The US news station CNN reported that the original draft had contained an appeal to the United Nations and donors to provide comprehensive health services, including sexual and reproductive ...healthcare, to victims of sexual violence.1 Speakers at the Security Council meeting included Nadia Murad, a Yazidi victim of sexual violence and winner of the Nobel peace prize, and Amal Clooney, the human rights lawyer who represents Murad and many other Yazidi women who have been enslaved and raped by Islamic State. Earlier this year the Trump administration issued new “gag” rules from the Department of Health and Human Services that would end access to abortion information offered through the Title X family planning program that provides birth control, cancer screening, and testing and treatment for sexually transmitted diseases to about four million people on low incomes. The American Medical Association, Planned Parenthood, and other organizations sued to block the rules.5 This week a federal district court judge in Oregon said that he would issue a preliminary injunction blocking the Trump administration’s gag rules.6 1 Kosinski M, Watkins E. US successfully removes “sexual health” references from UN resolution on sexual violence.
Abstract
This paper examines personal narratives and how they change according to the context in which they are narrated. In particular, it argues that personal narratives change as they are mediated ...by various discourses, genres and modes, as well as by the peculiarities that emerge when speaking and writing in different languages and when undertaking translation. It uses a case-study approach to analyse the different narratives told by Islamic State’s Yezidi female survivor, and United Nations Goodwill ambassador, Nadia Murad, in different contexts in 2014 and in
2015
. In 2014, when two Western mass media outlets interviewed Murad, her narrative was compacted and less detailed. This shifted in December
2015
when Murad testified about her ordeal before the Security Council. Mediated by the discourse of the latter and by the genre of testimony, Murad’s narrative became more detailed, and transformed from a description of a personal suffering into a call for action.
In the present paper, Murad's memoir, The Last Girl, is scrutinized through the lens of Resistance Literature theories. First introduced by Kanafani (1966) and adapted by scholars such as Harlow ...(1987) and Sangari (1389 2010 A. D.), Resistance Literature has come to constitute pieces of writing that are written during or after a conflict by people experiencing life under the oppressive power. For Harlow and Sangari, what is of utmost importance is the accounts of war experience pictured by civilians from all walks of life. With the Syrian war with the ISIS escalating in 2011 and its consequent overflow into Iraq, the extremist terrorists brought the war to the doorsteps of ordinary people, massacring men and leaving women to deal with the aftermath. The Last Girl is Nadia Murad's retelling of life under the ISIS as a Yazidi-Iraqi woman. At first glance, Murad pictures a sad, yet vivid image of the Yazidi genocide by the ISIS. However, in a deeper analysis of the text, one finds how being ripped apart from family, utterly displaced, terrorized and raped can also shape a rather stronger, resistant person. By applying Harlow and Sangari's theories of Resistance to Murad's memoir, what is manifested is the way in which being appointed to various kinds of terror in war-time can create a more resistant self in someone.
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