Sometimes I add a very specific book to my TBR list, complete with ISBN and the source of the recommendation or the reason for my curiosity.
Sometimes there’s a name added to the list, with no context or details. That’s how it was with Dunya Mikhail, so I started with the books that were most readily accessible from the library.
The first I read is The Beekeeper: Rescuing the Stolen Women of Iraq. It’s translated from the Arabic, by the author with Max Weiss.
(For context, Weiss previously translated Samar Yazbek’s A Woman in the Crossfire—also essential reading. And, n North America, The Beekeeper‘s published by New Directions, who’s also responsible for Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy in these parts.)
When it arrived, I realised that I must have written down Mikhail’s name as part of reading to expand my understanding of the post-October-7th conflict between Hamas and Israel. It’s an excellent place to begin if you, also, want to understand more about Jihadism and how its adherents are different than ordinary Muslims—which is a little like saying that you want to understand how evangelicals, actively fighting in the war for souls, are different from ordinary Christians.
Mikhail opens with her teaching the Arabic alphabet, specifically the letter ‘n’, which is written like a semi-circle on its back and a dot centred above—like a star above a fallen crescent moon. It’s the character that Daeshi (another jihadist group, like Hamas, fighting for the Islamic State) write in red on people’s doors—infidels’ doors they would say—giving them 24 hours to leave their homes and all their belongings. N for Nasara, Christians.
She doesn’t share her thoughts with her students who, she thinks, are “too delicate to hear how young ladies were sold in warehouses after being inspected like watermelons—buyers would select the ones they wanted after smelling the girls carefully.”
But, inwardly, she remembers Nadia: a 28-year-old Kurdish woman she had interviewed (with the help of an Arabic translator) after Nadia escaped from Daeshi jihadi captivity to Iraq. N for Nadia, who was married with children and left with her husband as instructed; they were later surrounded by Daeshi fighters and captured.
She and her children (aged six, five, and one) were brutally schooled in and forced to “convert” to Islam with the other “infidels” in a camp, hungry and thirsty, and where her children were beaten in front of her. Then she was sold for about 100,000 dinars—about $85 American—and “married” to a jihadi, who raped her in front of them. Three months later, allied with another woman (and her two children) and, with the assistance of the community’s baker and one of her cousins, they escape while the men are briefly away to fight.
The Beekeeper was a finalist for the National Book Award in the U.S. (published by Simon & Schuster) whereas The Bird Tattoo is fiction, a finalist for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction. It, too, opens with the sale of a woman, but it’s not written in a journalistic tone.
The sentences are short and the language spare, but there are moments of lyricism. “She felt the presence of [her husband] all around her. Like threads stitched on an embroidered canvas, her life was seamed with the color of his absence.”
The jacket copy references Elif Shafak, and it’s clearly political and powerful like Shafak’s writing (Samar Yazbek’s Planet of Clay and Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad are also highlighted). But I was reminded more of novels by Khaled Hosseini—especially A Thousand Splendid Suns, set in Afghanistan and focussing on girls’ and women’s lives—with the emphasis on story and a strong throughline.
From a narrative perspective, The Bird Tattoo is immediately and consistently engaging; readers are drawn into Helen’s story immediately and invested in the idea of her escape, haunted by the details of her everyday life with the jihadists. From a publishing perspective, it’s a page turner.
From an historical perspective, it’s revealing: readers can readily visualise the scenes, whether populated by jihadis’ ordinary speech about camp “work” assignments alongside scenes of cooking eggplant in the kitchen belonging to one of a series of “husbands”. From an educational perspective, it’s an invitation.
Mikhail’s fiction allows readers to imagine how she distinguishes between her homeland in Iraq (Helen’s love of flowers abundant in her homeland, the letter F for fig, her spelling of l-o-v-e) and what it’s become with the rise of Jihadism. (She worked as a journalist and translator after graduating in Baghdad, but fled to Jordan and then America, when faced with interrogation.)
Fiction like hers allows all of us to move towards a greater understanding of the intricate power dynamics behind the headlines, behind statements designed to provoke your interest (in a world where news is paid for via advertisers rather than subscriptions to a daily paper delivered to doorsteps), phrases designed to secure the click rather than to inform, to encourage comprehension, or to reward critical thinking.
Mikhail’s writing, fiction and non-fiction, offers a different perspective on the challenges of confronting an ideology, characterised by violence, inherently oppositional to “western values” wherein women are not sold, husbands are not murdered, and people choose whether to believe or how to believe in religion.
We can see, in literature, how longstanding grassroots movements towards freedom might be coopted by the jihadis’ goals, how resistance fighters might believe that an alliance with jihadis could be a step toward freedom because both groups seek to overthrow existing power structures (how there would be inner debates about the costs and benefits of that alliance), and how ordinary people trying to live their lives outside of this conflict get caught in the snare.
Of course there are many books one can read to gain this kind of understanding, and here are only two of them, by a writer whose name was scribbled on a single line in my notebook, until that translated into two library loans. (This post has been written to coincide with Rebecca’s #LoveYourLibrary event, marking the last Monday of each month.) Next, maybe I’ll try for her first translation into English, a book of poetry. Or, maybe you have another suggestion?
What have you been reading recently that’s added to your understanding of human conflict and reconciliation, war and resistance, loss and restoration?
It’s hard to even fathom that things like this happen now in the world I live in.
That’s a good way of putting it!
Dunya Mikhail is not an author I’ve come across before, but I appreciate your thoughtful reflections on these powerful, thought-provoking books. I’ll keep her in mind, especially for some of my book subscription readers at the shops.
Re: the question at the end of your post, My Friends by Hisham Matar (which you’ve seen on my blog) very much falls into this category. A thoughtful, beautiful written portrayal of friendship in exile imbued with a strong sense of loss. It really made me think about the pervasive impact of repressive regimes, how they can destroy people’s lives in so many ways from major, life-changing acts of violence to smaller, everyday micro-repressions that get under the skin…
Particularly her non-fiction would be a good mix for subscriptions: concise, incisive, and the anecdotes are unforgettable.
Ah, yes, I was impressed by your thoughts on that. It’s more than 400 pages long, nearly 500 in French, I see from the library catalogue: does it feel that long? What a bizarre question, now that I think about it. Just that his other books are so much shorter that I’ve long held the idea his prose is spare and his writing streamlined. I can see where that might become a very satisfying reading project.
What a beautiful, thoughtful post and set of reviews Marcie, I just loved this. You ask such good questions, and although it’s scary to think and read about, you bring up good points. The need for news to provide ‘clickers’ rather than an informed population is such an important distinction, one that many people have forgotten about, or glossed over.
It’s not less scary to not read about it because that doesn’t make it un-happen; if we pretend otherwise, the fear grows and we are truly helpless. And how do we talk to our children about things that we haven’t troubled to understand ourselves, then where’s the hope for future generations to have fewer wars (at least, if not an end to war) if they can’t work towards understanding. I’ve definitely followed the clicks myself, so I understand how it happens!
The books you highlight here sound incredible, powerful but perhaps make for tough reading. The sale of women for example makes me shudder. To answer your final question, I recently read A Woman In Berlin, by an anonymous German woman in 1945 Berlin, when the Russians took over the city. It was so uncompromising, yet there was no self pity. The way the women faced their trauma in an almost pragmatic way, to ensure survival and also how surprising connections were made with their oppressors. It was a tough read it made me think.
It sounds a good companion for Etty Hillesum’s diary (from Persephone). These aren’t easy stories, but as you say, there’s so much we can learn about resilience and determination, about how pwople locate courage and insist on their humanity in excruciating situations. I think you would find a similar pragmatism and sisterhood in these accounts (in the NF, particularly).
I’m a political person, and my only response to this review is political. So I ask myself ‘who benefits?’, who benefits from the demonisation of Muslims?
Solzhenitsyn was lauded in the West because it suited the US security establishment during the Cold War. Is that what this is?
For as long as the West continue to invade the Middle East and to maintain client states there then some Muslims will support extremist organizations like Daesh – who’s formation was pretty largely a direct result of the illegal US/UK/Australian invasion of Iraq, and was predicted well in advance.
I think she would say she’s a political writer, so that makes sense. The whole “when America sneezes, Canada catches a cold” thing translates into media here often mirroring an unquestioning (seemingly) pro-American perspective-as with the invasion of Iraq-and sometimes it’s a challenge to follow the thread, when that reequires subverting the standard narrative on these incursions. I understand why so many people here don’t care to dig below the headline.
And, then, there’s the classic differentiation between American and Canadian society, characterised by the “Melting Pot” in America (i.e. assimilation) and the “Mosaic” in Canada (i.e. embracing more than one cultural influence), so in theory Canada is supposed to value differences more (in reality, all the same prejudices exist). Easier to think that Canadians are “better” than it is to look at the xenophobia and demonisation of Muslims and so many others.
Are you thinking of Mikhail as Solzhenitsyn, or simply urging that people consider why a certain point-of-view is leveraged in general? For me, writing like hers draws attention to the fact that Jihadism is not the same as Islam, that being a jihadist is not the same as being a Muslim, that this is a relatively small group of believers inside a larger group, even though the media tends to paint them all with the same brush. But maybe you’re thinking that too much damage has already been done, that people reading her books would simply receive them as anti-Muslim in general. I can see how that might happen.
I will have to take time to think about how writers must be free to criticise their own societies even if that criticism can be co-opted by others. And that we must be free to read them.
I like your point that freedom fighters might ally themselves with religious extremists to see off a common enemy – the religious governments of Iran and Afghanistan are a direct result of US enmity.
I’d like to read more about American interventions/interference in the 1970s to understand enduring animosity. I’m reminded of Kamal Al-Solaylee‘s writing about how things changed so swiftly for his family in Yemen in that time, how the women went from having so much freedom to being so restricted (Intolerable, Brown, Return) and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis of course, set then in Iran. All those are via mainstream presses, so I take your point that we should beware of the “single story” and seek out indie publications too (Mikhail’s NF is indie-published and her novel was published independently overseas but by Simon & Schuster here).
Your final question really resonated as I’ve just finished an anthology of short stories by Afghan women. It’s definitely added to my understanding.
I’ve not read Dunya Mikhail but I’ll look out for her now and see if my library has any copies.