoir but a hopeful, inspiring page-turner that finds resilience and redemption in a terrible misadventure.
One of the questions the book – co-written with American journalist Sara Corbett – sets out to explain is what the hell a 27-year-old Canadian, who had only eight months earlier been waitressing in Calgary, was doing in ‘the most dangerous place on Earth’?
‘I faced a lot of criticism, particularly in the Canadian media,’ admits Lindhout, 32. ‘A lot of it is justified. I hope I have written with some kind of self-awareness about my younger self.’
The seeds of Lindhout’s restlessness were sewn in a hardscrabble childhood. At nine, she and her brothers were living with their mother and her occasionally violent lover, at the wrong end of Sylvan Lake, Alberta. Her father, who had recently come out as gay, lived 15 minutes away.
Even then, Lindhout’s focus was further afield: she and her elder brother, Mark, would ‘dumpster dive’ for bottles they could exchange for a few coins, which she used to buy back issues of National Geographic.
At 19, Lindhout moved to Calgary, found work as a waitress in a bar for high-rolling oil-workers and funded her first backpacking adventure to Venezuela. Over the next six years her tips would fund lone trips to ever more daring places.
In Ethiopia, in late 2006, she fell in love with Nigel Brennan, an Australian photographer. The relationship foundered but his work inspired her to pursue journalism as a means of getting paid to travel. A stint as a rookie stringer in Afghanistan led to her naive acceptance of a Baghdad-based job as a television reporter for an Iranian press agency.
Having found post-war Iraq an isolating challenge, only Lindhout would have concluded that lawless Somalia was the obvious next destination. When Brennan, who was now involved with someone else, got in touch she suggested he came too.
In August 2008, three days into a four-week trip, their vehicle was pulled over by Kalashnikov-armed kidnappers. Their families were asked for $3million (£1.8million) ransom – an unimaginable sum for Lindhout’s parents. In the book she writes that her mother worked a minimum-wage job, and her father lived off disability payments under the strain of chronic ill health.
Despite their cruelty to her, Lindhout speaks with compassion about the ‘soldier boys’ who kept them captive for 15 months.
Her teenage guards were, like her, products of their upbringing, with little to show for life but a gun and a mobile phone – on which they would spend hours watching suicide bombers and jihadi training videos.
‘They were shaped by war and violence,’ she recalls. ‘Most of them hadn’t been to school but all spoke of a desire for an education.’