Hope and Despair: My Struggle to Free My Husband, Maher Arar (review)

Most Canadians will recognize the picture of Maher Arar on the cover of Hope and Despair: My Struggle to Free my Husband, Maher Arar. On September 26, 2002, Arar left Tunisia en route to his home in Ottawa, travelling through the United States on his Canadian passport. At New York Kennedy Airport, Arar was detained, interrogated, accused of being a member of al-Qaeda, and then deported to Syria via Jordan, where he was subsequently imprisoned and tortured. After an interminable 375 days, Arar was released and in 2006 fully exonerated by a federal fact-finding commission. In 2007, Arar would also receive an official apology from the government of Canada, as well as financial compensation for his extraordinary ordeal.

The story of Arar’s wife, Monia Mazigh, is far less familiar to Canadians. When Arar left Tunis in 2002, he left behind Mazigh and their two small children who were to return home to Ottawa one month later. Hope and Despair is Mazigh’s personal memoir, chronicling her private year-long struggle without her husband, as well as her public struggle to free her husband. Mazigh traces her tireless lobbying of politicians and diplomats, signalling the extent to which the outcome of Arar’s ordeal was far from arbitrary and, in fact, necessitated an advocate as exceptional as she.

Spanning the time period between Arar’s initial deportation and the government’s establishment of the federal commission of inquiry, Mazigh meticulously dates major developments in her struggle, drawing in part from personal notebooks, letters, emails, and media stories. Some of the most compelling material includes Mazigh and Arar’s letters to each other, as well as Gar Pardy’s emails to Mazigh regarding the consul’s visits with Arar in Syria. Readers may be familiar with critical junctures covered in Mazigh’s narrative, including then U.S. ambassador to Canada Paul Cellucci’s implication of Canada in Arar’s deportation, the Syrian Human Rights Committee’s confirmation that Arar was being tortured, then Foreign Affairs Minister Bill Graham’s subsequent denial of that fact, and the RCMP raid on Ottawa Citizen reporter Juliet O’Neill’s home. Readers may also recall Mazigh’s own Globe and Mail article, Arar’s statement at the Parliamentary Press Gallery, as well as the government and media smear campaign that continued against Arar after his return home. In addition to providing insight regarding the support she received and cultivated from allies such as Alexa McDonough, Alex Neve, Nazira Tareen, Kerry Pither, and Marlene Catterall, Mazigh’s narrative provides a window into what she terms a world of “mystery and secrecy” (145), one where she struggled to navigate and learn the often impassive, indifferent, and bureaucratic “new language” (31) of diplomacy.

To be clear, Hope and Despair is not an explicitly political text, nor simply a chronology of political developments. Mazigh’s primary motivation in writing this memoir was to create a “family album” (xi) that assembled answers to questions her children will no doubt one day have. Framed by the organizing tension of hope and despair, Mazigh’s narrative complicates any clear distinction between private and public as she weaves her private day-to-day experiences and thoughts into her intensely public fight. The great strength of Mazigh’s work is that it provides a necessary context, hence a poignant rereading of the “official record.” Her own interrogation in Syria, the humiliation she felt when dealing with Canadian customs officials upon her return to Canada, her need to secure social assistance despite her doctoral degree, her interactions with often shockingly insensitive government officials, her formal confirmation that her husband had been tortured, and her transition to political activist — each of these components forms an integral part of “the story of Arar.”

Mazigh’s narrative is multilayered and readers will find different elements most salient. Those with interests in discourses of citizenship, “race...