Published: 24 May 2019
Last updated: 4 March 2024
Mikhail’s lens is wider and longer, however, taking in the persecution of many of Iraq’s minorities over time. The story begins with the image of red paint marking “N” on doors of Christian (Nasara) families, forced by Daesh to “abandon the houses they’d lived in for over 1,500 years.” She writes:
The N on the doors,
the exodus
from houses:
no keys,
no compass,
no words.
When Daesh attacked in 2014, it was not the first time the doors of families from particular religions had been marked with red symbols, targeting them for deportation or murder. Similar accounts were given by Christians targeted by Ottoman authorities one hundred years earlier.
Mikhail describes her grandmother’s friendship with a Jewish girl, Salima, whose family had been forced to leave after the Farhud, the anti-Jewish pogrom committed during the holiday of Shavuot in 1941. She tells me her grandmother had always felt nostalgic about their friendship.
“She loved how the two of them kept secrets of each other and how their festivals were doubled because they celebrated each other’s occasions.”
The Farhud, or “violent dispossession” as Mikhail translates it, saw about 180 Jews murdered, thousands raped or wounded and Jewish property and synagogues looted and destroyed. During World War II, Nazi propaganda made its way to the Middle East, and the Jews of Iraq, who had lived peacefully and flourished, were the ones whose doors were marked with red paint, often in the shape of a Hamsa.
Iraq’s history has been punctured by war and persecution, with no end in sight. Yet through it all, friendships have been made between individuals whose communities are in conflict; brave people have tried to rescue the oppressed at great personal risk. The power of The Beekeeper of Sinjar lies in recording those small moments of friendship and human kindness which give the reader hope in humanity, despite the broader narrative of violence and atrocity.
The forced exile of Iraqi Jews by “the merciless”, Mikhail says, “left a scar in the memory of my grandmother.” When she died, she left a bag of personal belongings containing some small Turkish coffee cups that had belonged to Salima. The theme of relationships torn apart by prejudice is continued in Mikhail’s memory of a university friend, Amani. Together they walked along al-Nahr Street and bought turnip cooked with date syrup. But Amani had Iranian heritage, and she, too, had to leave Iraq, during its war with Iran.
Mikhail intersperses more of her own memories through the book, transporting the reader into the madness of war. She writes about the 1991 Gulf War: “The satellite images depicted us as rows of ants leaving their hills … From above, it isn’t possible to see inside the houses, to recognise the lives of the inhabitants, their struggles over the little things and the big things …”
She draws connections between past violence and the present in subtle, intimate ways. Temporarily fleeing Baghdad at the height of the bombings, Mikhail and her parents took shelter at the family home in Telkaif, north of Mosul. She recalls her aunt’s refusal to leave the village when it became dangerous and she remained for decades. The arrival of Daesh, with its black flags and immediate act of lowering the cross from the church, finally forced her to desert the ancestral home.
Mikhail’s text is most heartrending when it reminds us that history is not just dates of military actions, and that the real impact of war is found in small details, in saying goodbye to friends and missing them at future family events. It is in a grandmother’s recipes passed down from generation to generation. It’s the day bullet cartridges are found near the washing line and a family has to stop sleeping on the roof under the stars. And it is in the generosity of individuals, conveyed in the overarching story of Abdullah the beekeeper’s rescue of scores of captive women, and just as much in the examples of a poor family who shared their food with a Yazidi woman during her escape, or the seamstress who, despite her father being a member of ISIS, allowed a Yazidi woman and her children to hide in her storeroom.
Learning about the torment Daesh imposed in recent years has not shattered Mikhail’s idealism. She tells me that although the stories of survivors were painful to hear, they “… remind us of how much we humans, regardless of who or where, are in need of each other.” She believes wholeheartedly that through these stories we must realise that “… no matter what our race is, humanity is our favourite colour; and no matter what our beliefs are, love is our best religion.”
Against the darkness of violence, mass killing and captivity, Mikhail chooses to shine a light on acts of kindness, reminding us of all the shades of humanity and urging us to have hope in it yet.
Dunya Mikhail was in Australia recently for the Sydney Writers Festival. See more about The Beekeeper of Sinjar here: https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/books/other-books/The-Beekeeper-of-Sinjar-Dunya-Mikhail-translated-by-Max-Weiss-9781788161268
The English version of Dunya Mikhail’s latest poetry collection, In her Feminine Sign, will be available in July. https://www.ndbooks.com/book/in-her-feminine-sign/
Photo: A Yazidi woman and her children who fled violence in Sinjar rest at the Iraq-Syria border, 2014. Credit: Youssef Boudlal/Reuters
