This week’s readings and viewings were a difficult set to work through. Mikhail’s The Beekeeper: Rescuing Stolen Women of Iraq was a favorite. The book described the pain and suffering endured by the Yazidis with the kind of poetic prowess that makes readers, including myself, to physically reel and ache in their seats. The story of Reem and Zuhour was especially poignant — even while being the daughter of a committed Daresh fighter, Reem allows Zuhour and her children to stay in a hidden part of her home alongside her sewing equipment, and through the weeks helps devise a method for Zuhour and her children to escape.

The stories themselves were powerful on their own, of course, but I was also duly impressed by Mikhail’s narrative decisions and construction of the stories as a whole. The book begins by an anecdotal illustration of Mikhail’s time as an Arabic teacher in the U.S.. She’s struck by a sense of disillusionment as the Arabic letters she teaches her students — meaning nothing more than the sound and shape they are to the students themselves — are the letters that Mikhail knows signified incoming suffering and death for the women she wrote about.

I’ve encountered in my past journalism classes the notion of ‘fly on the wall journalism’ — where journalists remove themselves entirely from the narrative scope of their writing, effectively erasing the role that they played in conversing with and constructing the story of their subject. Mikhail effectively does the opposite of that. Her own story and perspective as a writer is an imperative that anchors the story of the women. We begin with Mikhail in Chapter 1 and end with her, too, in Chapter 7. From the harrowing stories of all the women in between, it isn’t immediately clear in Chatper 7 whether Mikhail is speaking as herself or immersing the reader into another tale of a Yazidi’s escape — the changes in narrative point of view throughout the book adds to the confusion (Mikhail switches from the third, to second, to first person in different instances).

But the kind of poetic ambiguity that blurs subject and object is perhaps an intended one by Mikhail. It reminds the reader that they, like the author, are intertwined in our humanity to the women of the story in ways beyond our comprehension. The mode of Mikhail’s narrative construction, then, is effectively fundamental to her journalistic storytelling. As I thought about how I’m going to write my migrant profile, the book made me reflect on the conventions of profile and feature journalism that I too have internalized and might benefit more from reworking or abandoning entirely.