Comic about genocide | So that the suffering of the Yazidis does not disappear

Birgit Weyhe finds careful images for the horror that Jilan has to experience in IS captivity. Photo: Avant/Birgit Weyhe She wrote this book "so that no one forgets what happened to us," explains the young Yazidi Jilan in the afterword. »So that our suffering doesn't disappear. So that the voices of the people who are no longer there are not lost.« As a young girl, Jilan lost many friends and parts of her family when the so-called Islamic State attacked the Shingal region in northern Iraq in 2014, and she herself was captured and kidnapped. Together with the Hamburg comic artist Birgit Weyhe, she has now condensed her memories of these years into a comic story as part of the “Survivor-Centred Visual Narratives” project at the University of Victoria in Canada, which they have called “Don’t give up!”

Weyhe has already published several works in which she gave space to victims of racism, exclusion and persecution and told their stories that otherwise would not have been heard. For “Madgermanes” she conducted countless interviews with former GDR contract workers who came to the GDR from Mozambique in the 1970s and for whom there was no longer a place in society after 1989. In "German Calendar, no December" she talks about arriving in Germany based on texts by the Nigerian author Sylvia Ofili, and in "Rude Girl" she draws a portrait of the African-American German studies professor Priscilla Layne, who grew up between cultures, between the USA, London, Germany and the Caribbean, black and white worlds, punk, ska and reggae.

Silan is forced into marriage but is able to escape after a few months, but "something inside me was broken," she says.

Weyhe, who grew up in Uganda and Kenya and still feels more at home there than in her current “home” of Hamburg, is interested in the lostness of her protagonists between cultures. And so “Don’t give up!” also begins between cultures, at a memorial event for the Yazidi victims of IS in 2024, during which two trees were planted in front of the Millerntor Stadium in Hamburg. “Nature and especially trees are sacred to the Yazidis,” the comic artist is told by Leyla Ferman from the organization “Women for Justice.” “These two elm trees here are intended to commemorate the Yazidis who are still missing today.” The illustrator Weyhe is “uncomfortable with how little I know about it,” she thinks at the event. »Don't give up!« therefore contains, in addition to a glossary and texts by Julian and Weyhe on the creation of the book, an extensive appendix on Yazidi history and culture.

Through Leyla Ferman, Birgit Weyhe met Jilan, who now lives in Germany and is doing medical training. She trusts the illustrator and begins to tell Weyhe the story of her childhood, youth and imprisonment. She attended primary school in Shingal and dreamed of becoming a doctor, but when primary school ended, her childhood also ended: on August 3, 2014, IS attacked the region and Jilan was kidnapped along with her sisters. In the course of this attack, IS murdered thousands of men and boys and kidnapped women and girls in order to sell them into sexual slavery. The kidnapped girls become objects and are at the mercy of their captors: “They could do whatever they wanted with us. They had no heart. And no conscience,” Jilan summarizes. She is also forced into marriage, but manages to escape after a few months. “I was back with my parents, but my childhood was over,” she says. "Something inside me was broken."

Birgit Weyhe finds careful images for the horror that Jilan has to experience in captivity, and equally careful images for what the Yazidi woman cannot tell, what she had to repress in order to continue living. »Memory doesn't work like a reference book. It cannot be accessed reliably,” explains the illustrator. »Extreme situations can be removed from everyday consciousness as self-protection. There is no memory of it anymore.« These thoughts about memory and forgetting are accompanied by drawings of branches, trees and leaves that represent what is absent - memories as well as people - and which in turn point to the starting point of the comic: the memory of the women and girls who did not return from captivity and who are remembered with the trees in Hamburg.

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