Resilience of the Traumatized in Nadia Murad’s The Last Girl: My Story of Captivity and My Fight Against Islamic State

Abstract

Annihilated body and lost memories are testimonies of any war victim. Body spaces, identities, hierarchies are mutilated, thus making survival a hard thing to exist. Moving from a generalized term of a war victim to a more concise and gendered identity - women and men experience it differently. Unfortunately, compliance is a feminine aspect that transhistorical women reconcile to the patriarchal authority with the burden of silence. Moving away from realizing one’s identity and reclaiming the lost life is indeed a laborious task. With a resurrected psyche and a healed body, to walk out and confront the world; vociferously detailing the traumatic experiences to a sombre culture -where women’s virtue is reckoned solely on the base of her marital status and virginity- Nadia Murad’s memoir The Last Girl: My Story of Captivity and My Fight Against Islamic State boldly narrates her life as a “sabiyya” (sex slave) under the ISIS regiment in Iraq. The trajectory of her life is weighed in this study to show her resilience to all that she faced.