I, Pink, just Pink, am a rock star. A guy so famous and loved that women fawn over me constantly. So how in the hell can I relate to some poor Ex-ISIS girl?
Damn good question, I’ll tell you.
Shamima Begum, a girl of only 15, moved country and married with the false hope of a better life. I had a relatively normal childhood; granted, I became a rockstar so something must have gone wrong.
Shamima was tricked into an institution when she was still only young; my schooling was the same. Authority figures promising great outcomes yet coming up with nothing. Assimilating both parties into roles of oppression.
My institution, the schooling forced upon me in youth. Her’s, the religious beliefs twisted that entrapped her in a role of solitude from her home country and family.
Her identity, found in her family, her religion, and her country, was stripped away from her the moment she joined ISIS. As a 15-year-old too, a girl not even recognized as an adult, from political standpoints, made a decision that was deemed irrevocable.
My identity, previously found in music and family, is now held in a small dose of drugs, physical or psychological. These small things have become my life, the first thought in the morning and the last at night. Shamima’s drug is ISIS; except, she didn’t realize how detrimental it was to her survival until it was too late; her citizenship has already been revoked.
She has nowhere and no one.
Except for her child.
The child of the 27-year-old man she married when she was 15. A product of her devotion to her husband, and his twisted cause.
Now, she fights for that child, trying to provide a stable home outside of the refugee camp that they currently reside in. There have been conversations about the child’s claim to a Dutch citizenship through his father. Hope may yet come to Shamima and her son, Jarrah.
Alas, it was also my father I found hope in, yet it was also he who started my chain of strife. Abandoning our family for the war, for glory.
Were we not enough?
He left me with my overbearing witch of a mother, thus starting the fall of a long line of dominoes.
I went on to search for a replacement because I had thought that it would be the most logical response; if you lose a toy, you get a replacement. No one told me it was different for fathers.
So I looked for one, in the park, the store, anywhere. I endangered myself just to maybe, maybe, find someone who could be a father. But, of course, that’s not how this works.
I never did find a father.
Shamima lost herself in ISIS, lost her identity, and now, after four years, she is trying to regain it. Except, all she finds is the government publicly rejecting her and claiming she has lost any and all credibility towards her home country.
Me, a drug-addled, no eyebrow, nutcase, and her, a war-torn, just had a baby, 19-year-old Ex-ISIS member, we’re seen as problems, not people. Only another news story or statistic to add to the pile.
We were forced into these positions; Shamima’s religious ideals and beliefs were promised to her in joining ISIS. She became her own worst nightmare; someone coerced into terror and brainwashed into believing it to be just.
I didn’t suddenly turn into the hammer, a ruthless dictator preying on the oppressed. No, he was cultivated, slowly over a lifetime. Until he finally came to light.
This vision, my dream, and simultaneously, my worst nightmare.
I was oppressed my whole life, by my family, my school, the people I thought I could trust, my wife. So I became the oppressor, oh yes.
I control this life, I am the master of mine and everybody else’s fate.
No one will control me.
Yet, looking back, I still didn’t get what I wanted.
I wanted belonging, love.
Not dissimilar to what Shamima is now striving for, belonging, safety, identity.
I know I’m well past the point of saving, the flashes of a padded cell remind me of that.
But maybe it isn’t for her, maybe she and her child can become a beacon for the other people estranged from their identities by ISIS coercion. Just maybe.
-Morgann Johnson
GenEd 1201 002 Blog 