From North Carolina to Iraq

My daughter at home with her dogs.
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Novelist Vicki Lane, whose blog I read daily (vickilanemysteries.blogspot.com), yesterday gave us a post entitled "Fear." In it she drew together a segment from her novel SIGNS IN THE BLOOD, in which a character comments on a harmless water snake too often killed, because the perpetrator doesn't know the difference between it and a copperhead, and a news report about the killing of three innocent Iraqi civilians by American troops on June 25. The military had said that these civilians, driving to their jobs at a bank, were criminals and thus legitimate targets. That official story turned out to be wrong. "Ignorance combined with fear is a dangerous thing," she concludes.

This set me to remembering.

WOMEN WRITING PLACE, that was the name of the conference in which I participated just days after the invasion of Iraq. Located at Barton College, in Wilson, NC, the writers included Judith Ortiz Cofer, Crystal Wilkinson, Janette Turner Hospital, and me. We read our work, engaged in a panel discussion, and on April 8,l went home. On the drive back, I began reading the Raleigh News and Observer, stopping short at an Associated Press release about civilian casualties in the neighborhood believed to house Saddam Hussein. U.S. planes had bombed it to smithereens, killing numerous civilians, but not Saddam. One of those killed was a 19 year old girl whose mother was keening out her grief. The young woman had been decapitated by the blasts.

I was haunted by that mother wailing over her child, so brutally destroyed, and then and there I began the poem below. To say that this was one of the most difficult poems I ever wrestled with would be an understatement. I thought of it yet again this morning when I read Vicki's post. Ignorance and fear are a dangerous mix, and we have seen too much of it over the last several years, not to mention throughout human history! We know so little about Middle Eastern and Muslim history, culture, and art! And yet we believe we can transform this region, this culture, through bombs.

My daughter at the time was studying Urdu literature at the University of Texas, translating Urdu poetry, considered by those who know it well, to be among the treasures of the literary world. I found the W.S. Merwin lines in C. M. Naim's essay on Ghalib; going through my daugher's old photocopies from her U. of Chicago days, I came upon this, by one of her favorite professors. The essay, and these lines, helped me conclude the poem in a way that retained the humanity of the subject, or so I hoped.


HER DAUGHTER



"Charred dove, nightingale still burning"
—Mirza Ghalib


Baghdad, April 8, 2003

Four years younger than mine,
her daughter lies under the rubble.

She stands at the edge of it,
watching the men lifting one stone,

another, till out of the crater
they gently lift somebody's

body, a body she now
sees is female. She tries to recall

what her daughter was wearing,
but no scrap of clothing remains

on it. Whose body is it? She sees
no face. She sees no head.

At the edge of the crater she stands
while they swaddle the body in blankets

a neighbor has brought. Through
the blasted streets she calls

a name that gets lost
in the rattle of gunfire, a name

no one hears as they pull
from the rubble her daughter's

head, hair twisted round like
a root-wad, not blonde

like my daughter's, not waking
up as my daughter will be, being safe

on this morning in Texas, beginning
to brush her hair after her shower,

her face in the mirror as perfect as
always I see it, the fair skin

she wishes had South Asian
dusk in it, not southern

sun from the fields of her mother's
line, as she examines

the scar on her temple,
the chin she believes looks

not quite smooth
enough, while her fingers

scroll over its surface
as if they are translating

Urdu, word after
unsteady word of a ghazal

that she must recite
today, all the while fearing

her voice will fail
even as she tries

to fill up the silence
with Ghalib's desire

to see, lost in the blaze
of the mirror

that holds her,
the face of the Beloved.


The URL for this page is http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200511/her-daughter. (There's a recording of me reading this poem, but be forewarned---I have a lot of trouble with the Arabic pronunciation of "gh."


My daughter at the University of Chicago graduation.