By now, we all know something about the deadly conflict in Darfur. We have seen television broadcasts and documentaries or read reports from journalists who have visited Sudan’s northern region. This information is valuable, but remote. We now know that around 200,000 to 300,000 people have lost their lives and two million have been forced to flee their homes, but the reality of those numbers and the faces behind them are hard to comprehend. Halima Bashir offers us an intimate memoir of life in Darfur, from childhood in her Zaghawa village, through years of medical schooling and the increasingly difficult prospect of survival in her home country.

I was intrigued by the opportunity to read a personal account of life in Sudan, but was compelled to continue with Bashir’s book because her storytelling is engaging and straight forward. Co-written with journalist Damien Lewis, the book is less crafted than compiled. The account is linear and reads a bit like the adjusted transcripts of Lewis and Bashir’s interviews. While developing this slightly more novelistic tone may sacrifice the objective details of current events reporting it also offers striking personal accounts of female circumcision, and harrowing escape across a country plagued by violence. There are scenes from Bashir’s primary school that at once resemble all the coming of age stories you have ever known. But the adolescent rivalry of Bashir’s world is more Lord of the Flies than Judy Blume because it belies the malignant ethnic tension the children’s lives are steeped in.

This is not a solipsistic memoir of overcoming great obstacles and achieving personal enlightenment. Bashir is writing for the particular purpose of raising awareness about Darfur’s crisis. It is a difficult story for obvious reasons. Bashir presents us with the violence, rape, confusion and helplessness we would expect in the memoir of a Sudanese woman. Luckily, she also manages to inculcate a sense of hope through accounts of her willful perseverance. Having become a fierce voice against the atrocities she both witnessed and experienced, Bashir’s book is not only her personal story but also a call for global action against the humanitarian abuses in Sudan.

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