Desert Flower By Waris Dirie Views
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.
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.
Waris Dirie was born in 1965 into a nomad family living in the region of Gallcaio, in the Somali desert near the border to Ethiopia. At the tender age of five, she underwent the inhuman procedure of genital mutilation. This horrible tradition is still practiced worldwide today, both by Moslems and Christians. According to estimations of the United Nations, more than 8 000 girls become victims of this cruel crime every day.
1997 Waris Diriei’s biography h‘Desert Flowerb’ was published in New York. The book became an international bestseller (in Germany, for example, the book stayed in the Top Ten list of best-selling books published in the magazine e‘Der Spiegels’ for a total of 120 weeks). The book appeared in more than 50 licensed editions and became number 1 of the best-seller lists in many countries. Till today, there were 11 million copies sold worldwide.
Desert Flower By Waris Dirie Images
