I was intrigued by the format of The Beekeeper of Sinjar, by Dunya Mikhail, which almost reads like an oral history. The book is comprised of Mikhail’s interviews with Abdullah, who rescues Yazidi women who are sold as slaves to Daesh officers. Mikhail gives minimal context. She doesn’t tell us what Daesh is or anything about its history. She also gives scant context about the Yazidis and the vulnerabilities they face as a persecuted group. Instead, the context emerges naturally. Mikhail assumes a certain amount of prior knowledge and lets Abdullah fill in the rest. Through the stories he tells, we learn more about the crimes Daesh commits and the experiences of those held captive.
On the one hand, this format allows the reader to learn through immersion. Abdullah rarely mentions numbers or dives into history, instead focusing on stories of particular women. Through giving voice to these stories, we feel closer to the subjects. Context sections never pull us out of the narrative at hand. Readers are also invited into an intimate reporting process. We bear witness to one-one-one phone calls between Abdullah and Mikhail, learning details about Mikhail along the way.
At some moments, I found myself craving context. The risk of telling many narratives in sequence is that they blend together and lose their weight. Over time, the reader can become desensitized to the acts of extreme violence described. Kingsley takes the opposite approach, weaving context throughout human stories. He even alternates between one man’s story and those of other immigrants. A combination of narrative and background create a comprehensive (though never complete) picture of Europe’s migration crisis.
Kingsley also incorporates his own takes, at times. I appreciated this. He clarifies a key tension: as migration swells, Europe tightens border controls. The continent’s response to scores of migrants has not just been inadequate, but also, negligent.
Today, Europe’s response is becoming more extreme, and sometimes, explicitly xenophobic. Germany started issuing payments for Syrians to return home after Assad’s regime fell. Meanwhile, the AfD gains ground around the country, helping to entrench anti-immigrant sentiment.
Ben Taub’s reporting gives us a glimpse into migration of another kind. Taub follows the story of Khaled al-Halabi, who was initially not persecuted by Assad’s regime, but part of it. Taub never spoke with Halabi but managed to reconstruct his story, relying on other sources and his French asylum interview. Halabi went from spy to refugee when conspiracies swarmed of his failure to defend Raqqa, where he was stationed, from rebels. He crosses the border with Turkey and flees to France. Soon, scores of Syrians escaping war are also abroad. Meanwhile, the international community failed to persecute a regime whose violence was obvious and widely condemned.
To emphasize this failure, Taub draws parallels between the world’s negligence of Jews during the Holocaust and its ambivalence toward Assad’s regime. Taub makes this connection for reasons more historical than symbolic: Nazis helped form Syria’s intelligence services. The structure that propped up Assad had structural origins in another regime that has been universally condemned. Taub’s story, in this respect, calls attention to the need for international law to protect countries from systems of persecution.
