I was a girl once, but not any more. I smell. Blood dried and crusted all over me, and my wrapper in shreds. My insides, a morass. Hurtled through this forest that I saw, that first awful night, when I and my friends were snatched from the school.
On the night of April 14–15, 2014, 276 female students were kidnapped from a government school in the town of Chiboki, Nigeria by the Islamic terrorist group Boko Haram (and as of today, 112 of these stolen girls are still missing). Having seen an interview with one of the Chiboki schoolgirls who eventually got away from her captors, acclaimed Irish novelist Edna O'Brien travelled to Nigeria and spent many months interviewing other survivors of the kidnapping, NGO workers, government officials, doctors, and journalists. From this wealth of information, O'Brien wrote Girl: a fictionalised account of one Chiboki schoolgirl who is kidnapped, enslaved, brutalised, and after making a harrowing escape, finds herself further marginalised by her family and community. I suppose any of us could imagine what the first half of Maryam's story would look like (the beatings, forced labour, and repeated rapes), but by so deeply investigating the variety of Nigerian culture, O'Brien spins her story out in some ways that surprised and enlightened me. This isn't a long read but it includes a wealth of information, and while I can't say that I “enjoyed” this, it feels like a necessary act of witnessing; over a hundred of these girls are still out there.
“Open her legs.” He is still yelling it, even though they know exactly how his desires must be met. I both died and did not die. A butchery is being performed on me. Then I feel my nostrils being prised open and the muzzle of the gun splaying my nose. I know now that within minutes that gun will explode inside my head.I will not wake from this, I will die with my scream unfinished.The first chapter of Girl is set during the time that Maryam is making her way, with her baby, away from the Boko Haram encampment – so, the escape isn't really a spoiler, and no matter how hard the conditions get for Maryam in the camp, there is the comforting knowledge that she will eventually get away. Maryam appears to be narrating her story in the future – at a time when she is suffering some form of PTSD – so the storytelling is a bit sketchy, with scant details, large time lapses, and shifting tenses. Others in the camp tell Maryam their stories – kidnapped girls and captured boy soldiers explaining how they came to be there – and some longer stories are set apart in italics. When Maryam does escape, she's helped by some women from a nomadic herding tribe – until a rumour gets out that they're harbouring an escapee from Boko Haram and the group fears a retaliatory attack; as Maryam's story proceeds, it would seem that the entire countryside is gripped by a fear of the Sect and their mid-night raids. When Maryam begs for help from a military outpost, the “buffoon” soldiers are more inclined to believe that this half-starved girl with a baby strapped to her chest is a suicide bomber than a victim of terror. Even their commander has lost faith in the stability and security that the military can provide:
He sat on the stool next to me, saying there was something I must know. Human nature had turned diabolical. The country as I had left it was no more, houses torched while people slept inside them, farmers no longer able to till their land, people fleeing from one hungry wasteland to another, devastation. A woman pouring her own faeces on her head and her children's heads each morning, to deceive the Dogs, to delude them into believing they were all mad.Maryam eventually meets the Nigerian president (at an event where she is rolled out for his aggrandisement), is reconnected with her family (and learns how the families of the kidnapped Chiboki schoolgirls could be torn apart by efforts to free them), is shown charity in a convent (until the Sisters require their one guestroom for a visiting Irish nun; O'Brien needed to get that dig in there, natch), she experiences an internal camp for displaced persons (a nasty place from which everyone hopes for rescue), and she learns that having been forced to become a “Bush Wife”, she will never again be wholly accepted by her own community:
Even as they arrived, these cousins and neighbours, I felt a freak. I could read their minds, by their false smiles and their false gush. I could feel their hesitation and worse, their contempt. I knew they were thinking, Jihadi wife, with the Sambisa filth still clinging to her.I note that most reviewers feel the need to comment on whether or not this book is an act of cultural appropriation; so, is the Chiboki schoolgirl kidnapping a valid subject matter for an old white woman to write about? Having read some of Edna O'Brien's work before, I want to note that she seems to have always been interested in the ways that men who derive great power from their religious positions will attempt to exert that power over women's bodies; and that is the same issue whether she's writing about Roman Catholic clergy or Boko Haram's twisted version of Islam. And as this is a real and ongoing humanitarian issue right now, I would think that anyone who is inspired by the pitiable plight of these stolen and broken young women ought to be writing about them; shining a light where the hashtags have done exactly nothing. Certainly, that makes this both worth the writing and worth the reading.
