The Prison Book Club (27 page)

The men were horrified by some of the details of genital mutilation, which Hirsi Ali tells us is a practice that predated the Muslim faith, but is performed on almost every Somali girl in the name of Islam. In describing her own ghastly mutilation at age five, she gives us the image of an itinerant circumciser tweaking her clitoris, then cutting it off, along with her inner labia—like a butcher cutting through meat. He then pushed a sewing needle through the outer labia to stitch up the area into a virtual chastity belt of scarred flesh, leaving openings for urine and menstrual flow. The circumciser worked on Mahad and Haweya too.

“I did not know that they sewed them up,” exclaimed Tom.

Phoebe was unafraid of speaking candidly about the procedure. “The point is to get rid of sexual desire,” she said. “But it doesn't take away that desire.” And Hirsi Ali claims that it doesn't eradicate sexual pleasure, either, though she describes how much pain accompanied any remaining pleasure. The mention of desire prompted Earl and Frank to remind the others of how amusingly male desire featured in the book and how Hirsi Ali was taught that if she uncovered any skin she would be so “beguiling” it would cause traffic chaos.

As for the parents, we discussed the much-talked-about estrangement between Hirsi Ali and her father after she skipped out on her arranged marriage by claiming asylum in the Netherlands. Phoebe asked why the father's reaction had been more violent to her foiled marriage arrangement than to her rejection of Islam. “The marriage was a business transaction for the father,” Frank said. “He was now in debt to the man she ran away from.” The father's honour had been tainted. Frank's close reading always produced insights for the rest of us.

Finally we tackled some of the more controversial questions. On the issue of her ability to break free, Bookman argued that it wouldn't have been possible if she had not at one time been extremely devout, searching within Islam to find answers to key questions. “It became an issue of why she couldn't find those answers,” he said.

And Raymond, whose scholarship in the Jewish faith was deep, was again a helpful contributor. “The book is about the rejection of the
dictates
of the Koran. It's not a rejection of the essence of the religion. And in her rejection of those dictates she makes a big point of its anti-American, anti-Semitic bias.” He thought she was still a God-fearing woman, though she described herself as an atheist.

Frank agreed. “If you asked her today if she's really an atheist, she would say no. She was just revolting against all the man-made rules. To tell you the truth, reading this, I almost question my Catholic upbringing.” He confessed he couldn't see the point of repeating the same prayers and rituals over and over.

“There's a great passage,” says Raymond. “And I can't find it right now, where she specifically says she wants to be a woman of integrity, how she wants to adopt all the greatness that Islam represents in all of its multi-faceted nature but does not want to be constrained by the strictness.”

“It's on page 281,” said Byrne. Pages rustled. He read it aloud, the passage about finding her own intrinsic moral compass and no longer relying on a holy book to tell her what was right or wrong, good or bad. The lines he read spoke to everything that I believed about goodness and kindness. And it shone through that day in the men, whose own judgments about members of Hirsi Ali's family spoke to their own moral compasses, and their own innate awareness of right and wrong. As Graham said to me: “If your daughter or wife chooses to wear a burka and that's part of her belief, I don't have a problem with that, but if you're forcing her to wear a burka, I do have a problem with that.” Contained in that response was a deep natural morality and an instinct to honour women's rights.

With just fifteen minutes to go before our time was up, Phoebe posed a question that would get good traction in any book club: what role did the Western novels that Hirsi Ali read as a girl play in her later rebellion.

Tom didn't think her early reading was important. He thought the Harlequin romance novels that Hirsi Ali and a friend had giggled about as girls were passing fantasies. But Raymond challenged that view, arguing that reading torrid romances fed her determination to marry for love, rather than to submit to an arranged marriage.

His view aligned with Phoebe's. Two specific passages stood out for her about the importance of Western books for the author. She directed them to page 94, where Hirsi Ali talks about romance novels saving her from submission. But it was clear the men had already flagged those passages in their own books. Bookman asked Phoebe to read from higher up on page 94 where Hirsi Ali says that reading romances made her feel wild and free, and aroused her sexual desire. And when Phoebe then pointed them all to page 118, Doc was already on that page and suggested the line at which she should start reading. It was exactly the section that Phoebe had been hunting for, where the author describes being fascinated with the ethical choices that characters faced in Western novels. In
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
, for instance, Hirsi Ali discovered that good and evil could reside in one human being.

“Or page 69,” said Bookman. There was a rustle again as everybody found the page. He read the passage about how even trashy books introduced her to new ideas of freedom and equality for people of different races and genders. The men talked about how the books allowed Hirsi Ali to experiment with freedom and moral choices in a way that wasn't possible in her real life, by standing in the shoes of characters who were free to make life decisions.

I thought about all the books that Hirsi Ali had read at the Muslim Girls' Secondary School in Nairobi:
Wuthering Heights
,
Huckleberry Finn
,
1984
, and works by Jane Austen and Daphne du Maurier.

“They plant the seeds of rebellion,” said Graham.

I considered how lucky Hirsi Ali was that her family was living in Kenya at that point in her education, because her mother was able to enrol her in a school where she had access to good books and she had the opportunity to learn English. And Tom must have been thinking the same thing because he asked why the other girls in Hirsi Ali's school didn't react as she did.

“We all read a book,” said Graham. “But we get different stuff out of it.”

I cannot begin to tell you how so many of the men's statements that evening thrilled me. They brought the book to life for me in ways that I hadn't begun to discover on my own. And while Graham often intervened to invite some of the quieter men to speak, Raymond had not “hogged” the meeting. Indeed Graham had often agreed with Raymond's points. The new member, it seemed, was going to work out.

After the meeting, Graham told me that some of the men had been asking to read a wider range of genres, particularly science fiction.

“I'm not crazy about science fiction,” Frank said.

“Neither am I,” said Graham. “But if that's what everyone else wants to read, I'll read it too,” he said, with an equanimity that proved his leadership yet again.

They both preferred non-fiction to fiction, and sci-fi seemed to them fiction to a factor of five. “I think non-fiction is stranger than fiction,” said Frank. He liked the way non-fiction wasn't neatly tied up like a work of fiction. For example, now that he'd read
Infidel
and Hirsi Ali's other memoir,
Nomad
, he was ready for more. “I'm interested in what happens to this woman,” he said. “I'd like to keep track of her in the future.”

He turned to me. “How do you pick the books for your Toronto book club?”

“We usually select books around a theme,” I said. “So one year all our books were by Indian authors, and before I joined the book group the women spent a year reading African authors. This year we're reading a smattering, including three books in tandem with the Collins Bay Book Club.”

I asked Graham and Frank what they'd been reading outside the book club. Frank had finished
Power Concedes Nothing
by Connie Rice,
Every Man Dies Alone
by Hans Fallada and Jhumpa Lahiri's
Namesake
, and was now starting
The Elegance of the Hedgehog
, the bestselling novel by Muriel Barbery. Graham was reading two books at the same time: Erik Larson's
Devil in the White City
and Yann Martel's novel
Life of Pi
. He read one in the morning while doing cardio on the exercise bike, and the other at night. So many literary works.

I walked back to reception with Phoebe, the portable alarm banging against my thigh. I decided I wouldn't wear one again.

That evening I sat down with Frank's journal. It was full of admiration for Hirsi Ali. He described her as remarkable for her achievements and for risking her life to shine a light on what Muslim girls experience. He went on to describe how he was eager to get home sooner than his “stat date” in May. He had a parole hearing in a few days and he'd managed to persuade his parole officer that an old police report that had been dogging him should be put aside.

I took off my reading glasses and put his journal on the table beside me. How many different types of prisoners there were in the world. Prisoners in cells, prisoners of religion and prisoners of those threatening violence. Even prisoners of fear, as I once had been. With each book club I was gradually liberating myself.

Something else occurred to me that night. I was discovering my “opinion compass,” much as Hirsi Ali described discovering her moral compass. Although I had always had a strong sense of moral direction, I had never been a highly opinionated person—usually more interested in exploring the facts on either side of an argument than in landing on one side or the other. I think partly I owed this tendency to the non-opinionated, apolitical discussions around our family dinner table when I was growing up. For a judge, my father seemed completely non-judgmental. And my training as a newsmagazine journalist taught me to deliver just facts, not an editorial point of view. But as I saw the men express their views, listen to each other and sometimes alter their positions as a result, I began to find my own views sharpening into opinions. And I liked it.

16

THE WOUNDED

T
HAT YEAR THE TURNER Classic Movies television channel showed several vintage films on prison pets. I watched
Birdman of Alcatraz
for the first time and
Caged
, a 1950s Oscar-nominated film set in a women's prison where a kitten becomes a pet. It made me wonder if the men at Beaver Creek or Collins Bay were allowed to keep any animals. I knew that feral cats roamed the prison grounds at both Bath, a minimum-security prison twenty kilometres west of Collins Bay, and at Warkworth, another medium-security prison in the province. And some U.S. jails had introduced programs in which inmates trained rescue animals to make them more adoptable, while gaining skills for their own re-entry to society. But when I asked Ben about it as we were waiting for the February 2012 book club to start, he said the only animals that entered Collins Bay were birds. I wasn't surprised, given that the prison, like Amherst Island, was on an avian flyway. On one occasion, he saw an owl fly in and perch on the bleachers in the yard. From his description, “big and brown with a white stomach” and a pale face, I guessed it was probably a short-eared owl. “He looked scary to me,” said Ben. “Are they prey or predators?”

“Predators,” I said, describing how they hunt talons-first and holding up my hands to illustrate. I told him I was planning to go owl watching with Carol on Amherst Island after book club.

In the weeks leading up to that February meeting, Peter wrote at length in his journal, documenting his reactions to the books that he was reading, and observing that literature had “elevated something inside” him. In one observation, he noted that Edgar Allan Poe effectively establishes his characters first “to make his tales more believable and subsequently more disturbing.” Writing in pencil in a neat script with a backward slant, Peter also captured other aspects of his life in prison. For the past year, he had been learning a style of street fighting from an inmate who was a professional in mixed martial arts. That, he said, explained his “bruised shins and black eyes.” He had enrolled in and dropped out of a restorative justice program, saying that it was a good program but that he was past having the ability to forgive. In one stunning passage he talked about an emotional numbness. “I know my past sadnesses and remember why, but cannot recall how it felt,” he wrote. “I can describe its weight, its overwhelming nature, the mind-tricking effort required to subdue tears, but cannot for the life of me, feel it.” I recalled that he had been homeless for a while in high school. He also dedicated some space in his journal to describing the lack of variety in the weekly meal plan in the cafeteria: baked chicken thigh for dinner every Tuesday, cooked the same way every time; on Sundays, a piece of cake (with no icing) for dessert. He experimented with saving the cream centres of Oreo-type cookies and using them on Sunday nights as icing for the cake.

As the February book club meeting drew near, Gaston's journals indicated that he was not inclined to finish that's month book, which would be a first for him. Some of it was circumstantial. He was preparing for a parole hearing seeking a transfer to a halfway house. And six days before book club, his wife arrived at the prison for a weekend Private Family Visit. But most of all, he was finding it troubling to read a novel about alcoholism and domestic abuse.

We were discussing
The Woman Who Walked Into Doors
, the fifth novel by Booker Prize–winning Irish author Roddy Doyle. Thanks to Carol's initiative, Roddy Doyle himself had agreed to answer all of the men's questions by email. And once again the women in the Toronto book club to which Carol and I belonged were reading in tandem with the men and exchanging comments. When Carol and I gathered with the men in late February, I was revved up for a great discussion. Tristan was there too, filling in for Derek, who was away.