Burned Alive: A Victim of the Law of Men FROM THE PUBLISHER
"When Souad was seventeen she fell in love. In her West Bank village, as in so many other villages, sex before marriage is considered a grave dishonor to one's family and is punishable by death. This was her crime. Her brother-in-law was given the task of meting out her punishment. One morning while Souad was washing the family's clothes, he poured gasoline over her and set her on fire." "In the eyes of the community he was a hero. An execution for a "crime of honor" is a duty, and Souad's brother-in-law had the full support of her parents." "Miraculously she survived, rescued by women of her village, who put out the flames and took her to a local hospital. Horribly burned over ninety percent of her body and still denounced by her family - who strived to "finish the job" even as she lay suffering in the clinic - Souad was able to receive the care she needed only after the intervention of a European aid worker. Now in permanent exile from her homeland, she has decided to tell her story and reveal the barbarity of a practice that continues to this day." More than five thousand honor killings are reported every year; many more go unreported. Burned Alive is both the testimony of one young woman's resolve to survive and build a new life - and a call to action to end a heinous tradition.
FROM THE CRITICS
Daphne Uviller - The Washington Post
Souad tells her story in an unadorned, childlike voice that reflects her continuing battle to perceive herself as an adult in full possession of her rights, a battle she wages despite being married, employed and the mother of two more children. But her tale is so shocking that it needs to be told plainly; this is not a literary effort so much as it is a rare artifact whose mere existence should be regarded as nothing less than a miracle.
Publishers Weekly
The meaning of "women's rights" varies with nationality and culture. For Souad, who grew up in the late 1950s in a tiny, remote village in the "Palestinian Territory," it's an issue of life and death. When, as an unmarried girl, she became pregnant, she was sentenced to death by her immediate family, doused with gasoline and set on fire by her brother-in-law, and taken to a hospital to be neglected until she died. There, she was discovered by a humanitarian worker who managed to save her life by arranging her emigration, with her infant son, to Switzerland. As horrifying as this "honor crime" is, it's a logical, almost natural outgrowth of what Souad says is the standard treatment of girls and women in her closed world. Using starkly plain language, she vividly depicts a childhood of virtual slavery, in which she was illiterate, ignorant of anything beyond the confines of the village, working "harder than a beast of burden" and beaten daily. As Souad slowly healed and made a new life for herself in Europe, horrific images arose out of her jumbled memory: her mother smothering unwanted female babies at birth; her brother strangling her younger sister with a telephone cord for committing an unknown sin. Not so much a literary work as an expos of the brutal treatment of women still condoned in several parts of the world, this memoir, although painful to read, will be of urgent interest to anyone concerned with international human rights. Agent, Anna Jarota. (May 11) Forecast: This book was published in France last year and hit bestseller lists there. Ads in People and Time will alert American readers to its U.S. publication. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
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