"The Bird Tattoo" is a beautiful and troubling look at Iraqi village life in the time of war

Needless to say, when we first planned this week's schedule, we had no idea just how emotional it would be to read a novel about a small village in the Middle East that is ripped apart by war, terrorism, indoctrination, and gender-based violence. Yet, here we are.

But before we begin talking about Iraqi author Dunya Mikhail's stunning 2022 novel "The Bird Tattoo," we have to issue our strongest content warning in the history of the newsletter.
 

This book is not for everyone — particularly if you have difficulty reading about rape, abuse, and ethnic cleansing. If you need to skip this week's newsletter, we understand. We also promise that next week's edition will be much lighter.

For the rest of you: "The Bird Tattoo" is a beautiful and poignant story about what happens when a family and remote region have to endure horrors inflicted on them by the political forces around them. Main character Helen is a young Yazidi woman living in a remote mountain village in Sinjar, northern Iraq. Life in her village used to be idyllic, as the area is too remote and isolated for the sectarian divisions that have historically affected the Yazidi and other Iraqis to have a deep impact on daily life. That all changes with the rise of what the reader knows to be ISIS, which the author Mikhail chillingly dubs the Organization.

When we meet Helen, her life is anything but idyllic, as she is now kidnapped with hundreds of other women and sold and used through a website run by the Organization. As Mikhail writes, "“If she had not seen it with her own eyes, Helen would never have believed a market for selling women existed.” 

As she endures and watches her fellow captives endure rape and other violence, she also wonders what has happened to her husband Elias, a fellow Yazidi she met by chance when he came to her village over the course of his work as a journalist she also wonders about her sons and what the Organization has done to them. As the book goes from Helen's present to Helen and Elias's courtship (where they got bird tattoos on their fingers in lieu of wedding rings) the reader is captivated by both Helen's endurance and all of the systems that allowed this all to happen.

We received copies of The Bird Tattoo from Pegasus Books. Readers can purchase their own copies at our Bookshop storefront here.

Lakshmi: Oh my goodness- what a novel. I will never read this book again- but parts of it will stay with me forever.

Asha: I was unprepared.

Lakshmi: Same – I saw the title and the cover and thought "oh this looks like a sweet look at village life." OH MY GOODNESS. And the funny thing is – the flashbacks ARE a sweet look at village life!

Asha: They are!

Lakshmi: That's what makes the book so brutal! you see what things were like before. Dunya Mikhail is also a poet and it is brutal how vivid these lines are.

Asha: The way the book starts almost feels like you're in a dystopian world. Especially with the author's use of "the Organization" in place of ISIS. But as the book goes on it gets more and more real.

Lakshmi: Yes, it starts with the reader wondering what the Organization is and then as Helen endures it's hard not to look away

The Washington Post review sums it up well:

These opening 30 pages of sexual abuse are challenging to read, but hang on. Mikhail has a poet’s sensitivity to what her audience needs and can endure.

During one of Helen’s escape attempts, the story suddenly flies back 15 years to the first time she met the man who became her husband. Falling down an elevator shaft would be less jarring than this transition. But it’s clearly intentional — a juxtaposition meant to give us a visceral sense of what she lost.

Asha: This opening paragraph man…

Members of the Organization had taken all the captives’ possessions, including their gold wedding rings. But Helen’s wedding ring was not a ring. It was a tattoo of a bird. She was staring down at her finger when someone started shouting “Twenty-seven! Number twenty-seven!” 

It’s beautiful and immediately jarring

Lakshmi: So jarring.

Asha: The idea of an auction where women are sold into sex slavery really feels either far in the past, or in an imagined future, but it was the reality of Iraq in 2014. I don't remember much coverage about that...or maybe I just wasn't paying attention

Lakshmi: I also feel like we (as Americans) haven't and probably will never really wrestled with how awful and wrong the 2003 invasion of Iraq was. Everytime I think of it I get mad all over again.

Asha: Word

Lakshmi: But we've barely wrestled with the Vietnam War and Korea! So this will never happen

but omg- want to be mad- look up who voted for that war.

Asha: Oh that part I remember!

Lakshmi: Like sometimes when I am already mad I look at the senate vote hahahaha. But we digress.

This book really shows how innocent people- particularly women, particularly poor women

always suffer the most during conflict

Asha: Apparently Halliqi is a real village that really was a refuge from Daesh! From an interview with Dunya Mikhail:

Yes, Halliqi exists in Iraq (in the northwest corner), but even Iraqis don’t know much about it; it’s not even on the map. I myself, who lived in Iraq the first 30 years of my life, didn’t know it existed when I was there. I learned about it and about its fascinating traditions from one of the novel’s characters, who is originally from Halliqi.

Lakshmi: That just makes it so much sadder.

Asha: Here’s more from that interview:

Until Daesh arrived in this area (of Sinjar villages) in 2014, Halliqi had no internet and no telephones. Its isolation and geographic uniqueness saved its residents from Daesh. The terrorist fighters probably didn’t know it existed either, and, even if they had known, it would take hours to reach it by foot or by donkey from the closest spot, and there’s no way to reach it by car. The village in August 2014 became a shelter for many people who left their villages as they heard of Daesh coming to their area. Its residents, who are extremely generous and kind, baked bread in their clay ovens to feed hundreds of guests who slept in the open air by the fig trees. They never anticipated suddenly losing relatives and family members. And, as a result of that crisis, they realized how important it was to have cell phones, since that was the tool through which they could hear the voice of someone asking for help or someone offering help to rescue their loved ones. These days, some of them managed having cell phones, but they would still have to go to the top of the mountain to get an internet connection.

Lakshmi: Also the Yazidi traditions are so beautiful: the birds and the poetry. It just sounded so beautiful.

Asha: It did! Which is why it was even more upsetting when the lives of its residents are disrupted.

Lakshmi: For some context:

Yazidis are one of the oldest ethnic and religious communities indigenous to the Middle East. The majority of Yazidis live in the north-west of Iraq, in areas surrounding Shingal Mountain and Shekhan district. Additionally, there are some Yazidi villages and towns in Talkeef and Bashiqa District, and in Duhok Governorate in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI). Although there is a dearth of reliable statistics on demography, community estimates state there are about 550,000 – 600,000 Yazidis in Iraq. Yazidis are considered the second-largest religious minority in Iraq, after the Christians. 

I hadn't heard of this faith at all until the stories about villagers fleeing in 2014.

Asha: Me neither!

Lakshmi: I do remember stories about this group fleeing and living in the mountains, but not of the targetted rapes of the women.

Asha: Probably because rape and war always go hand and hand - so on the one hand it's just assumed that where there is war there is rape, but on the other it means no one really talks about it.

Another thing that felt really vivid was her descriptions of Daesh fighters being given peoples' houses.

Lakshmi: Yes

Asha: 

It was furnished and smelled of people who were absent. She felt as if she were about to suffocate despite the fact that she loved the place and its decor, especially the carpet with Persian-style motifs and the turquoise ceramic vase on the round wooden table. The cushions on the sofas were of warm colors that matched the carpet. A large box of toys by the sofa filled Helen with sadness, as she imagined children forced to leave their toys and their home. On the side table was a dried piece of bread. The inhabitants must have left in a hurry and not taken much with them, neither big things like the television in the middle of the wall nor small things like the tiny sandal by the door. She almost saw their fingerprints on the furniture and memories between the walls. She saw in her mind how they’d escaped with only the clothes they were wearing, just as her own people had. They dispersed like billiard balls after a hard hit.

Lakshmi: These poor people

Asha: It kind of reminded me of “Brotherless Night”, the book we read about the Sri Lankan civil war, and how militants were just given other peoples' houses.

Lakshmi: Yes.

But on a lighter note-- the scene that will also stay with me is Elias taking Helen to the amusement park, it was just so sweet. She is terrified of the rollercoasters (she is even terrified of the ferris wheel) but it's still one of the best days of her life because she is with her favorite person.

Asha: That was great!

Lakshmi: But of course there is also a sense of foreboding and predictions that things might change. The bird tattoo(s) of the book's title come from a fortune teller at the amusement park

she does the tattoos because Helen admires a ring with a bird but there isn't one her size. I loved every moment of how the author depicted that day.

But there was also a foreboding moment, when the fortune teller hints that the future will not be 

Lakshmi: But the structure of this book is also fascinating because it goes from the brutality of the organization- to the flashbacks- and then to a nonstop thriller as we learn what happened

structurally it felt really different and an interesting piece of storytelling.

Asha: And it worked.

Lakshmi: Yes- this book is a real feat

Asha: We get what's happening in the present, back up to absorb the context, and when we've really gotten to know the characters and are rooting for them, we learn their fates.

Lakshmi: Also- I loved Elias and most readers will so we are really, really invested in his fate

Another beautiful little scene is when Helen (in captivity) sees an old copy of the magazine he worked at. Because he wasn’t always bylined, she doesn’t know if she is reading something he wrote. But she sees a sentence that sounds like him, and clings to that.

Asha: It must be the worst feeling in the world, not knowing where your husband and children are, and not knowing when it will all end.

Lakshmi: And like we noted in the intro — since that’s happening to so many ppl right now — it’s particularly poignant.