Relatives at the coffin of a victim of the IS massacre of the Yazidis during the fall of Mosul in mid-2014; The remains of 41 murdered people recently found in a mass grave have now been interred at the Martyrs’ Memorial in Baghdad.
Foto: picture alliance/dpa | Ameer Al-Mohammedawi
For me, all writing is fiction,” writes Ronya Othmann in “Seventy-Four.” “Whether I write about myself, my father, my grandmother or a character to whom I give a name and a story.” It is an admission that reality can never be fully represented in a text. And certainly not the “74th.” Ferman”, the 74th attempt in 2014 to wipe out the Ezidis (Yazidis) as an ethno-cultural group.
And yet, four years later, Ronya Othmann went to Iraq and Turkey for the first time and began to write about the genocide. Her uncles and aunts were lucky and were able to escape from IS at the last moment in 2014. But they tell her about the horror when the Islamist terrorist group conquered large areas of Iraq and Syria. Areas in which Ezidis have settled for thousands of years, a mostly Kurdish-speaking ethno-religious community that does not belong to Islam, Christianity or Judaism. The Ezidi men were murdered and the women were sold as slaves.
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Othmann talks to people who have been displaced and who have lost relatives to IS. She talks to Xatê Shingali, a well-known Ezidi singer who founded a Peshmerga women’s brigade in 2016. She sees the destruction and is told about villages where the Muslim neighbors with whom the Ezidis lived took part in the murderous actions. About villages in which Muslims now live as a matter of course.
The reader quickly realizes how limited the possibilities are to understand and describe the victims’ suffering in its entirety. “Every text I write can only be incomplete, if not misleading.” Nevertheless, Othmann continues to write, driven by the events and what the survivors tell her. «I want to delete myself from the text. Just be eyes and ears. … I’m afraid that what I’ve seen and heard will slip away from me.” At one point she believes that the text will free her from the nightmare. «I tell myself, I have to finish the text. When the text is finished, I can forget everything.” But that too is an illusion: “I also note: There is no end to this text.”
Many passages are almost unbearable for the reader. And not just where Othmann reports on the actions of IS. The lack of sensitivity with which the genocide of the Ezidis is reported is also unbearable. The sensationalism with which the victims are used by the media as profitable news. People are ashamed of the lack of empathy for the survivors who appear as witnesses in court, including in the trial against Al-J., who left a five-year-old Ezidi girl to die of thirst in the blazing sun. And why are only four members of the press present on November 30, 2021 at what the judge predicts will be “the world’s first trial” “in which a conviction for genocide committed by the members of the ‘Islamic State’ will be pronounced”?
At the same time, the story of “Seventy-Four” develops a pull that gives readers the unpleasant feeling of being gripped by their own sensationalism and fascination with the apocalypse. It is the eternal dilemma between entertainment and education that becomes particularly clear here. But how else can a catastrophe be remembered, other than with a text like Othmann’s, in order to prevent another genocide? Contradictions that Ronya Othmann sees but cannot resolve.
For Ronya Othmann, her own identity also remains open. She just talks about her struggle with the question of who she is. According to the strict rules of the community, only the Ezidi whose both parents are Ezidis are eligible. But Othmann has a German mother. That doesn’t change the fact that she feels like an Ezidi woman and can’t sleep at night when IS enslaves women like her and kills men like her father or her uncle.
“Seventy-Four” is an impressive book about the 2014 genocide against the Ezidis. It is also a book about Ronya Othmann, who can only watch the horror from a distance and begins to document it four years later. It is therefore also a book about all of us, who may not be Ezidis, but who, like Ronya Othmann, ask ourselves in the face of horror: What can we do?
Ronya Othmann: Seventy-four. Rowohlt, 512 p., hardcover, €26.
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