Desert Flower by Waris Dirie | Book Review
Note: You have to activate your e-mail subscription. Check your spam box if the activation mail is there. Congratulations in Unclanking your email!
The “Desert Flower” is Waris Dirie, a supermodel from Somalia. This is her autobiography detailing the travails of her life from desert Nomad to top model to UN Ambassador. I don’t know what it is with rags to riches stories but I ate this up like a hot fudge sundae on the hottest day of the year.
Desert Flower by Waris Dirie
They’re not supposed to do that to little girls
The “Desert Flower” is not your run of the mill shifting of fates, it actually has depth. Waris Dirie did not become a UN Ambassador just by being pretty. She had a horrific past and she had the courage to speak against it. At the age of 5, Waris Dirie just like most little girls in Somalia, was circumsized. I know right! It made me gasp as well! In the book, she goes into detail how the tradition is practiced by their society because if little girls were not genitally mutilated, they would be unfit to marry. Of course, she is able to overcome this and she migrates to England, where she is discovered by Malcolm Fairchild. She goes on photoshoots and even becomes a Bond girl.
This woman is amazing. She’s probably in her forties now and her life has been made into a movie. “Desert Flower” is not without faults though. It is very obvious from the writing style that the writer is a novice. But it doesn’t matter, when you’re dealing with something as heavy as FGM (female genital mutilation), you don’t need highfaluting words to get your point across.
Now you know
This book really opened my eyes to the cruelty and injustice that women suffer from all over the world. I especially liked that Waris Dirie put as much of her culture as she could. I could actually feel the dusty feel of the Somalian Desert sand as I was reading this book. I felt the pain, the fear, and the humiliation that anybody would feel if they were victimized. I recommend this book to those people who would like to learn about exotic cultures that are so far removed from your daily experiences. I recommend this book to people who want to see a cause worth fighting.
And that’s “Dessert Flower” unclanked!
