If your spouse dies, you are a widow or widower; if your parents die, you are an orphan. But, as bereaved mother Diane Foley notes in her searing new memoir, American Mother, what are you if your child dies, and in fact is murdered cruelly in full view of the world? “There’s no specific word for it in the English language … What word could capture and convey such loss?”
In 2014, Foley’s son, James, a journalist, was publicly beheaded by Isis militants after being held hostage for nearly two years in Syria. The crime echoed around the world. It is a visceral horror nobody else can really imagine – how do you go on afterwards?
With her co-author, novelist Colum McCann, Foley attempts to salvage meaning from the unfathomable. American Mother isn’t an easy book to read, carrying an almost overwhelming emotional weight.
Few of us, hopefully, will know what it is like to lose a child, and almost nobody will have the experience of watching their public execution.
This memoir is about Foley’s journey from hope to rage to a bruised kind of acceptance. She has dealt with the unthinkable with remarkable grace, starting a foundation to advocate for other hostages and lobbying governments to consider the human cost in hostage-taking.
American Mother is bookended by Foley’s confrontations in prison with one of the militants accused of killing James, former British citizen Alexanda Kotey.
Kotey was one of the so-called “Jihadi Beatles”, an appallingly tacky British tabloid nickname that unfortunately has stuck. One of several people charged in her son’s death, Kotey is alternately defensive and introspective in his meetings with Foley. He ultimately offers apologies and empathy without entirely accepting responsibility. “I am reminded somewhat of my own mother,” he writes in a letter to her, which could be seen as a cruelty or a grudging kindness.
James Foley’s life is reconstructed through a series of shifting narratives, in his mother’s first-person memories and McCann’s subtle evocation of other perspectives. There’s the sense that he felt a higher calling in tackling impossibly difficult assignments abroad, powered by a journalist’s relentless curiosity: “The unknown was a good place for him to be.” Risks were constant – he had already been held hostage in Libya, in 2011, before his capture in Syria the following year.
His story is also a firm reminder of the importance of journalists, who too often become the target of threats and violence, even in New Zealand. Deaths are still happening. The Committee to Protect Journalists estimates at least 88 journalists and media workers have been killed in the Israel-Gaza conflict just since October.
“What happens if no journalists are allowed to report on what is happening?” Diane Foley asks. War reporters like James Foley attempt to pierce the veil of propaganda in places like Russia or Syria. “The truth is that the truth must come home,” she writes.
Forgiveness is a constant theme throughout American Mother, as well as acknowledging the impossibility of it ever being totally clear of other emotions.
Still, Foley remains angry about how the US government essentially abandoned her son and many other hostages as “not their priority”. US policy for years has been no negotiations with terrorists, and the complicated chess game of geopolitics tends to leave people like James Foley behind. At one point, the families themselves scrambled to try to raise more than $100 million to free him.
Former US President Barack Obama is even confronted by Foley and her husband after their son’s death and comes off as callously pragmatic here, though it’s not just a problem of one administration. Foley has committed her life to pushing the US government to not abandon its citizens.
“Diane Foley has turned tragedy into purpose and relentless advocacy,” President Joe Biden’s National Security Adviser, Jake Sullivan, told The New York Times in October.
Throughout the world right now, families of hostages are going through something similar, waiting for word on their missing loved ones, staring at the empty chair at the family table and wondering what the future will hold. Foley has taken a terrible bereavement that there isn’t even a proper name for and turned herself into a kind of surrogate mother for hundreds.
American Mother is a book that shows it’s important sometimes to stare back into the darkness with eyes wide open, and not look away.
