How ‘Anna Karenina’ helped Somali prisoners
In a previous column, I wrote about the power of a book, “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” to change my views on race, politics, and religion. Today I’d like to explore the incredible story of an imprisoned man who learned to communicate in a new way and subsequently be influenced by a classic 19th-century Russian novel. This is based on a story from public radio.
Mohamed Barud, a Somalian newlywed at age 31, was sentenced to life in prison in 1981 during the military dictatorship of Siad Barre. His crime? Complaining about the conditions of a local hospital, which the government saw as treasonous. As a prisoner, he was forbidden to talk with anyone, and while the first months passed, he wondered if his wife would wait for him in the event that he would ever be released.
After eight months, his next-door inmate began whispering when the prison guard was just out of earshot: “Learn ABC through the wall.” Mohamed was confused, but the other man explained that by knocking on the wall, they could tap out letters of the alphabet and put words together. The man in the other cell was Adan Akobar, the director of the very hospital that Mohamed had complained about, and the two men were able to communicate by knocking on the wall that stood between them.
More than two years into their prison sentence, Adan was called into the warden’s office for his first change of clothes. He found the warden in a generous mood and asked if he could borrow a book he spotted on a shelf: “Anna Karenina.” Adan took this 800-page novel back to his cell and knocked out a message to Mohamed: “I have a book, and I’ll read it to you chapter by chapter.”
In this tedious way, Adan tapped out this huge novel, more than 2 million letters and 350,000 words over a period of years. Tolstoy’s novel (which I read in Korea during the long, cold winter of 1975) is the story of a young Russian noblewoman who is unhappily married to an older man and falls in love with Count Vronsky, a soldier. After leaving her husband, Anna is punished for her actions. She is isolated and alone, thinking of Vronsky constantly when he is not with her. At that moment in the narrative, the author makes a key comment: “If he (Vronsky) loved her, he would understand all the difficulties of her situation, and he would rescue her from it.”
These words struck home with Mohamed, and so he began to think more of his wife, Ismahan, than of the misery of his own harsh situation — wondering how she was doing, what difficulties she was facing. In fact, during that time Somalia was going through a civil war, and she became a refugee for a while but resisted the temptation to divorce Mohamed.
After eight years in prison, a new regime freed Mohamed, this couple reunited, and they are still living in the city where they first met.
One has to admire the determination of these two men, who maintained hope in the face of utter depravity. One also has to admire the power of imaginative fiction to influence the reality of people’s daily lives.