It's All About Muhammad

(THE NATIONAL) — By M. Lynx Qualey

It was the summer of 2014 when Dunya Mikhail learned that ISIS forces were not only kidnapping Iraqi women, but buying and selling them in open markets. Mikhail, an Iraqi poet living in the United States, says she “felt so insulted as a woman.” The Iraqi poet was so enraged by the treatment of women in her homeland by ISIS that she wrote a book detailing their pain – and strength

Mikhail, who now teaches at Michigan State University, went on to write Fi Souq Al Sabaya, which was longlisted for this year’s Sheikh Zayed Book Award. The English edition, titled The Beekeeper: Saving the Stolen Women of Iraq, was co-translated by the author and Max Weiss and was published by New Directions this month. The book is also being translated into Sorani Kurdish.

On the news, she heard of people being ordered to leave their homes. Online, she watched videos of hundreds of Iraqis fleeing on foot, many of them Yazidis. When Mikhail heard these women’s stories, she said: “I didn’t know what to do with my anger, but I contacted my friends in northern Iraq.”

She called a Yazidi journalist friend, who told her he’d heard horrifying stories from women who’d been kidnapped and escaped. He sent her the phone numbers of three women. At first, Mikhail didn’t call, as she wasn’t sure what to say. When she finally picked up the phone, the first two women spoke Kurdish, and Mikhail knew only a few words. At the third number, a man answered in Arabic. This was Abdullah, “The Beekeeper”, and he helped relay his cousin Nadia’s story. He also told Mikhail he was using his earnings from selling honey to assemble a network of smugglers and help women escape.

Mikhail is a multi-award-winning poet, the author of Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea and The War Works Hard (translated by Elizabeth Winslow) and The Iraqi Nights (translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid). Yet although she wrote for The Baghdad Observer as a young woman, it had been a long time since she’d practiced journalism.

“In the beginning,” she said, “I thought I was going to write a long poem – an epic – in response to that crisis.”

But the more she heard women’s stories, and spoke with Abdullah about his attempts to help escapees, the more she “wanted to stay behind the story and not in front of it, so that I could let their voices be heard”. There are still poetic moments in the book, which Mikhail says she kept “as breaks for the reader and myself”.

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