When Telling Becomes a Burden: Displacement, Performance and Resistance in Nadia Murad’s The Last Girl

Abstract— The present paper studies Nadia Murad’s The Last Girl in the light of the theories of displacement, performance and resistance. According to the theories of displacement, a person going through forced displacement faces two paths: either to put what she was aside and take up what is forced on her, or to resist and become what she wants. Murad, a Yazidi-Iraqi young girl, falls in the hands of ISIS when the so-called Islamic State attacks their village, Kocho, and is taken as a sex slave. Although traumatized by it all, through her captivity, forced displacement and torture, Murad finds a stronger, independent version of herself enabling her to change her performance accordingly and to find resistance in herself to fight what comes her way. What follows is an attempt to scrutinize how displacement brings out different aspects of performance leading to the resistance of a twenty-one-year-old frightened girl; she didn’t know she had it in herself.