SINMIGO - MR. KILOMBO FT. ROZALÉN (LYRICS + ENGLISH TRANSLATION)

Educated by Tara Westover
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is my attempt to unleash some of the many thoughts and emotions this book generously gave me. It is known that books bridge the gap between generations, civilizations and ideologies, never before has a gap that large been bridged for me.

In this masterpiece of a memoir Tara Westover vividly describes how it is to grow up in a fundamentalist Mormon family. I have heard of stories in the south of Egypt, Syria and other Middle Eastern and Asian countries about how religious fundamentalism gives birth to utterly ridiculous behavior, so insane and abusive that is seemed almost unreal, and how the victims of such ideologies and ignorance are often women, but never did I think similar things are happening in this first world country. The thing about religious fundamentalism, and in the case of this book, conservative Mormonism, is that by believing so much that one is on the only true path to god, one almost deludes oneself into thinking they are god, and her father was pretty much like that. Never doubting for a second his devotion, never doubting that god speaks through him, he was a channel for a lot of injustice and a lot of abuse, because what more right can you have, that the right of a chosen one.

Tara is able to break free of her family confines to pursue a chance in education, one that she never had before, the first time she enters a classroom was in university, while before that, her education was trivial, virtually non-existent. All of her life prior to that she saw the world through her parents eyes, even when she was subject to abuse. Seeing everything from only one point of view is very deluded, and she was able to swap her family’s eyes for hers only much later.

Tara’s story is powerful, tragic at points, impressive at others. In the book she never uses a self congratulatory tone, even when she describes her achievements, which are, given her constraints, miraculous. It is truly a story of a woman finding herself, her mind, her voice through education, and the price that comes with all that, the price that she paid for being different, for refusing to be a copy of her family and live an authentic life to herself. She managed to document her struggle in the literary gem that is this book, and I am so glad I picked it up.

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