II. Calling for attention and recognition, breaking the taboo and reconsidering honour: Yezidi women speak about their ISIS slavery experiences Joanna Boche?ska1 Jagiellonian University, KrakĆ³w, Poland Abstract Drawing from Jeffrey Alexander's theory of cultural trauma this paper fo- cuses on the selected stories of Yezidi women written in cooperation with different journalists. These stories have been published in recent years in French, German and English. Although Western media interest in the Yezidi women tragedy was sometimes criticised by scholars and Yezidis them- selves, these narratives should be distinguished from the mainstream media production and offered special attention. The stories play a very important role as instruments of the 'trauma process'. They give shape to the represen- tation of the tragic events, and thus call for recognition and redress. What is more, the women break taboo and speak about many sensitive issues such as sexuality and the traditional type of female honour called namĆ»s, which is based on female chastity. Until very recently the chastity of women has constituted the uncontested moral norm recorded in many oral narratives in the Middle East. It was precisely due to the strong social meaning of this norm that sex slavery might have been invented by the ISIS leaders as a deliberate 'war plan' designed to destroy the entire community. Follow- ing Kwame Anthony Appiah and Donna Hicks's reflection on honour and 1 CONTACT Joanna Boche?ska joanna.bochenska@kurdishstudies.pl Scanned by CamScanner
26 JOANNA BOCHE?SKA dignity I suggest that the narratives reconsider traditional honour and give meaning to modern dignity that elevates the value of human life rather than chastity. Thanks to their deeply emotional character and the tragic context that attracts attention of the global audience, the stories have great potential to create effective trauma discourse and bring some changes to the cultural and political landscape of the Middle East. Introduction In the book Esclave de Daech ("Enslaved by Daesh"), published in French in 2015, as one of the first stories narrated by the Yezidi women with the cooperation of the European journalist Jinan, the main protagonist and nar- rator of the story, is encouraged by her psychologist to change the ending of recurring nightmares that are the result of her dramatic experience in the Islamic State (ISIS)2 captivity. The Daesh invasion on Shingal3 in August 2014 brought mass killings and sexual slavery to thousands of Yezidis, the little known minority living in Iraq, Syria and Turkey as well as in the Cau- casus and Europe. These events were recognized as genocide by UNHCR (2016). In this paper, I am going to show the way the Yezidi women narra- tives, that were published in recent years in different European languages, try to change the ending of the long story of the Yezidi persecutions from the hands of their Muslim neighbours and also to confront ignorance and neglect of the global world. 2 Islamic State, Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL) or Daesh are the names of the same