{"id":6505,"date":"2023-09-06T11:06:09","date_gmt":"2023-09-06T15:06:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nykcc.org\/?p=6505"},"modified":"2023-09-26T20:41:10","modified_gmt":"2023-09-27T00:41:10","slug":"the-bird-tattoo-by-dunya-mikhail","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nykcc.org\/oldsite\/the-bird-tattoo-by-dunya-mikhail\/","title":{"rendered":"“The Bird Tattoo” by Dunya Mikhail"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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\"The Bird Tattoo\" by Dunya Mikhail<\/h1>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t
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\"BirdOn September 5, 2023, the Book Club discussed The Bird Tattoo<\/em> by Dunya Mikhail. The author was present and took questions.<\/p>

Dunya Mikhail<\/strong> is an Iraqi American poet and writer, of Chaldean descent. She studied at the University of Baghdad, then worked as a journalist for the Baghdad Observer<\/em>. Facing censorship, in the mid-1990s she emigrated to the United States. She earned a master\u2019s degree at Wayne State University and currently teaches Arabic at Oakland University in Michigan. She has published several books of poetry in Arabic.<\/p>

Her first book published in English, The War Works Hard<\/em> (2005), was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and was selected as one of the 25 best books of 2005 by the New York Public Library. Later poetry collections in English are The Iraqi Nights<\/em> (2014) and In Her Feminine Sign<\/em> (2019), chosen by the New York Public Library as one of the ten best poetry books of 2019. Her nonfiction book, The Beekeeper<\/em> (2018), was a finalist for the National Book Award and shortlisted for the PEN\/John Kenneth Galbraith Award. The Bird Tattoo<\/em> (2022) is her first novel and has been shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction.<\/p>

Mikhail\u2019s honors include the Arab American Book Award, the United Nations Human Rights Award for Freedom of Writing, and the UNESCO Sharja Prize for Arab Culture.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t

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The Bird Tattoo<\/em> tells the tragic story of Helen, a Kurdish Yazidi woman, and her family during the ISIS attack on Iraq\u2019s Yazidi community in 2014-15. \u00a0<\/p>

Halliqi, a mountain village<\/strong><\/p>

A good part of the novel is takes place before the attack, in Helen\u2019s home village. Halliqi is a remote mountain village located in northwestern Iraq. It\u2019s a very primitive place technologically, with no internet or telephones or roads for cars. But it\u2019s enormously appealing, innocent and simple, Residents carry water up the mountainsides. The village had a generous connection to nature. Animals lived in special rooms in people\u2019s houses. And the villagers are hospitable, providing visitors with homemade bread, with homegrown figs, and much more.<\/p>

Here boys and girls, men and women, mingle easily. When Helen and Elias meet, 2 hours from her village, she is confident walking with a stranger. Mikhail explained that that\u2019s normal among Yazidis, everyone knows everyone in the villages. The free mixing between the genders is a stark contrast with the radical separation between the sexes under IS.<\/p>

Halliqi wasn\u2019t on the map when Mikhail wrote about it, but it\u2019s a real place, near where her family used to vacation during her childhood in Baghdad. \u00a0For this fictional portrait, she drew on other villages as well. For example, she created the celebration for Eid.\u00a0 Also, the way people in Halliqi communicate by whistling–that came from another village. \u00a0<\/p>

The simple appeal of Halliqi contrasts with the more complicated larger world that the characters face later in the novel. \u00a0But during the IS attack on Sinjar, its very inaccessibility allowed it to become a refuge for some Yazidis.<\/p>

\"DunyaIronic symbols<\/strong><\/p>

We asked about the bird, the qajab, which the Halliqi villagers prize. They cherish its freedom, but later these villagers, like Helen, become caged by Daesh. Their celebration of the freedom of the bird is therefore deeply ironic. Also Helene and Elias chose to put tattoos of the bird on their fingers instead of wedding rings, because rings can be lost. But they will be lost, in the incomprehensibly violent attack by Daesh.<\/p>

Anther ironic symbol in the novel is that of the whale swallowing the moon. The villagers go to the top of the mountain to rescue the moon from the \u201cwhale.\u201d But soon they themselves \u00a0will need to be rescued. \u00a0Mikhail is a poet and deliberately chose to use energy from poetry for these metaphors.<\/p>

Who can write about Yazidis?<\/strong><\/p>

Book Club members asked Mikhail about her Chaldean background and why she chose to write about Yazidis rather than Chaldeans. She replied that what happened to the Yazidis was unique. In advance of August 2014, Daesh had warned the Christians that the attack was coming and allowed them to leave, considering them \u201cpeople of the book,\u201d the Bible, like themselves. But they considered Yazidis to be infidels and so deserving only to be killed if they refused to convert to Islam.<\/p>

Daesh killed the Yazidi men and enslaved the women, put them for sale on the market. \u201cI felt humiliated by this as a woman,\u201d Mikhail told us. \u201cThey put price tags on the women and stripped them of their family members, their human value, their names. They were given only numbers. I couldn\u2019t not write about that.\u201d \u00a0<\/p>

Pressed further on how she responds to those who say she should leave writing about Yazidis to Yazidis, Mikhail replied, \u201cYazidis are Iraqi and so am I. But I don\u2019t have to be Iraqi to write about Iraqis. I don\u2019t think only Yazidis should write about Yazidis, Americans about Americans, and so on. Human beings are connected. My job is to serve the story in a way that is faithful to it.\u201d \u00a0Mikhail previously wrote about the Yazidi tragedy in her nonfiction book The Beekeeper.<\/em> She explained, \u201cA people who were deprived of their human value\u2014there\u2019s nothing wrong with writing about it and the story has been taken into other languages.\u201d It\u2019s also, for Mikhail, a matter of fighting. \u201cI don\u2019t have a weapon, only my pen. it\u2019s all I know how to use.\u201d<\/p>

Yazidis still unrecovered<\/strong><\/p>

We discussed the insufficient attention to finding the still missing abducted Yazidi girls and women. Mikhail explained that she was in touch with Abdullah, who initiated the network to rescue them. About 6,000 girls were stolen, and about half have been rescued and returned to communities.<\/p>

Some of them had children fathered by the terrorists and were and are not accepted in the community. Yazidis are not allowed to marry outsiders. One book club member explained that she been trying for two years to adopt two little boys who came from Yazidi mothers and Daesh fathers, working with an orphanage in Syria.\u00a0 Their mothers couldn\u2019t return to their communities with the children\u2014their families rejected them, they even got death threats.<\/p>

The recovered women have nothing, and others have not yet been recovered. This problem needs much more attention than it has received. When Mikhail visited the camps for interviews, \u201cI got the impression that they didn\u2019t get that much support internationally. They depend on each other.\u201d As for rescuers, she asked Abdullah\u2014on whom a character in the novel is based\u2014if he was still rescuing people. \u201cHe said there are two difficulties. . . . Those who try to rescue women risk their lives, so it\u2019s not easy. But also, they don\u2019t know where the women are anymore. Initially after the attack, there was one place to target, Raqqa. But Daesh is no longer in control of Raqqa. It makes it harder to find the women to rescue them.\u201d<\/p>

The Book Club thanks Dunya Mikhail for participating in this discussion. <\/em>The Bird Tattoo is available for purchase here<\/a>. The photo of Mikhail is from her website<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“The Bird Tattoo” by Dunya Mikhail On September 5, 2023, the Book Club discussed The Bird Tattoo by Dunya Mikhail. The author was present and took questions. Dunya Mikhail is an Iraqi American poet and writer, of Chaldean descent. She studied at the University of Baghdad, then worked as a journalist for the Baghdad Observer. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6507,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"give_campaign_id":0,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[97,62],"tags":[155,85],"class_list":["post-6505","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-club","category-literature","tag-dunya-mikhail","tag-yazidis"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nykcc.org\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6505","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nykcc.org\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nykcc.org\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nykcc.org\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nykcc.org\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6505"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/nykcc.org\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6505\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7176,"href":"https:\/\/nykcc.org\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6505\/revisions\/7176"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nykcc.org\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6507"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nykcc.org\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6505"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nykcc.org\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6505"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nykcc.org\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6505"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}