by Nadia Murad
She was also practical and hardworking, trying against great odds to make our lives better. Yazidis are among the poorest communities in Iraq, and my family was poor even by Kocho’s standards, particularly after my parents separated. For years, my brothers dug wells by hand, lowering themselves delicately into the wet, sulfurous ground inch by inch, careful not to break a bone. They also, along with my mother and sisters, farmed other people’s land, taking only a small percentage of the profit for the tomatoes and onions they harvested. The first ten years of my life, we rarely had meat for dinner, living on boiled greens, and my brothers used to say they bought new pants only when they could see their legs through the old ones.
Gradually, thanks to my mother’s hard work and the economic growth in northern Iraq after 2003, our situation, and that of most Yazidis, improved. My brothers took jobs as border guards and policemen when the central and Kurdish governments opened up positions to Yazidis. It was dangerous work—my brother Jalo joined a police unit guarding Tal Afar airport that lost a lot of its men in combat in the first year—but it paid well. Eventually we were able to move from my father’s land into our own house.
People who knew my mother only for her deep religious beliefs and work ethic were surprised by how funny she could be, and how she turned her hardship into humor. She had a teasing way of joking, and nothing, not even the reality that she would almost certainly never marry again, was off-limits. One day, a few years after she and my father separated, a man visited Kocho hopeful for my mother’s attention. When she heard he was at the door, she grabbed a stick and ran after him, telling him to go away, that she would never marry again. When she came back inside, she was laughing. “You should have seen how scared he was!” she told us, imitating him until we were all laughing too. “If I was going to marry, it wouldn’t be to a man who ran away from an old lady with a stick!”
She joked about everything—about being abandoned by my father, about my fascination with hair and makeup, about her own failures. She had been going to adult literacy classes since before I was born, and when I became old enough, I started tutoring her. She was a fast learner, in part, I thought, because she was able to laugh off her mistakes.
When she talked about that scramble for birth control before I was conceived, it was as if she were telling a story from a book she had read long ago and liked only for its punch lines. Her reluctance to get pregnant with me was funny because now she couldn’t imagine life without me. She laughed because of how she had loved me the moment I was born, and because I would spend each morning warming myself by our clay oven while she baked bread, talking to her. We laughed because I would get jealous whenever she doted on my sisters or nieces instead of me, because I vowed never to leave home, and because we slept in the same bed from the day I was born until ISIS came to Kocho and tore us all apart. She was our mother and our father at the same time, and we loved her even more when we became old enough to understand how much she must have suffered.
I grew up attached to my home and never imagined living anywhere else. To outsiders, Kocho may seem too poor to be happy, and too isolated and barren to ever be anything but desperately poor. American soldiers must have gotten that impression, given the way kids would swarm them when they came to visit, begging for pens and candy. I was one of those kids, asking for things.
Kurdish politicians occasionally came to Kocho, although only in recent years and mostly before elections. One of the Kurdish parties, Barzani’s Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), opened a small two-room office in Kocho after 2003, but it seemed to exist mostly as a clubhouse for the village men who belonged to the party. A lot of people complained privately that the KDP pressured them into supporting the party and into saying Yazidis were Kurds and Sinjar was part of Kurdistan. Iraqi politicians ignored us, and Saddam had tried to force us to say we were Arab, as though we could all be threatened into giving up our identities and that once we did we would never rebel.
Just living in Kocho was, in a way, defiant. In the mid-1970s Saddam began forcibly moving minorities, including Kurds and Yazidis, from their villages and towns into cinder-block houses in planned communities, where they could be more easily controlled, a campaign people call the “Arabization” of the north. But Kocho was far enough away from the mountain that we were spared. Yazidi traditions that became old-fashioned in these new communities thrived in my village. Women wore the gauzy white dresses and headscarves of their grandmothers; elaborate weddings featured classic Yazidi music and dance; and we fasted in atonement for our sins when many Yazidis had given up that custom. It was safe and close-knit, and even fights over land or marriage ended up feeling minor. At least none of it had an impact on how much we loved one another. Villagers went to one another’s houses late into the night and walked the streets without fear. I heard visitors say that at night, from afar, Kocho glowed in the darkness. Adkee swore she once heard someone describe it as “the Paris of Sinjar.”
Kocho was a young village, full of children. There were few people living there who were old enough to have witnessed firmans first hand, and so a lot of us lived thinking those days were in the past, that the world was too modern and too civilized to be the kind of place where an entire group could be killed just because of their religion. I know that I felt that way. We grew up hearing about past massacres like folktales that helped bond us together. In one story, a friend of my mother’s described fleeing oppression in Turkey, where many Yazidis once lived, with her mother and her sister. Trapped for days in a cave with nothing to eat, her mother boiled leather to keep them alive. I heard this story many times, and it made my stomach turn. I didn’t think I could eat leather, even if I were starving. But it was just a story.
Admittedly, life in Kocho could be very hard. All those children, no matter how much they were loved, were a burden on their parents, who had to work day and night to feed their families. When we were sick, and the sickness couldn’t be healed with herbs, we would have to be taken to Sinjar City or to Mosul to see a doctor. When we needed clothes, those clothes were sewn by hand by my mother or, after we got a little wealthier, purchased once a year in a city market. During the years of United Nations sanctions on Iraq, intended to force Saddam from power, we cried when it became impossible to find sugar. When schools were finally built in the village, first a primary school and then, many years later, a secondary school, parents had to weigh the benefits of their kids getting an education against keeping them at home to work. Average Yazidis had long been denied an education—not just by the Iraqi government but also by religious leaders who worried that a state education would encourage intermarriage and, therefore, conversion and loss of Yazidi identity—but for the parents, giving up the free labor was a great sacrifice. And for what kind of future, the parents wondered, for what jobs, and where? There was no work in Kocho, and a permanent life outside the village, away from other Yazidis, attracted only the very desperate or the very ambitious.
A parent’s love could easily become a source of pain. Life on the farm was dangerous, and accidents happened. My mother pinpoints the moment she grew from a girl into an adult to when her older sister was killed, thrown from a speeding tractor and then run over right there in the middle of the family wheat field. Illnesses were sometimes too expensive to treat. My brother Jalo and his wife Jenan lost baby after baby to a disease that was inherited from Jenan’s side of the family. They were too poor to buy medication or take the babies to a doctor, and out of eight births, four children died.
Divorce took my sister Dimal’s children away. In Yazidi society, as in the rest of Iraq, women have few rights when a marriage ends, no matter what happened to end it. Other children died in wars. I was born just two years after the first Gulf War and five years after the end of the Iran-Iraq War, a pointless eight-year conflict that seemed to fulfill Saddam’s desire to torture his people more than anything else. The memories of these children, who we would never see again, lived like ghosts in our house. My father cut off his
braids when his eldest son was killed, and although one of my brothers was named after this son, my father could only bear to call him by a nickname, Hezni, which means “sadness.”
We measured our lives by harvests and by Yazidi holidays. Seasons could be brutal. In the wintertime Kocho’s alleyways filled with a cement-like mud that sucked the shoes off your feet, and in the summertime the heat was so intense, we had to drag ourselves to the farm at night rather than risk collapsing under the sun during the day. Sometimes harvests would disappoint, and when that happened, the gloom would stretch on for months, at least until we planted the next round of seeds. Other times, no matter how much we harvested, we didn’t make enough money. We learned the hard way—by lugging bags of produce to market and then having customers turn the vegetables over in their hands and walk away—what sold and what didn’t. Wheat and barley were the most profitable. Onions sold, but not for much. Many years we fed overripe tomatoes to our livestock, just to get rid of the excess.
Still, no matter the hardship, I never wanted to live anywhere other than Kocho. The alleyways may have filled with mud in the winter, but no one had to go far to see the people they loved most. In the summer, the heat was stifling, but that meant we all slept on the roof, side by side, talking and laughing with neighbors on their own roofs. Working on the farm was hard, but we made enough money to live a happy, simple life. I loved my village so much that when I was a child, my favorite game involved creating a miniature Kocho out of discarded boxes and bits of trash. Kathrine and I filled those model homes with handmade wooden dolls and then married the dolls to one another. Of course, before every wedding, the girl dolls would visit the elaborate house I made out of a plastic tomato crate, where I ran a hair salon.
Most importantly, I would never have left Kocho because my family was there. We were a little village ourselves. I had my eight brothers: Elias, the eldest, was like a father. Khairy was the first to risk his life as a border guard to help feed us. Pise was stubborn and loyal and would never let anything happen to us. There was Massoud, who grew up to be the best mechanic (and one of the best soccer players) in Kocho, and his twin Saoud, who ran a small convenience store in the village. Jalo opened his heart to everyone, even strangers. Saeed was full of life and mischief and longed to be a hero, and it was Hezni, the dreamer, whose affection we all competed for. My two sisters—the mothering, quiet Dimal, and Adkee, who one day would fight with our brothers to let her, a woman, drive our pickup truck and the next weep over a lamb who collapsed dead in the courtyard—still lived at home, and my half brothers, Khaled, Walid, Hajji, and Nawaf, and my half sisters, Halam and Haiam, were all nearby.
Kocho was where my mother, Shami, like good mothers everywhere, devoted her life to making sure we were fed and hopeful. It’s not the last place I saw her, but it’s where she is when I think about her, which I do every day. Even during the worst years of the sanctions, she made sure we had what we needed. When there was no money for treats, she gave us barley to trade for gum at the local store. When a merchant came through Kocho selling a dress we couldn’t afford, she badgered him into taking credit. “At least now our house is the first one they visit when they come to Kocho!” she joked if one of my brothers complained about the debt.
She had grown up poor, and she never wanted us to appear needy, but villagers wanted to help us and gave us small amounts of flour or couscous when they could. Once when I was very young, my mother was walking home from the mill with only a little flour in her bag and was stopped by her uncle Sulaiman. “I know you need help. Why don’t you ever come to me?” he asked.
At first, she shook her head. “We’re fine, uncle,” she said. “We have everything we need.” But Sulaiman insisted, “I have so much extra wheat, you have to take some,” and the next thing we knew, four big oilcans full of wheat had been delivered to our house, enough for us to make bread for two months. My mother was so ashamed that she needed help that when she told us what happened, her eyes filled with tears, and she vowed that she would make our lives better. Day by day she did. Her presence was a reassurance even with terrorists nearby. “God will protect the Yazidis,” she told us every day.
There are so many things that remind me of my mother. The color white. A good and perhaps inappropriate joke. A peacock, which Yazidis consider a holy symbol, and the short prayers I say in my head when I see a picture of the bird. For twenty-one years, my mother was at the center of each day. Every morning she woke up early to make bread, sitting on a low stool in front of the tandoor oven we kept in the courtyard, flattening balls of dough and slapping them against the sides of the oven until they were puffy and blistered, ready to be dipped into bowls of golden melted sheep’s butter.
Every morning for twenty-one years I woke up to the slow slap, slap, slap of the dough against the oven walls and the grassy smell of the butter, letting me know my mother was close by. Half asleep, I would join her in front of the tandoor, in the winter warming my hands by the fire, and talk to her about everything—school, weddings, fights with siblings. For years, I was convinced that snakes were hatching babies on the tin roof of our outdoor shower. “I heard them!” I insisted to her, making slithering sounds. But she just smiled at me, her youngest child. “Nadia is too scared to shower alone!” my siblings mocked me, and even when a baby snake fell on my head, prompting us to finally rebuild the shower, I had to admit they were sort of right. I never wanted to be alone.
I would pick burned edges off the fresh bread, updating my life plan for her. No longer would I simply do hair in the salon I planned to open in our house. We had enough money now to afford the kohl and eye shadow popular in cities outside Kocho, so I would also do makeup after I got home from a day teaching history at the secondary school. My mother nodded her approval. “Just as long as you never leave me, Nadia,” she would say, wrapping the hot bread in fabric. “Of course,” I always replied. “I will never leave you.”
Chapter 3
Yazidis believe that before God made man, he created seven divine beings, often called angels, who were manifestations of himself. After forming the universe from the pieces of a broken pearl-like sphere, God sent his chief Angel, Tawusi Melek, to earth, where he took the form of a peacock and painted the world the bright colors of his feathers. The story goes that on earth, Tawusi Melek sees Adam, the first man, whom God has made immortal and perfect, and the Angel challenges God’s decision. If Adam is to reproduce, Tawusi Melek suggests, he can’t be immortal, and he can’t be perfect. He has to eat wheat, which God has forbidden him to do. God tells his Angel that the decision is his, putting the fate of the world in Tawusi Melek’s hands. Adam eats wheat, is expelled from paradise, and the second generation of Yazidis are born into the world.
Proving his worthiness to God, the Peacock Angel became God’s connection to earth and man’s link to the heavens. When we pray, we often pray to Tawusi Melek, and our New Year celebrates the day he descended to earth. Colorful images of the peacock decorate many Yazidi houses, to remind us that it is because of his divine wisdom that we exist at all. Yazidis love Tawusi Melek for his unending devotion to God and because he connects us to our one God. But Muslim Iraqis, for reasons that have no real roots in our stories, scorn the Peacock Angel and slander us for praying to him.
It hurts to say it, and Yazidis aren’t even supposed to utter the words, but many people in Iraq hear the story of the Peacock Angel and call us devil worshippers. Tawusi Melek, they say, is God’s chief Angel, like Iblis, the devil figure of the Koran. They claim that our Angel defied Adam and therefore God. Some cite texts—usually written by outside scholars in the early twentieth century who were unfamiliar with the Yazidi oral tradition—that say that Tawusi Melek was sent to Hell for refusing to bow to Adam, which is not true. This is a misinterpretation, and it has had terrible consequences. The story we use to explain the core of our faith and everything we think of as good about the Yazidi religion is the same story others use to justify genocide against us.
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br /> This is the worst lie told about Yazidis, but it is not the only one. People say that Yazidism isn’t a “real” religion because we have no official book like the Bible or the Koran. Because some of us don’t shower on Wednesdays—the day that Tawusi Melek first came to earth, and our day of rest and prayer—they say we are dirty. Because we pray toward the sun, we are called pagans. Our belief in reincarnation, which helps us cope with death and keep our community together, is rejected by Muslims because none of the Abrahamic faiths believe in it. Some Yazidis avoid certain foods, like lettuce, and are mocked for their strange habits. Others don’t wear blue because they see it as the color of Tawusi Melek and too holy for a human, and even that choice is ridiculed.
Growing up in Kocho, I didn’t know a lot about my own religion. Only a small part of the Yazidi population are born into the religious castes, the sheikhs and elders who teach all other Yazidis about the religion. I was a teenager before my family had enough money to take me to Lalish to be baptized, and it was not possible for me to make that trip regularly enough to learn from the sheikhs who lived there. Attacks and persecution scattered us and decreased our numbers, making it even harder for our stories to be spread orally, as they are supposed to be. Still, we were happy that our religious leaders guarded Yazidism—it was clear that in the wrong hands, our religion could be easily used against us.