The Beekeeper: Rescuing the Stolen Women of Iraq

by Dunya Mikhail, Max Weiss (Translator)

Overview

The true story of a beekeeper who risks his life to rescue enslaved women from Daesh

Since 2014, Daesh (ISIS) has been brutalizing the Yazidi people of northern Iraq: sowing destruction, killing those who won’t convert to Islam, and enslaving young girls and women.

The Beekeeper, by the acclaimed poet and journalist Dunya Mikhail, tells the harrowing stories of several women who managed to escape the clutches of Daesh. Mikhail extensively interviews these women—who’ve lost their families and loved ones, who’ve been sexually abused, psychologically tortured, and forced to manufacture chemical weapons—and as their tales unfold, an unlikely hero emerges: a beekeeper, who uses his knowledge of the local terrain, along with a wide network of transporters, helpers, and former cigarette smugglers, to bring these women, one by one, through the war-torn landscapes of Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, back into safety.

In the face of inhuman suffering, this powerful work of nonfiction offers a counterpoint to Daesh’s genocidal extremism: hope, as ordinary people risk their own lives to save those of others. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811226127
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	03/27/2018
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	298,375
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Dunya Mikhail is an Iraqi American poet and writer. She is the author of the poetry collections The War Works Hard (shortlisted for the International Griffin Poetry Prize), Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea (winner of the Arab American Book Award), The Iraqi Nights (winner of the Poetry Magazine Translation Award), and In Her Feminine Sign (chosen as one of the ten best poetry books of 2019 by The New York Public Library). Her nonfiction book The Beekeeper was a finalist for the National Book Award, and her debut novel, The Bird Tattoo, was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction. Mikhail won the UNESCO Sharjah Prize for Arab Culture and the UN Human Rights Award for Freedom of Writing.

Max Weiss is an Associate Professor of History and Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. He is the author of In the Shadow of Sectarianism, and the translator of Samar Yazbek’s A Woman in the Crossfire and Nihad Sirees’s The Silence and the Roar.

Table of Contents

1 N 1

2 The Bee Kingdom 9

3 In the Sabaya Market 28

4 Through the Eye of a Needle 40

5 Five Tricks for Escaping Daesh 60

6 In Daesh's Camp 76

7 The Exodus 93

8 My Grandmother's Grave 103

9 The Chirp 113

10 One Step Closer, Two Steps, Three 125

11 Narjis, Narjis 140

12 The Infidels 151

13 Sinjar: The Beautiful Side 166

14 The Spring 178

Editorial Reviews

War memoirs tend to be written by soldiers; civilian voices are seldom heard. The Beekeeper…is a rare and powerful exception…Through interviews with those who managed to escape, Mikhail has created a searing portrait of courage, humanity and savagery, told in a mosaic of voices…which together illuminate a human catastrophe that might otherwise be a mere footnote to the still-unfolding consequences of the Iraq war. Mikhail, whose gifts as a poet infuse these narratives with unexpected beauty, is interested in the little things: "I mean the little things with their big shadows."

The New York Times Book Review - Deborah Campbell

01/29/2018
Iraqi journalist and poet Mikhail (The Iraqi Nights) lays bare the agonizing experiences of the Yazidi people at the hands of ISIS in this visceral account of the outskirts of modern day Iraq. In 2014, ISIS began invading villages of northern Iraq, killing most of the men and enslaving the women and children. Much of Mikhail’s account is made up of first-person testimonies of several survivors who speak of being repeatedly raped, sold to the highest bidder, and tortured. They recall losing their families and witnessing their children, raised by ISIS supporters, becoming “a distorted version” of who they once were. Mikhail also homes in on the rescue efforts of a man named Abdullah, a local beekeeper who used his knowledge of the region and the money he made selling honey in Iraq and Syria to cultivate a “hive of transporters and smugglers” to save women; he subsequently connected Mikhail to several survivors. Powerful and heartbreaking, this work lets the survivors tell their stories and highlights the courage of those risking their lives to rescue others. Photos. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

"Mikhail’s harrowing account of the horrors inflicted on women captured by Isis...A powerful reminder."

Financial Times

"Remarkable. A child’s perspective mingles freely with the poet’s mature voice, both baffled by the paradoxes of so much beauty and so much destruction."

The Washington Post - Ron Charles

"The Beekeeper is a brutally important, electrifying, and lyrical true story."

Foreward - Paige Van de Winkle

"A searing portrait of courage."

New York Times Book Review

"Dunya Mikhail, award-winning poet, has gathered first-person stories from those who survived [an] unthinkable ordeal, as well as those who worked tirelessly to rescue them. We should all read it."

The Observer - Peter Stanford

"The stories in The Beekeeper are reminiscent of tales of escapees on the US’s Underground Railroad of the mid-1800s or during the Holocaust. The book is a paean for coexistence in a multiethnic, multi-religious, multilingual Iraq. Powerful and difficult."

The women stolen by ISIL speak out: Dunya Mikhail details their journeys - The National - M. Lynx Qualey

"Haunting and captivating—a powerful portrait of courage."

Elle UK

"Shakespeare would have enjoyed the poetry of Dunya Mikhail, who has spoken of love as a response to a war-torn world–an aesthetic, a value, and a practice. "

Christian Science Monitor - Elizabeth Toohey

"This remarkable book tells of one man’s attempts to fight back and to rescue his people from a life of horror. In the hands of Dunya Mikhail, an Iraqi Assyrian poet, the stories of these women and their escape, with Abdullah’s help, become a horrifying tightrope walk. Abdullah’s story is a remarkable one, and it is told with great intensity by Mikhail."

The Sunday Times (London) - Louise Callaghan

2017-12-24
An Iraqi journalist and poet long resident in New York returns to her native country to chronicle the misfortunes of Yazidi women under the rule of the Islamic State group.The country of the Yazidi lies outside Mosul in northern Iraq. Under the control of IS, also called Daesh, it saw the rise of two kinds of smugglers: of cigarettes and of captive women. Using tobacco was strictly forbidden under IS, to great penalty, but kidnapping women was a luxury, a prize of war, that was met by Yazidis and sympathetic Arabs smuggling them back to their families, sometimes impregnated by their captors. The beekeeper of Mikhail's (The Theory of Absence, 2014, etc.) title likens the stolen women to queen bees, the work of rescuing the sabaya, or sex slaves, to apiculture: "We worked like in a beehive," he says, "with extreme care and well-planned initiatives." The women are psychologically damaged and do not always reintegrate easily into Yazidi society. Their accounts are harrowing; one tells the author of being raped by a Daesh fighter who sang, "Oh, Muslim, come, there's a virgin in heaven" before assaulting her each night, promising her that in the afterlife she would remain a sex slave to serve the faithful, who "would kill themselves to meet their houris in heaven." Mikhail bears witness to them and other women in war-torn Iraq, women who have scarcely known peace throughout their lives. That she is a poet is clear on each page, as when she writes, "maybe Kurdistan is a daffodil that has only wilted temporarily, only temporarily." She writes affectingly and well, but newsworthy as it is, her account follows two major books—Cathy Otten's With Ash on Their Faces and Nadia Murad's The Last Girl—on the same subject and may be lost in the shuffle. That would be a shame, for it is a meritorious, urgent book that deserves an audience.All but true believers suffer under Daesh, Mikhail makes abundantly clear—but especially women. A powerful study.

Kirkus Review