by Jason Porath
By the end of the war, 25 Night Witches had been given the nation’s highest honor: Hero of the Soviet Union. Around 200 women had been part of the squadron at one point or another, and only 32 were lost. They flew over 1,100 nights of combat, and each pilot flew over 800 missions. Many of their stories have come from one of their most courageous pilots, Nadezhda Popova, who died in 2013. Of the experience, she later said: “I sometimes stare into the blackness and close my eyes. I can still imagine myself as a young girl, up there in my little bomber. And I ask myself, ‘Nadia, how did you do it?’”
There are way too many individual stories of Night Witches to cover here—but you can find many more online at www.rejectedprincesses.com.
Sita
(INDIAN MYTH)
The Princess Who Leapt into a Pit
You are beholding the pinnacle of Indian femininity: Sita, from the Ramayana.
For those unfamiliar with the Ramayana, it’s an incredible (and incredibly long) work of Indian mythology—so here’s a condensed version. For 90 percent of the book, it’s basically Mario/Princess/Bowser by way of Tarantino. Bad guy (Ravana) kidnaps princess (Sita), and good guy (Rama) goes on bloody rampage for years in order to get her back. Rama kills Ravana, gets the princess back, yay for everyone.
But then there’s that last 10 percent of the book.
About five pages after they get home, cut to Rama talking to his advisers. “Advisers,” he says, “what are the people saying about me?”
“Oh man, Rama, they totally love you. Way to rock it with killing that demon guy.”
“Wait, everyone loves me? No way. There’s gotta be someone who’s not on board.”
“Well, I mean, there’s some knucklehead . . .”
“Well, what’s the knucklehead saying?”
“He’s saying that Sita totally hooked up with the bad guy, but, I mean, he’s a knucklehead.”
“Wait, what? People are saying that? Oh crap. Hey, Sita! Baby, I’m sorry, I can’t be seen with you. Some guy is saying you hooked up with Ravana. Now, I know you’ve passed like, my hundred other purity tests, but still. You should go live in the forest for the rest of your life.”
So she goes into exile—pregnant with Rama’s kid.
Cut to many years later, Rama’s having a festival, and two awesome guys show up. They wow everyone, and Rama says, “Oh hey, you two are amazing! Who are you?” They’re like, “Surprise! We’re your twin sons! Also, Sita’s alive and in the forest.”
Rama replies, “Oh snap! Yeah, that whole thing with Sita was totally my bad. Hey, can we get her in here? I got some smoothing over to do.”
Sita shows up, nice and calm. “No, guys, it’s cool! Hey, I’ll settle this once and for all. Everyone listening? Okay, if I did not hook up with the demon guy, may the earth swallow me whole.”
Bam, lava, the end.
Now, that’s the overview, but if you go into more depth, there’s more at play:
• In some versions, Sita was Ravana’s daughter in a previous life and was reincarnated as Sita in part to help purge him of evil. (He was one nasty dude.)
• While Sita is generally described as the world’s most beautiful human, she was actually fairly supernatural—her birth involved her springing up out of the ground, to be raised as a princess. Thus, when she jumps into the ground at the end, it’s a return to her roots (no pun intended).
• She was also a reincarnation of Lakshmi, the goddess of beauty, wealth, and love, while Rama was a reincarnation of Vishnu.
Even taking all of that into account, this author still holds that the reading of “I’d rather jump into a pit of lava than be with you” is a valid one. Your mileage may vary.
Ravana’s kidnapping plot began when Ravana’s sister unsuccessfully hit on Rama’s brother—who promptly cut off her nose instead of just saying, “Not interested.” Ravana’s sister told Ravana what happened, and he swore revenge. The sister went on to tell Ravana about Sita and how attractive she was, and Ravana got ideas. Gross ideas . . . and it goes on and on. The standard version of the Ramayana is around 600 pages long, and there’s a lot worth reading in there. Characters turn night to day by piercing the sky with arrows, there’s a bad guy with a chariot pulled by snakes, and a monkey god leaps across the Indian subcontinent while carrying a mountain on his back to resurrect literally everyone in the world.
Kharboucha
(19TH-CENTURY MOROCCAN LEGEND)
The Poet Who Sang Truth to Power
Sometimes becoming royalty is far from a reward. Sometimes it’s punishment.
Take the story of Kharboucha. Named Hadda at birth, Kharboucha was an illiterate Moroccan poet of the Oulad Zayd tribe who, in childhood, was horribly scarred by smallpox. Refusing to let her appearance hold her back, she embraced the name Kharboucha (“scarred woman”) and put her all into singing. She soon created a new style known as al-Aïta (“the Call”), which remains popular to this day. What was so unique about al-Aïta? In a word: protest.
At the time, Morocco was under Spanish and French rule, but the real powers were the regional governors (the Caids). Enter Omar Ben Aïssa, our villain. Aïssa proved a decidedly suboptimal Caid, as evidenced by his confiscating the land, cattle, and horses of Kharboucha’s tribe. He then topped himself when, in response to Kharboucha singing about said injustices, he massacred the entire Oulad Zayd tribe.
Without a home to return to, Kharboucha began wandering from place to place, singing out against Aïssa. In festivals, gatherings, and marketplaces, she would dub him “eater of carrion”—quite the cultural diss—and advocate open rebellion. Her songs proved popular with tribes all over, which led to Aïssa capturing her and making her his personal singer/jester/prostitute.
Imprisonment didn’t quiet Kharboucha in the slightest, though. Even as Aïssa paraded her in front of guests at grand parties, she continued to belt out her songs of protest against him. Fed up with her insolence, Aïssa had her tortured and buried alive. As legend has it, she continued to sing even as she was being buried. Posthumously, her tale spread throughout the region and her songs became more popular than ever.
Now, did Kharboucha actually exist? Probably not. Her story, despite having very specific details regarding places, people, and even dates, doesn’t quite hang together. Modern historians consider her an amalgamation of figures like contemporary chanteuse Haja Hamadouia and historic Islamic poet al-Khansa.*
Nevertheless, her legacy as a political firebrand lives on. As recently as the 1990s, a song devoted to her—“Hikayat Kharboucha” by Mohamed el-Batouli and Said Limam—was immediately censored by the Moroccan government upon release. It didn’t work, though. Look at the playlist of almost any contemporary al-Aïta singer and you’ll find a song devoted to Kharboucha—truly the most fitting form of immortality.
Marguerite de la Rocque
(MID-16TH CENTURY, CANADA/FRANCE)
The Girl Who Lived
There’s no more favored pastime for disaffected teens than the hallowed “my family is worse than yours” competition. Although these contests rarely have a clear-cut winner, Marguerite de la Rocque could present a strong entry. For Marguerite was the first European to spend more than one winter in Canada—after her relative Jean-François* abandoned her there, on a barren rock literally called the Isle of Demons.
The crazy thing? She survived and returned home.
Not much is known about Marguerite’s life. Although her birth year is unknown, it’s clear she was a young unmarried woman who was accompanying Jean-François on an abortive mission to colonize New France (later known as Canada). Why she went along is also unclear—especially seeing as Jean-François was hardly the most reputable or trustworthy individual. He was the sort to soothe his persistent financial woes with piracy, rarely a positive sign.
During the journey, Marguerite had a romance with one of the sailors,* to which Jean-François took none too kindly. Stopping the ship at a godforsaken slab called the Isle of Demons, he ordered
Marguerite, the sailor, and Marguerite’s servant Damienne—who’d covered up the romantic liaisons—to disembark and then left them all there, with a scant smattering of supplies.
It’s worth mentioning at this point that there are two main sources for this story. One, by Queen Marguerite of Navarre, is a gossipy version gleaned, ostensibly, from Marguerite herself. The other, by heartless sycophant André Thévet, is firmly on team Jean-François. Thévet infuriatingly describes the captain as “clever and wise” to punish the trio “without soiling his hands with their blood.”
The island—a wooded area replete with wolves, bears, and, in Thévet’s telling, demons—was aptly named: the trio could barely sleep at night for the constant howling. Worse still, Marguerite was, in short order, left alone. First to die was her lover, and then Damienne. Lastly, she lost the child she’d had with the lover.* This was all within her first year on the island.
And from there, she lived another year and a half by herself. In that time, she hunted bears and deer, probably with one of the four arquebuses (incredibly heavy first-generation firearms) left to them. She survived bitterly cold winters (the island is located in northeast Canada) and the intense isolation of the island by taking solace in religion. Even as she became increasingly convinced the nighttime cries were actually phantoms come to bedevil her, she clutched her crucifix tight and held on.
After two and a half years, in an incredibly unlikely series of events, she was spotted by Basque fishermen and taken back to France. Once home, she befriended the aforementioned Queen Marguerite of Navarre and from there slipped into the mists of history. No official reproach was ever recorded for Jean-François, who lived to be 60 years old. Marguerite herself became a schoolmistress, and beyond that there is no information on the rest of her life—even the date and place of her death are unknown.
Noor Inayat Khan
(1914–1944, FRANCE)
The Spy Princess
Noor Inayat Khan was, without a doubt, one of the bravest women to ever live. She was a British secret agent during World War II, working as a radio operator in occupied Paris. In fact, working as the only radio operator in occupied Paris. The average life span for that job was six weeks, and she lasted almost five months. She escaped the Gestapo numerous times and went out fighting. All this even though everything about her work went against her religious pacifism.
Noor was the least suitable person in the world to become a spy. For one thing, she was a deeply rooted pacifist—her father was a Muslim Sufi who counted Mahatma Gandhi as a personal friend. Their family home doubled as a mystic school. Noor was so deeply invested in Sufism that she outright refused to lie, which you’d think would disqualify her for the job entirely.
On top of that, Noor didn’t even like Great Britain! She said as much in her initial interview with the British military, due to her relentless honesty. She told the interviewers that after the war she would devote herself to obtaining India’s independence. This is almost like applying to work at a construction site and saying you plan on tearing the building down afterwards.
And she wasn’t remotely physically or psychologically suited to be a spy! Prior to the war, she spent her days writing poetry, music, and children’s books—she was not exactly bodybuilder material. In test interrogations, Noor would freeze up in terror and start quietly muttering to herself. Her instructors remarked that she was clumsy and scatterbrained, and that she regularly left codebooks out in the open.
And above that, in the greatest possible sin for a spy, Noor did not blend in at all. Her parents were Indian and white, British and American, royalty and commoner; she was raised Muslim and Sufi; she was born in Moscow and lived in London and France. She was an actual, honest-to-God princess, descendant of Tipu Sultan. She could not have stood out more if her mother had been albino and her father a neon signpost.
But something shifted in her when the Nazis invaded Paris. Seeing German bombs drop on her beloved France stirred up a deep resolve. She signed up for the armed services shortly thereafter.
In short order, she was placed with the British Special Operations Executive, to be trained as an undercover radio operator. She flung herself into training, becoming both physically and mechanically skilled in record time. Her eccentricities shone through, though: her radio encryption code was derived from one of her poems, and her code name, Madeleine, was a character from one of her stories. Her clumsy style of Morse signaling was so peculiar that she was jokingly nicknamed “Bang Away Lulu.” But despite the misgivings of many of her superiors (most were downright patronizing), she was soon sent to Paris as the first female secret radio operator.
Unfortunately, tragedy struck almost immediately. Barely a week into her Paris assignment, virtually the entire Parisian spy operation was caught in a giant sweep. Noor escaped, but by the end of the SS roundup, she was the only radio operator left in the entirety of Paris. London offered to extract her, but she flat-out refused until a replacement was made available.
What happened next no one expected: she crushed it. For nearly five months, she evaded the Gestapo, changing her location, looks, and clothes on a nearly daily basis. On more than one occasion she tricked, evaded, or just plain outran the Nazis. All the while, she did the work of six people, relaying all of the spy traffic for the entire region back to London by herself. She lasted three times as long as the average radio operator.
She was eventually caught, when a double agent betrayed her to the Nazis. She went down as you’d expect a lifelong pacifist would: by punching, kicking, and biting like a wild animal. Then, scant hours into her imprisonment, she made her first escape attempt. She did so by demanding a bath, and insisting that the door be closed (to protect her modesty). As soon as the door shut, she darted onto the roof, nimbly clambering across the tiles, only to be caught again.
Facing the possibility of harsh punishment, she grew outwardly compliant as she fed the Germans lie after lie. All the while, she was plotting another escape, which almost worked—except, just as she left her cell, the British made a surprise air raid. Because of that, the guards did an unscheduled check of the cells, only to find the bars on Noor’s window undone and her sprinting across the roof yet again.
She was then reclassified as extremely dangerous, shackled in chains, and kept in solitary confinement. Her interrogations changed from friendly questioning to relentless physical violence. Her prison mates, unsure of who she was, knew her mostly through her nightly weeping. And yet, this woman who had failed her test interrogations so miserably never revealed a single thing. Virtually all of the information we have about her last months comes from the few survivors housed in nearby cells. She would scratch out messages to them on the bottom of their shared food bowl, identifying who she was.
And then one day, she was taken to the Dachau concentration camp, along with three other spies. While her companions were shot almost immediately after arrival, Noor’s execution was prolonged, giving her an extra day that was nothing but hour upon hour of brutal violence. According to the other prisoners, her last word, shouted at the Nazis before she was shot, was “liberté.”
Noor Inayat Khan gave everything of herself. She became a pacifist who fought dirty. A klutz who climbed buildings. A Sufi who lied daily. An artist who braved torture. A captive who told nothing.
She was thirty years old.
• ART NOTES •
That is the rooftop of 84 Avenue Foch, the building where Noor was imprisoned. The flak going off in the background is a callback to the air raid that thwarted her second escape attempt, and is also supposed to draw the eye to Noor.
Her outfit is what she was caught in—a blue dress with white trim and a gray sweater. The suitcase radio she’s using is the same model she used in Paris. Her hand is reaching for the Morse signaling button.
Empress Myeongseong
(1851–1895, KOREA)
The Queen Who Almost Saved Korea
If you’re married, there’s a good chance you dis
like your in-laws. Maybe they disapprove of you, maybe they’re overly controlling, maybe they overstay their welcome. But as bad as you might have it, Korea’s powerful Empress Myeongseong likely had it worse—her father-in-law tried to kill her.
And then nearly destroyed the country.
Myeongseong,* better known as Queen Min, was never supposed to be a powerful ruler. An orphan at the age of eight, she was from an unimportant and impoverished noble family, the Min line. The only reason the king’s father, Heungson Daewongun,* plucked her out of obscurity to marry his son, King Gojong, was pure political machination: the Daewongun didn’t want his political enemies bringing in a bride who could help them seize power. Thus Queen Min—an unconnected and politically unimportant figure.
This plan would backfire spectacularly.
At first, Queen Min faced an incredibly uphill battle. Married to a man with whom she shared little—he liked to party, she liked to study—her position became all the more tenuous when the king had a son by a different lady of the court. After years of trying, Queen Min finally bore him a son too, only for the baby to die in infancy. Despondent over the loss, she began to suspect her baby had been poisoned by the Daewongun.
So she began to read. And read. And in short order, she became dangerous.
Knowing her weak-willed husband wanted to rule independent of the Daewongun, who was still holding on to the throne, she approached Gojong as a political partner rather than a wife. Working in concert with the king, she expanded their power base tremendously, putting her relatives in key government positions. She got her husband’s half-brother, whom the Daewongun imperiously referred to as “blockhead,” to spy for her. And then she began to legislate.
