He could have stayed in his living room lined with books and fireplace, with hot legs under the table, in the security of his home in the London neighborhood of Knightsbridge where he is a legend and have seen several YouTube videos, read several books and have put to write with the documentation obtained. At 89, Edna O'Brien (Tuamgraney, Ireland, 1930) was not going to recriminate it.
But Edna O'Brien, a small old lady with glass health , is an uncomfortable writer even for herself. If you want to narrate the life of a girl kidnapped by Boko Haram, the jihadist sect of northern Nigeria, it is not enough to read a bit about it or ask those who passed by. The girl (Editorial Lumen), which is not a canonical novel because what counts is not fiction, begins with this phrase: "Once I was a girl, but I am not anymore. I smell bad." It is impossible to write this if you have not had in front of girls kidnapped by this militia. Because what attracts the most attention, beyond the shock that remains in his gaze, is his smell.
O'Brien became obsessed with the story of the 276 girls of Chibok, that school assaulted by armed Salafists in 2014 and moved to northern Nigeria to document and interview one of the girls who were released, because most continue in the hands of their captors and whereabouts unknown.
"I am not like journalists. They arrived and then left. I stayed for months, " says O'Brien, who claims to remain in the place to go deep and not stay in the anecdote. Only in this way can you relive the night of April 14, 2014 in the village of Chibok, with the girls hiding in their bedrooms between gunshots, screams of girls and the unmistakable "Allah is great", howled by the armed wolves of Boko Haram . The school burning, the guards dead on the ground, vehicles carrying the hostages. Tears.
The author takes us to the trucks of the terrorists to an unknown place in the middle of the night, escorted by jihadists on a motorcycle. The girls decide to throw objects along the way so that the Nigerian army can follow the clues. They are the breadcrumbs of Pulgarcito in hell . A sandal, a tie, a tattered dress. Some girls throw themselves from the truck at the risk of being run over. The captors threaten them: whoever tries to escape will receive a bullet. They sleep in the open and take days to reach the den, without eating and almost without drinking anything. They will already be marked by trauma forever.
Borno state belongs to Boko Haram. A handful of cities are in the hands of the government, but even there you are not safe. For a Occidental, Borno is like Afghanistan . Muslim abaya covering the head and body of women, heat that hurts, no alcohol, restricted movements, tinted windows in the cars, military controls everywhere, tens of thousands of refugees ... Boko Haram, that unmentionable evil (Western education it's sin, in Hausa language) it's everywhere . Boko Haram may be your brother, your neighbor, your own son. Inside the cities and outside it. Poverty makes all young people potential members of the sect. That is the atmosphere of O'Brien's novel, the oppression of knowing to be kidnapped and surrounded without escape, with the conviction that freedom is something unattainable inside or outside the terrorist group. It's not that Borno is tough for an 89-year-old woman. It is terrible for anyone.
When you arrive from the plane you already know that you are going to a special place. All the hillsides around the capital have been razed and there is only the blackened stump of what they were. Earth burned here and there.
The protagonist and narrator is Maryam, a kidnapped girl, raped by her captors, forcibly married to one of them and mother of Babby, the son of his enemy. Through her eyes we live the life of the girl under horrible conditions of captivity, ridiculed by her jailers, who call her blasphemous or leper , turned into a concubine of fans who survives thanks to her relationship with Buki, another girl who comes from another place but whose story is the same. Their relationship is reminiscent of other books by the author, such as Las chicas del Campo , the first in the trilogy of Kate and Baba, the work that defines her style, her struggle and her world.
Maryam knows that she has to live with the enemy because she sees what has happened to girls who have not wanted to marry those men with beards and black clothes : they begin a six-week process of preparation to become bomb girls destined to tighten the button of his explosive vest, hidden under the abaya, in markets and schools where children take hours to access when being searched for bombs one by one.
O'Brien became obsessed with these girls when he read the story of one of them, found walking through the forest disoriented and hungry with his baby after escaping from one of the jihadist camps. Then he decided to leave his cottony reality in London and go to his particular heart of darkness. "As a writer you have to take risks, you have to strive not to get bored of yourself or your readers and you can only do that if you try new things ."
The most frustrating thing about this dark story is that every day it gets bigger, more and more girls are kidnapped all over Nigerian territory, without anyone again posing in ridiculous selfies with the little sign # bringbackourgirls ( Return to our girls) and without that the army of your country be able to stop it without causing even more pain.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
Know more- Nigeria
- Boko Haram
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