The Last Girl by Nadia Murad

It’s the global season of sheltering in place. For once, we are all together experiencing the same challenge, and most of us have figured out how to best cope over weeks of quarantining. My way to cope has been to lose myself in the world of books. And the latest gem I found is a book called The Last Girl by Nadia Murad. In these challenging times, it makes me realize that had we all stood together against the horrors shared in this book, perhaps this world would be a better place.

The book paints the life of the author from her childhood in a Yazidi village (Kocho) in Iraq to her journey abroad after surviving a genocide. The landscape of beautiful villages, the community life, and the strong bonds of caring people. It sketches out the outlines of Yazidism for the reader – drawing upon lives of characters who lost their lives for their way of life. Learning about this way of life from a Yazidi who lost her mother and siblings to the blind anger during a recent power struggle in Iraq, simply because they believed something different is heartbreaking but also enlightening of true human nature. Could we really defend that any higher power would condone lost lives and the insurmountable sorrow that comes with it? Would it really condone violence against an entire community, sex slavery of young girls, and inhuman treatment of children?

And yet, this book draws out the extreme goodness and the debilitating suffering of humans. It’s a story of how people come together in times of distress to support each other, to spend every penny they own to help a woman escape, and how with utmost hope they run over landmines ridden farms to taste freedom one last time. It’s a story of hardship, interwoven with a thread of hope, with both stories of loss and the spirit of survival. It is an example of how a belief can take the form of both a demon bigger than humanity, and selfless love that discounts ones own life for the life of another.

You may say that this is a story of millions of people around the world, from jews in Germany to Muslims in India, and you would be right. But there are a few very distinct reasons to lap this book up:

1. The author really has a flare for raw but poetic writing. She is able to draw upon the visual images of her childhood with the simplicity of a child and also explain the impact on her community with the clarity of an adult at the very same time. It’s the story of lives lost but from the eyes of a survivor, and that offers the perspective often missing
2. This is a beautiful and incomplete primer on Yazidism and how the geographical location of this community amidst the staunch Sunni villages and in the presence of ISIS led to the very roots of their culture and religion to be questioned, attacked, and almost wiped out
3. Nadia Murad, the author, has done tremendous work in support of victims of genocide and has also won the Nobel Peace Prize. She, with little support, left her beloved homeland behind to bring more visibility to this issue and to become a pillar of support to others. If we, as educated and forward individuals of society, don’t learn about her and support her then we are truly not playing our part
4. Last but not the least, we can only support the diversity in this global human village if we can learn about each other with an open mind and be appreciative of the goodness in each belief system. I, for one, didn’t know much about Yazidism and have found it extremely inspirational

Importantly though, this isn’t about education on a religion, but instead it is the story of how human intolerance and extremism can destroy a beautiful concept and in the attempt to destroy a concept, ruin an entire community. Having grown up as a Hindu, I was taught that all religions are just different paths to reach the ultimate goal of falling out of the circle of time. Admittedly, everything any religion says is debatable, and yet not something one should ever be killed or abused over – there is no reason for children to see their mothers be shot, or for young girls to be taken as slaves, and young boys to be brought up with complete strangers attempting to shove down beliefs that got their elders murdered in front of their innocent eyes. There is no reason in this world to treat a community or religion as text written with pencil that one can erase forever… there is no reason to take away from Earth the very presence of their heritage.

If you’d like to read more about the book, here’s an interesting professional review: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/18/books/review/nadia-murad-last-girl.html