Book Review: Tears of Gold
Tears of Gold: Portraits of Yazidi, Rohingya, and Nigerian Women by Hannah Rose Thomas (Plough Publishing, 2024).
Tears of Gold is a gut punch of a book, a riveting record in pictures and words of women who have survived horrors worse than most of us could imagine.
British artist and activist Hannah Rose Thomas was inspired to create the book while working with women and children who had been through captivity by terrorist groups or fled from ethnic cleansing. Her work shows the power and value of the arts for those trying to heal from unspeakable trauma. Wanting to help them tell their stories, she taught them to paint self-portraits, and she painted their portraits as well. Both her artwork and theirs are featured together in this book. (Three of Thomas’s paintings were chosen by then-Prince Charles for an exhibition at Buckingham Palace after she graduated from his School of Traditional Arts, which is why he contributed a foreword to the book.)
Thomas’s portraits—one of which appears on the book’s cover, above—are hauntingly beautiful, incorporating gold leaf into their portraits as a sign of her subjects’ sacredness. The women’s portraits of themselves are much simpler, but in some ways, more vivid. Some of them paint red or gold tears streaming down their faces.
Both Thomas’s paintings and those done by the women themselves spill over with emotion, the grief and anger and pain they are finally finding ways to express.
The portraits are accompanied by the women’s stories in their own words. The tellers of these stories range from preteens to grandmothers, but again and again the same sorrows emerge from their accounts: kidnapping, rape, slavery, the loss of children and husbands and parents and siblings. Some are still waiting for news of lost loved ones; others were blamed and punished by their own families for having been raped and, in several cases, giving birth to their rapist’s child. Many are struggling to survive in refugee camps.
Atrocities like these are possible, Thomas writes, because we allow ourselves to dehumanize those who are different from us—like these women, most of whom belong to religious and/or ethnic minorities in their respective countries. This book argues powerfully that the dehumanized reclaim their own humanity and dignity by telling their stories, through words and through art.
One Nigerian woman, Charity, tells Thomas, “I am so happy. I have never held a pencil in my life before, and this is the first time I have been able to write my name and even to draw my face!” Having been beaten, raped, and impregnated by members of Boko Haram, then beaten by her husband when she brought her baby home, Christy has rediscovered who she is—a woman of worth—through art.
Thomas quotes Aisha, another of her participants, as saying, “I want the whole world to know that I have pain.” Through their creative and courageous work, the world now knows, and must not forget.
(Cover image copyright Plough Publishing. In the interest of full disclosure, Plough is also the publisher of my book The Gospel in Dickens. Thanks to Plough and to NetGalley for the advance review copy of Tears of Gold. All quotations have been checked in the published edition.)
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