What an unforgettable book! Raw, sad, horrifying and very much the reality of some women, Girl beautifully portrays the life of a schoolgirl abducted by terrorists in the area and what her return looks like into society. This is based on true events. How can something like this be beautifully portrayed you might wonder? Well, it is emotionally charged and the author has a number of writing choices which I really enjoyed – use of flashback, switching between past/present tenses, anonymity of characters and places…
I thought about the atrocities of war, the plight of women in these times, the political games that are played and the way society views women who have come back somehow, and below are some of my thoughts. You will also find separate reflection points on the writing choices and notes from interviews done by the author. First the book blurb though (a short one which is another creative choice here!):
I was a girl once, but not anymore. So begins Girl, Edna O’Brien’s harrowing portrayal of the young woman abducted by Boko Haram. Set in the deep countryside of northeast Nigeria, this is a brutal story of incarceration, horror, and hunger; a hair-raising escape into the manifold terrors of the forest; and a descent into the labyrinthine bureaucracy and hostility awaiting a victim who returns home with a child blighted by enemy blood.
Content Notes: Depictions of sexual assault, abduction, terrorism, domestic abuse, violence, trauma.
Themes for Thought
In 2014, mostly Christian female students were kidnaped from the Secondary School in the town of Chibok in Borno State, Nigeria (source). Boko Haram, mentioned in the synopsis of the book, was responsible for the kidnapping. It is an Islamist extremist terrorist organization based in northeastern Nigeria. This led to a movement called #BringBackOurGirls. In Girl, we follow one of the abducted girls and we learn about the initial kidnapping, her stay at the terrorist camp and the life she had to lead there, as well as her escape from that place and return to society. This journey was fraught with danger and I felt that the author did a great job at portraying helplessness, rage, fear and strength.
On Atrocities of Conflicts
I don’t think I have read a book where the protagonist was captured this way, and what they went through was deeply rooted in religious beliefs. There were a couple places in the book story where views shared by Maryam (the girl) were hard to follow but that would be because I have never been in her shoes and while I can identify religious dogma, she was not able to. Religious beliefs, in general, would also play a role in identifying these forced ideas.
The camps where the girls were sent were horrifying places. The girls lived in terrible conditions and used as tools of pleasure by the men. I found the lead up to a number of these incidents ominous and pointing to doom. However, this happened so many times that Maryam’s disconnect from her surroundings served as a mechanism to save her, and also me, as the reader, from the horrors that befell her.
On Trauma
The girls had to bear witness to a lot of violence in their time in the camps. What I found interesting was that the ones who had been there longer and seen worse, did not seem to have sympathy for the new ones.
“We had banded together, but we were also alone, alone in a solitude so deep that it would never leave us.”
– Page 35, Girl
The girls are pushed into an identity and life crisis. At the same time, with the sexual assault and trauma, the girls developed self-loathing. Through Maryam, I saw her rage and helplessness. She had so many reasons to die but death just would not come. She wanted to be lost in a void and blank everything out, but that wasn’t going to happen either. So much was demanded of her, and it shattered her faith in love and home.
If you are interested to read about how women are used as weapons of war, check out Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado-Pérez. FInd the book on Goodreads or read my review.
On Societal Treatment of Women and Survivors
In times of war when suicide bombers are a common occurance, if a missing person showed up at your door, would you believe them to be have escaped by themselves?
“He says I am a puzzle, nay an enigma. I have walked through an immense forest, rife with dangers, landmines, hunters, different militia, thirst, hunger, and yet I arrive at this military post, albeit in shock, but in one piece. There must be some mystery.”
– Page 115, Girl
A lot of suspension surrounds Maryam when she shows up at the military camp with Babby, her baby. But that suspicion is nothing next to the treatment she is given at home.
“Auntie began to explain to me that the government did not approve of bush wives bringing back their children, but instead found creches for them to live in.”
– Page 135, Girl
It was hard to read about how heartless family and society can be to a survivor! They can accept Mayam back, sort of, but they will not have anything to do with her child because her father was a militant. This child who is still an infant and cannot even speak, this child who has been on the run with her mother for so long, is not welcome. Because her blood is tainted. Because she will be like her father. They do not even ask who he was as a man. I find these claims ridiculous and my heart cried for Maryam. She had fought long and hard, and at the end, she only had her baby, which people were not keen for her to keep.
On Politics
We see a glimpse into the people who were so afraid of the militants that they did not want to help the girls for fear of their own lives. Later, there is one chapter in the book when Maryam is invited to meet the President. Her story is one of perseverance, however, throughout that conference, she is told not to say anything negative. The President and his wife’s grandiose speeches and promises do not equate to the weight of the atrocities and horrors of the girls. It was infuriating how fake all that was. A show for the public. A cursory acknowledgement, yet no word of the truth.
Looking at the faces of the mothers assembled there, their girls still missing, Maryam wonders:
“How could I tell them the truth, that some girls had died in childbirth, others in different bombardments, some sent to remote camps, and most bafflingly of all, some had chosen to stay in the camp, where they were thankful to have at least one meal a day.”
Page 138, Girl
Notes on Writing Choices in Girl
Girl was an extra reading in week one of my How to Read A Novel course. The course gave me a lot of pointers and things to consider as I read this book. Even though we know that the kidnapping was by Boko Haram, that is not mentioned in the book at all. Many pieces of information are missing, including the name of the town where the abduction of the schoolgirls happened. The reader is also not given names of other places and most people in the story. Our protagonist herself is anonymous for most of the book – I recall reading her name only a handful of times through the book. I felt this added generality to the narrative that in some manner, this could be the story of any number of girls who were kidnapped.
Also, the age of the protagonist is not clear. It was mentioned that she was in high school and also that she had only recently started her menstruation cycles. Every country has different names for sets of grades so I am not confident about this detail but I would expect Maryam to be no older than 16 years at the end of the book. We don’t know how long she was in captivity for. It was at least a year though because she had a child. There were instances in the story where I just could not imagine Maryam as a child – she had been through so much to think of her as a young girl.
Week one of the course was focused on narration and one of the questions was if the narrator was a reliable one. I personally felt Maryam’s narrative to be as reliable as it could be, considering her trauma. So many times it was obvious that she had not yet come to terms with what had happened to her. This was also portrayed well by the switching between present and past tense of the narration. She would be recounting an incident at the camp and then the narrative would change to present, as if she is back there.
Lastly, the writing itself was beautiful and immersive. I learned a lot about powerful narratives and emotions by observing Edna’s use of short sentences.
Notes from Author Interviews
From Goodreads Author Page: Edna O’Brien (b. 1930), an award-winning Irish author of novels, plays, and short stories, has been hailed as one of the greatest chroniclers of the female experience in the twentieth century. She is the 2011 recipient of the Frank O’Connor Prize, awarded for her short story collection Saints and Sinners. Her 1960 debut novel, The Country Girl, was banned in her native Ireland for its groundbreaking depictions of female sexuality. Notable works also include August Is a Wicked Month (1965), A Pagan Place (1970), Lantern Slides (1990), and The Light of Evening (2006). O’Brien lives in London. Check out this documentary about Edna and her works.
Through her books, Edna portrays stories of girls and women who have come out of entrapment. Inspired by global movements such as #MeToo, #BringBackOurGirls, and her own entrapment in Ireland, Edna’s works are an inspiration.
I watched a short interview with Edna and that gave me a glimpse into the work she put into this book. Her travels to Nigeria to understand what had happened was an integral part of her research. She says in the interview that “you can’t write a novel by reading good reportage.”
Girl approaches true events in Fiction rather than through Non-Fiction or Journalism. I felt that the first person narration made the events more real. Since these are harrowing incidents that caused a lot of hurt, it is a story that one would prefer to forget. There are so many atrocities and injustices around the world that we do not think about and this one would be no different. However, writing as Fiction makes it more approachable, while at the same time generalizing the events enough that it could be anyone’s story. At the same time, it added emotions that Journalism would be lacking in its attempt to be factual. The book focuses on the character, while I believe a journalistic approach would be more focused on the events and chronology. Thinking about how personal the story is, as a non-fiction, it might be harder to narrate because it would mean tapping into those terrifying memories.
I love engaging with books at a deeper level and literature courses tend to guide that analysis well! Without the pointers from my course, I don’t think I would have been able to enjoy this book as much as I did. I was constantly taking notes and thinking back to my course notes. There were so many beautiful lines and so much sadness, all put together in less than 250 pages. This book is thought-provoking and if you chose to read it, I hope you will take a lot out of it. No amount of content or trigger warnings can prepare one for the horrors portrayed in this book and lived by these girls.
** Girl is available in stores as well as your local library. If you decide to pick it up, let me know what you think! **
Amazon Print
Amazon Kindle
Cover image: Cover Photo by vaun0815 on Unsplash
Wonderful review, Kriti! It sounds like an amazing, impactful book and it was so interesting to read your thoughts on it. 😊
Thanks, Stephen! 🙂
Hi Kriti, I have followed your link from Future Learn’s, How to read a Novel course. Quick question, do you find the narrator’s voice (a young Nigerian girl) realistic given the authorly language/vocabulary of the passages provided? “She spoke of its fabled history and the many assaults attached to it. Water ran down its sides into the innumerable veins, like endless tears of lamentation” comes to mind.
Hi Debbie. Thanks for following the link! I hope you are enjoying the course. I myself have not gone through the kind of trauma that the protagonist went through and cannot speak to whether it was realistic for voice but seeing how dire the situation was, I could see someone using that language/vocabulary. It’s the sort of descriptive and flowery writing almost that some writers do very well. Whether some of us can actually think like that, I do not know. 🙂 What did you think about the writing?
I felt that the intensity of emotion and sense of drama were spot on, but didn’t always feel it to be the voice of a teenager. Having said which, it was a very powerful book and bravely written. I’m a little behind you, so off to week 2 now. I’ll read your ‘Sudden Traveller’ post when I’ve completed the next stage.
I didn’t think too much about that considering all that she had been through would (in my mind) have led to some quick growing up. But that’s definitely not a typical teenager’s voice.
Enjoy week 2!