Hearts of darkness
Asne Seierstad is a journalist of extraordinary rigour. She’s well known for her documenting of ordinary life under the shadow of war, as in the bestselling The Bookseller of Kabul, written after the Taliban were (temporarily) rolled out of Afghanistan in 2001, or Angel of Grozny, a catalogue of the Russian military’s crimes in Chechnya.
She has grit under her fingernails, a formidably hardened attitude and is no less empathetic for those qualities. Seierstad’s latest book is an involving account of two Somali girls who, in October 2013, exchanged liberal, democratic Norway for profoundly illiberal, anti-democratic Syria, travelling to a place that would soon be swallowed by terror: the Islamic State. The family they left behind is wracked by grief and incomprehension. Their father Sadiq, a warrior poet, tries to retrieve them from a void they do not want to escape.
Seierstad’s research is thorough and seemingly exhaustive (if not exhausting), and she employs the devices of fiction to elaborate and refine the raw material. She details how these kind and friendly sisters (called Leila and Ayan in the book, for protection) gave up their assimilated ambitions for a black flag and the promise of violence.
The contrast could not be more stark or distressing. As they are radicalised further by Norway’s small but furtive jihadi community, a mantra recurs: “We love death more than you love life.”
For all its dedicated searching, its rigour, its plunge into the twin hearts of darkness and despair, there is something impervious about Two Sisters: unbridgeable or unexplainable. Seierstad can trawl through reams of online conversations, meet 1000 faces and transcribe those conversations but she cannot, despite all efforts, get inside the heads of those two girls.
She can cite the general pattern of radicalisation elsewhere, too: the “push” of an alien and unfriendly society and the “pull” of belonging; the yearning for a defined and reinforced identity; the lure of messianic religion with its promise of glory in the afterlife. But still, Leila and Ayan’s decision to swap liberty for subjugation, emancipation for servitude, remains oblique and elusive.
To her credit, Seierstad acknowledges in an afterword: “I offer no explanation, neither of what attracted them to Islamic radicalism nor what propelled them out of Norway. I relate my findings.”
This plea for impartiality nevertheless feels like an evasion of a question that desperately needs answering.