"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. Facing censorship, in the mid-1990s she emigrated to the United States. She earned a master’s degree at Wayne State University and currently teaches Arabic at Oakland University in Michigan. She has published several books of poetry in Arabic.
Her first book published in English, The War Works Hard (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 (2014) and In Her Feminine Sign (2019), chosen by the New York Public Library as one of the ten best poetry books of 2019. Her nonfiction book, The Beekeeper (2018), was a finalist for the National Book Award and shortlisted for the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award. The Bird Tattoo (2022) is her first novel and has been shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction.
Mikhail’s 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.
The Bird Tattoo tells the tragic story of Helen, a Kurdish Yazidi woman, and her family during the ISIS attack on Iraq’s Yazidi community in 2014-15.
Halliqi, a mountain village
A good part of the novel is takes place before the attack, in Helen’s home village. Halliqi is a remote mountain village located in northwestern Iraq. It’s a very primitive place technologically, with no internet or telephones or roads for cars. But it’s 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’s houses. And the villagers are hospitable, providing visitors with homemade bread, with homegrown figs, and much more.
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’s 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.
Halliqi wasn’t on the map when Mikhail wrote about it, but it’s a real place, near where her family used to vacation during her childhood in Baghdad. For this fictional portrait, she drew on other villages as well. For example, she created the celebration for Eid. Also, the way people in Halliqi communicate by whistling–that came from another village.
The simple appeal of Halliqi contrasts with the more complicated larger world that the characters face later in the novel. But during the IS attack on Sinjar, its very inaccessibility allowed it to become a refuge for some Yazidis.
Ironic symbols
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.
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 “whale.” But soon they themselves will need to be rescued. Mikhail is a poet and deliberately chose to use energy from poetry for these metaphors.
Who can write about Yazidis?
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 “people of the book,” 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.
Daesh killed the Yazidi men and enslaved the women, put them for sale on the market. “I felt humiliated by this as a woman,” Mikhail told us. “They 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’t not write about that.”
Pressed further on how she responds to those who say she should leave writing about Yazidis to Yazidis, Mikhail replied, “Yazidis are Iraqi and so am I. But I don’t have to be Iraqi to write about Iraqis. I don’t 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.” Mikhail previously wrote about the Yazidi tragedy in her nonfiction book The Beekeeper. She explained, “A people who were deprived of their human value—there’s nothing wrong with writing about it and the story has been taken into other languages.” It’s also, for Mikhail, a matter of fighting. “I don’t have a weapon, only my pen. it’s all I know how to use.”
Yazidis still unrecovered
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.
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. Their mothers couldn’t return to their communities with the children—their families rejected them, they even got death threats.
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, “I got the impression that they didn’t get that much support internationally. They depend on each other.” As for rescuers, she asked Abdullah—on whom a character in the novel is based—if he was still rescuing people. “He said there are two difficulties. . . . Those who try to rescue women risk their lives, so it’s not easy. But also, they don’t 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.”
The Book Club thanks Dunya Mikhail for participating in this discussion. The Bird Tattoo is available for purchase here. The photo of Mikhail is from her website.
