3 Aug 2014: ISIS storm Sinjar. Only 25,000 of 300,000 residents stay. Yazidi forced to convert to Islam
March 2015: UN accuses IS of genocide and war crimes. Citing evidence of plans to wipe out Yazidi
13 Nov 2015: town of Sinjar liberated. Yarzidi start to return. Mass graves found.
Inspired by an article in the Guardian newspaper: http://www.theguardian.com/world/201...ighbours-raqqa
A user
manual explains
What to do
when she explodes
With rage,
so her new master
Cannot
complain
When she's
disobedient.
Stolen as a
teen,
Bought and
sold
Into years
of imprisonment
Forced
marriage and more.
As a child
she saw the injustice
Of hypnotised men corrupted by faith,
Saw sex
used as a weapon of oppression
Just as
white men once held the whip,
To
plantation worker,
Now woman
is the nigger
Of esoteric zealots
Painting
middle-eastern streets,
Museums and
homes
Blood red
in the name of Him.
In drugged
serried heaps
Sisters and
mothers lay
Stacked
like soup cans
On
supermarket shelf,
Waiting to be sold,
Except her
beauty and viginty
Make her a
valuable second wife.
But the
first,
Touched by
a mother's sympathy
Harbouring
a wife's jealousy,
Refuses to
acknowledge
Foreign
tribal flesh as human.
Her latest owner taunts
How brave brother and father
Succumb to sword;
Now in midst of pleas for death
She's told to ignore her desires
The girl she knew is already dead,
Because possessions
Cannot dictate their own fate.
Midnight
cries turn from pain to pitiful
The slow
drip of slave tears
Erode
neighbour's limestone heart,
Until with
a 'provision of captivity'*
A thousand
dollars buys possessor
The right
to beat, marry or make
Her a maid
at 20-years-old.
Instead new owner
Teaches teen to read,
Then risks their lives
To smuggle
this broken girl
From the
grip of soldiers fist
Under
abaya* and false intention
To Turkish
borders,
Past guards
reciting the shahadah*
And female
morality police
Looking to
disfigure unbelievers.
A nose
stud* her passport
Back to a
stolen past,
Where a
mother mourns
And a
sister will never return,
Where
freedom is a gift
From an
unknown neighbour.
*provision
of captivity: a contract between men when buying and selling women
*A nose
stud a symbol of being a Yazidi
*Shadadah:
a statement of Islamic faith
*Abaya: a
cloak like garment worn by woman in Muslim countries
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