There are many ways to deal with a breakup—moving far away, hooking up with strangers, that sort of thing. Dr. Nadia Amin’s reaction to breaking up with the woman she thought was the love of her life by taking a job with the United Nations setting up a program to deradicalize women who, for a variety of reasons, ended up married to ISIS members. (This surprising change also involves moving very far away and hooking up with people she barely knows.) Nussaibah Younis’s novel, Fundamentally, is a hell of a ride.
Nadia is filled with regrets as soon as she arrives in the Green Zone in Baghdad. Before her breakup with her long-term girlfriend, Nadia wrote a paper theorizing about a way to help women who willingly joined ISIS return to their former homes as a way of creating enough of an academic splash to maybe win a permanent job at University College London. She never expected that paper to turn into a job offer from the United Nations. And yet, there she is, sweating in the Iraqi sun and wondering how the hell she is supposed to turn that paper into a reality. The first problem is that Nadia doesn’t have any relevant experience; she’s an academic, not a social or aid worker. The second problem is that the people she is supposed to work for are deeply jaded from years of fighting bureaucracy and corruption. It’s all a farce.
In spite of a deck stacked very much against her, Nadia finds enough gumption to badger the necessary permissions to get a team out to a camp filled with women who spent years in ISIS. Some of these women were groomed and tricked into joining. Others were kidnapped from areas ISIS overran. A few joined of her own accord. After ISIS was beaten into submission, these women became effectively homeless. No one wants to take them back. Western countries don’t want their citizens back because of their association with violent terrorism. The women taken from Iraq aren’t wanted back in their hometowns because they carry the taint of multiple marriages (even if the woman in question wasn’t a willing participant).
One of the women, a young British woman named Sara, makes a deep impression on Nadia with her brash London banter. In Sara, Nadia sees what might have happened to herself if she’d followed a different path in life. A lot of what follows (apart from the satirical elements with the UN and local politicians) is clearly an effort by Nadia to deal in all the wrong ways: by trying to “rescue” Sara, by throwing all protocols out the window, and by never considering that she might need some serious therapy.
There are some parts of Fundamentally that strained my credulity. Nadia is such a complex character that it was hard for me to reconcile her successes with her program with her occasional emotional paralysis. I didn’t always buy the moments when Nadia would suddenly find the fortitude to bend others to her will. In spite of these moments, I was fascinated by the tale Younis spins and the question of how one is supposed to do even a bit of good in impossible situations.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.