Ibrahaim observes the human beings around him, trying to understand their innermost thoughts and feelings. He attempts to articulate what it’s like to be Yazidi, to live in a refugee camp, and to have survived immense suffering. As a journalist, he wants to transcribe these personal sentiments in order to convey them to others. Throughout Disquiet, Livaneli portrays how explaining someone’s private life, and in particular their suffering, is an impossible task, even as Ibrahaim obsessively tries to do so. Although Disquiet rebukes the world for its scant interest in the suffering of people like the Yazidi, it also speaks to the limits of the human imagination to truly conceptualize the realities of the survivors of a violent, modern-day genocide. The novel endeavors to understand the immensity of suffering caused by genocide, and ultimately the ways that language, the supernatural, and the physical body all fail to truly encapsulate the experiences of Yazidi survivors.
Disquiet is set in Maradin, a small Turkish border town that is also Ibrahaim’s hometown. He returns there from Istanbul in order to investigate the recent murder of a childhood friend, Hussein, who was killed in Germany by neo-Nazis. Attempting to document Hussein’s life (and death) leads Ibrahaim to Meleknaz, a Yazidi girl living in the camp where Hussein had been volunteering. As a Yazidi, she’s held in contentious regard by the Muslims in the city. After Hussein left his Muslim fiancée for Meleknaz, he was shot by ISIS sympathizers in Maradin, which forced him to flee to his family, who have since resettled in Germany. Ibrahaim’s journalistic compulsion to uncover answers is often in tension with Livaneli’s portrayal of how people actually live, where the truth often only further complicates and mudldes.
The novel clarifies early on that Meleknaz captures Ibrahaim’s attention entirely. When her small village was raided by ISIS militants, all the men were murdered, the young boys sent to reeducation camps to become child soldiers, and the girls and young women sold into sexual slavery. Meleknaz escaped with a young baby, conceived most likely during a rape and born blind from the stress of that. Part of what fascinates Ibrahaim about Meleknaz is the difficulty he has finding her in the camp. Her experience is one shared by thousands of women who have survived ISIS, and when Ibrahaim does find her, she exhibits little interest in documenting the horrors she witnessed.
Disquiet then becomes an oral history as Ibrahaim works through a series of interviews in which the subjects explain their own ordeals as well as their understandings of Hussein and Meleknaz. When Ibrahaim meets Hussein’s former fiancée, a seemingly perfect Muslim girl loved by his family, the woman still resents Hussein for breaking off their engagement to be with Meleknaz. As Ibrahaim attempts to explain, “It seemed that there were sorrows that could overshadow even death, that there were actions that couldn’t be forgiven even in death.” How, though, as a storyteller and as a documenter, does one explain sorrows that eclipse even death? The closer Ibrahaim gets to Meleknaz—both to discovering what happened to her and to actually finding her among the many people in the refugee camp—the more this question morphs into one of how one can even conceptualize such enormous suffering. The meandering narrative leaves us wondering if this is a story with a resolution, but perhaps a better question is why we would even anticipate a neat ending when reading a novel about genocide.
Reading in translation often raises questions about the fragility of human connection, as well as the impossibility of fully transcribing complex thoughts and feelings. Moving through multiple languages and different people, Disquiet structurally resonates with Ibrahaim’s work as a journalist as he recreates what happened to Meleknaz and ultimately Hussein. He’s playing his own game of translation to explain their lives, but even as he shifts through forms, languages, people, and religions, Ibrahaim still comes up short. It’s possible that the horrors Meleknaz has endured exceed the capabilities of language.
Abandoning language as the means of explaining what happened to Meleknaz, Livaneli extends Disquiet into the supernatural. Livaneli is interested in the divide between the urban and the rural, and suggests that the urban houses the secular, while the rural makes room for a more spiritual world. Early on, Ibrahaim explains that the environment of his hometown offers a different interpretation of Islam: “When I was a child, Islam in Maradin was something different. It was a tender world.” The supernatural can expand concepts of good and evil, providing a larger canvas to explain intense experiences like those Ibrahaim tries to document. The deeper Ibrahaim delves into the story, the more he realizes how the spiritual world is integral to unraveling the events which have unfolded, telling us, “I’d become caught up in the mystical and extraordinary world of beliefs, and one thing after another was happening.” Searching for Meleknaz in the camps, Ibrahaim meets Father Gabriel, a priest at the Deyrülzafaran Monastery, a Syrian Orthodox structure built on top of a Mesopotamian temple. Father Gabriel explains that the Yazidi, whose six-thousand-year-old religion is far older than Abrahamic religions, are a very strict people. Ibrahaim found his way to the monastery after hearing from Hussein’s sister about an incident where Meleknaz fled their family house upon seeing romaine lettuce, due to a superstition among Yazidi. As Ibrahaim talks to Hussein’s sister, Aysel, she recounts the story: “The girl went crazy, she screamed and raced out. She didn’t just flee the kitchen, she fled the house, barefoot and with her head uncovered, forgetting all about her baby.” Although this incident seems bizarre, it’s the first key to understanding that Meleknaz lives in a world that functions differently from the secular world Ibrahaim inhabits.
The unique monotheistic belief system of the Yazidi offers a conceptualization of good and evil that Ibrahaim cannot otherwise articulate. The Yazidi’ main deity is the Peacock Angel, a type of fallen angel. When Ibrahaim speaks to Father Gabriel about Meleknaz, the priest tells him, “If you ask whether the Peacock Angel is good or evil, they’ll tell you that he’s both good and evil, that he’s an angel of both good and evil.” This revelation begins to bend the world Ibrahaim is in, allowing more room to conceptualize the lives of both Hussein and Meleknaz.
Disquiet offers details of Yazidism, as knowledge of their belief system is important for understanding their persecution by ISIS, as well as that of other persecuted groups throughout history. The Yazidi religion also offers an alternative worldview that perceives evil differently, and perhaps offers more context for how Meleknaz interacts with the world and processes her trauma. As Ibrahaim writes to explore and give meaning to the life of his friend, and in many ways to the suffering of the women Hussein loved, Ibrahaim realizes that he must embrace the supernatural in order to conceptualize the evil he finds in documenting their stories. We have to imagine a world beyond our own senses in order to grasp what life as an ISIS captive was like for Meleknaz. Ibrahaim tells us early on, “Years ago, after a long and difficult process reminiscent of a snake shedding its skin, I cut all my ties to God and Satan.” Part of his personal journey throughout the novel is growing a new skin, one in which he is conscious of the spiritual world. Ibrahaim gains a new sensory awareness throughout the novel. Without expanding our point of view into the spiritual, we cannot begin to understand who Meleknaz is and why Hussein loved her.
Ibrahaim’s compulsion to document the lives of Meleknaz and Hussein is animated by an underlying belief that articulating their suffering will make it meaningful, or at least convey its importance and impact to others. As he says, “I think that even if we don’t admit it, we all like to think that our existence, our lives, are not bound to some meaningless, nonsensical coincidences but have a deeper meaning that we can’t grasp.” The more Ibrahaim writes, the closer he feels to encapsulating Hussein, nearly becoming him, but he never truly understands Meleknaz. Father Gabriel explains her unique disposition by saying, “It was as if she had a secret that she wasn’t going to reveal, it made you curious. Perhaps if she spoke she would be less enigmatic, but somewhere her silence made her seem deeper.”
Meleknaz’s silence is portrayed as a subtle yet distinctive refusal to share her trauma in a way that others can digest. The expectation that inner distress should be articulated through the body in order to communicate with others is a running theme. As Father Gabriel notes, “In short, we couldn’t figure the girl out but it was clear that there was a powerful soul in that thin body.” Meleknaz’s refusal to discuss her distress with Ibrahaim is directly tied to the ways in which she doesn’t display her trauma physically through her body. Whereas Hussein’s body refracts violence after the vivid portrayal the novel offers of his death in a German emergency room, Meleknaz, a survivor of brutal and intense sexual violence, offers no physical hint of the trauma she faced. Livaneli critically portrays the presuppostitions Ibrahaim makes about Meleknaz—the expectation of how she should bear witness to what happened to her—both in its ineffectiveness and in the demands it places on survivors.
Livaneli draws a thin line throughout the novel that ties together the expectations put on women’s bodies to illustrate distress, particularly from sexual violence. The first woman whose body reflects such suffering is Ibrahaim’s grandmother. He writes about her early on, saying she had a gazelle tattooed on her chest. He tells us, “I asked her once why she’d done this, and she replied that when she was distressed she wanted to see gazelles racing across her chest.” She reveals that the ink was made with soot mixed with breast milk from a mother feeding a baby girl, and that milk from a mother feeding a boy cannot be used in this sort of tattoo. We never learn about the sorrow that caused Ibrahaim’s grandmother to affix this image to her chest, but her body displays a reaction to suffering, a coping mechanism crafted through a deeply human medium—breast milk—that hints at the distinctively feminine.
Near the other end of the novel is a story about Meleknaz’s breast milk. Meleknaz gives birth while fleeing with Zilan, a childhood friend from her village. The women trek over the mountains between the border of Syria and Turkey together, surviving only by sharing Meleknaz’s breast milk, which gives them enough nourishment to survive the day’s long, physically intense journey without any other food or supplies. As Zilan recounts this stark story to Ibrahaim, he finds her narration too stoic, much in the same way that Meleknaz expresses disinterest in explaining what she’s survived. “Even now I get goosebumps when I think about it,” Ibrahaim explains. “Even though Zilan didn’t shed a single tear, she didn’t exaggerate anything. She spoke in an ordinary, unexcited, soft, humdrum Arabic, as if she had been talking about cooking, or braiding hair.” Zilan and Meleknaz don’t react to the violence they’ve endured, as might be expected. The one who does react in an expected way is Negris, Meleknaz’s baby daughter. Conceived through sexual violence during Meleknaz’s captivity, Negris clearly displays the suffering of her mother.
At one point, Ibrahaim has a dream incorporating religious motifs and ideas of body politics to articulate Meleknaz’s distress. Angelina Jolie becomes the Peacock Angel, who speaks to him directly and explains the cause of Negris’s blindness. This scene offers us a real woman’s body becoming a puppet to articulate key points of the plot. As Jolie recounts,
She was born blind in both eyes, so she wouldn’t see the evil that’s being done to the Ezidis in this world, so she won’t see the cruelty, the babies dying of thirst in the mountains, the women who were abducted by ISIS and sold in slave markets, little girls with lacerated wombs after being raped by ten militants in the belief that being raped ten times will turn her into a Muslim; so she won’t witness the savage extermination of the race of people I brought down from God’s world to this one. Do you think you understand everything that happens in the world? Your heart is closed to the angels.
Including Jolie in the novel makes more sense after these two scenes about breast milk. Jolie is perhaps the most famous woman in the world to undergo a double mastectomy and the removal of her ovaries, which she did in response to testing positive for a BRCA mutation that increased her likelihood of developing breast cancer or reproductive cancer. Jolie’s mother, grandmother, and aunt all died from cancers tied to that BRCA mutation. Her mother’s life and early death no doubt influenced her ideas and understandings of womanhood, femininity, and her own maternity, while Jolie simultaneously became a symbol of idealized womanhood. Although she’s spoken at length in interviews about the impact of her mother’s legacy, Jolie’s body—written about, photographed, obsessed over, and documented during her famous pregnancies—could only articulate the extent of intergenerational grief and familial loss after very publicly undergoing surgeries to save her own life.
Like Ibrahaim, we arrive at the realization that there is no way to fully understand what has happened to someone else, try as we might. Livaneli walks us through the forms used to articulate intense traumas by exploring the borders of language, expanding one’s idea of the world beyond what you can see into the realm of the supernatural, and later displaying suffering through a human body. All these methods to illustrate the lives of others fail to truly grasp the horror that women like Zilan and Meleknaz have experienced. Disquiet encapsulates the inability to truly conceptualize the suffering of fellow human beings, but the novel’s sharpest criticisms are reserved for our expectations that survivors of unimaginable violence must explain through their bodies to a sea of closed ears what has happened to them.
