Beautiful Heresy

“Beautiful Heresy” takes its name from a line in the poem Stone Me, I Am an Infidel by Layla Hamo*.

This work recalls the fate of Yazidi women, following the ISIS assaults on their villages. Yazidi women were not only abused, raped, and tortured as “infidels” by ISIS, but they – and the children born to them in captivity – were at risk of being excluded by their own community, owing to purity laws within the Yazidi faith, until a creative and compassionate halakhic solution was found by the community’s religious leaders.

Yazidi women showed extraordinary courage in offering public testimony to their suffering. This work is a tribute to them, and a cry against the use of rape as a weapon of war, and the capture of women as spoil for pleasure, convenience, or profit.

The white veil in this work is composed of embroidered monograms, offered as a futile gesture toward naming each of the victims and restoring something of their Yazidi identity. A similar hand-stitched fabric appears in Pietà, made in response to another group of young women who endured a similar ordeal, in a distant corner of the world. Here, the veil is wrapped around an assemblage of everyday olive-oil tins, repeatedly burned, concealing their own dark histories.

* I Own Nothing but Dreams: An Anthology of Yazidi Poetry in the Aftermath of the Disaster, 2014–2016, translated and edited by Idan Barir (Van Leer Institute, Israel).