Knightley as Anna Karenina
Tuesday
My dear friend Lois Stover alerted me to an extraordinary story (from National Public Radio’s Morning Edition) about Anna Karenina saving a Somali political prisoner from madness. Gregory Warner interviews both Mohamed Barud and the prisoner in the adjacent cell, Dr. Adan Abokor, who used morse code to tap out the entire novel to Barud letter by letter. You can listen to the episode here.
Newly married in 1981, Barud optimistically believed that Somalia’s dictator Siad Barre would respond to a letter complaining about poor conditions in a local hospital. Instead he was charged with treason and imprisoned to a lifetime of solitary confinement.
Cut off from all contact with the outside world and even other prisoners, Barud felt himself going insane. He was in a tiny cell that was three steps across and that was invaded by cockroaches, rats, flies, and millions of mosquitoes.
In his solitude, he began resenting and eventually hating his wife Ismahan for not visiting him, even though he knew visits weren’t allowed. He became frightened “of going to a certain area in my mind where I would commit suicide without knowing, without wanting to.”
After two months, however, Barud learned that the prisoners could communicate to each other through knocking on the walls. As he became proficient at the code, Barud would contact Abokor whenever he awoke from one of his ferocious nightmares. Diagnosing Barud’s condition as panic attacks, Abokor
explained to him through the wall that he’s not going to go mad and that he’s not going to die. But you can’t counsel a person through a wall.
After two years, the doctor was allowed a change of clothes and, while retrieving the items from his suitcase, asked the warden if he could choose one of the books he had brought. In a moment of unexpected leniency, the warden said yes, and he chose Anna Karenina as the thickest of the lot:
Warner as narrator: “Anna Karenina” is about 800 pages, 350,000 words, nearly 2 million letters, each letter a set of taps. So the doctor wraps a bedsheet around his hand to protect it.
Abokor: Because it would damage my wrist if I continued like that. So then I started knocking, and he started listening.
The next two months were spent communicating the novel. From the famous first sentence on, Barud was transfixed:
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Barud hated Anna’s lover Varonsky at once, largely because Varonsky is a military officer and Barud was in a military prison. He identified intensively with Anna, however, especially when, after having run away from her husband with Varonsky, Anna finds herself alone in a room, having been shunned by society while hearing no word from her lover.
Like Barud with his wife, Anna both longs for Varonsky and wants him to suffer as she is suffering. She is crazily jealous and hates herself for being jealous. Barud says that he identified with the sentence, “If he loved her, he would understand all the difficulties of her situation, and he would rescue her from it”:
Warner: Anna is trapped by views about women and maybe desire, but you were trapped by real walls.
Barud: Yeah.
Warner as narrator: He says it didn’t matter how different their lives seemed on the outside.
Barud: She was suffering all the time.
Varonsky doesn’t rescue Anna and of course Ismahan couldn’t rescue Barud. But finding his condition named let him know he wasn’t alone. An author understood his plight.
The novel offered yet more insights and more comforts. When Anna throws herself under the train, Barud saw his worst fears realized and found himself crying. He realized, however, that his tears were not for himself but for Ismahan. He began asking himself whether he had been a good husband, treating his wife as she deserved. Why had he done something that had separated them? Wasn’t she imprisoned as well? Perhaps she was suffering worse than he was.
From hating his wife, he came to see the world through her eyes. Empathy replaced resentment:
Warner as narrator: Mohamed realizes his tears are not just for Anna.
Barud: That’s when I remember my wife.
Warner as narrator: He’s thinking about Ismahan, his wife.
Barud: How much she’s suffering. And yes. The book’s the one that brought me back to think about her a lot.
Warner as narrator: Tolstoy is brilliant at showing a scene from one point of view and then shifting the frame, showing the same scene from a different character’s perspective. Mohamed credits Tolstoy and his perspective-shifting style with pulling him out of his mental prison.
Barud: It definitely helped – definitely, definitely. In a place like that prison, people become very selfish. You think, everybody has forgotten about me, and nobody cares about me like that. But when you think about other people’s situation, then you – it helped me survive. It helped me even sleep better.
The novel had yet another role to play. The prisoners were released six years later when the political climate changed, and Barud discovered that Ismahan had remained faithful, despite intense pressure to divorce him. She was in a refugee camp in Germany and they finally reunited.
While she wanted to rush into his arms, however, he maintained a distance—he had forgotten how to love her. This time Levin, the novel’s other protagonist, stepped up to help.
When he is preparing to get married, Levin is wracked with self-doubts about setting up a new life. Although Kitty is a wonderful woman who will prove a great wife, Levin is a restless soul. Only at the end of the novel does he learn to stand outside himself.
Barud said that Tolstoy taught him how to love his wife again. He realized that, like Levin, he was hard to live with—solitary confinement does that to someone—and having Levin as a model “made it easier for us to talk to each other. I knew that my heart wasn’t quite working yet.”
He concludes, “I should build a monument for that book.”
While Barud cites various passages from Anna Karenina, Dr. Abokor has not been able to return to the novel because of the associations it arouses. He did give it to an imprisoned journalist friend, however, telling him it was the best companion he could have.
Previous posts about literature in prison
Poetry Turns Prisoner’s Life Around
Shakespeare Was Mandela’s Lifeline
A Teacher, Lit, and a Jailed Student