shahida’s last word شهيدة
Wednesday, July 30th, 2008For a while I have wanted to write about the cult of the shahida; an Arabic word for a female suicide bomber. But in order to talk you need to be able to understand and this is a subject so beyond my ability to grasp time and time again I find I have no words at all, nothing to start a conversation with besides a horrified stupor at such barbaric actions.
Indeed, does anyone have any words that come close besides the condemnable rhetoric those who support and perpetrate these crimes use? I am not talking about the women, teenage girls mostly, who don belts full of explosives under their jilbab (traditional long-sleeved blouses and skirts) and allow themselves to have their bodies ripped apart in such gruesome manners. No, their motivations are easy to understand. I am talking about their handlers who prepare them to die; the religious leaders who sanction and encourage their behavior; their parents who see their only worth as a tool for killing the enemy. That is why I could find no words for such a long time; if one person or a small group of people do something abominable it is easy to say it was a freak occurrence, that the culture in question is still healthy and honorable regardless of the outside pressures being put upon it. But when whole societies sanction such behavior, when people on the lowest rungs who normally have little or no worth find they can be praised, honored and revered by committing acts of atrocity, then what words are there to say “you don't need to do this”?
“Ho, ho,” reply the critics, “but we do!”
Cults of suicide, especially at times of war, are not really all that mysterious. Regardless whether they belong to an organized army or an underground movement, when leaders find they have a population of economically desperate, marginalized people at their disposal, people willing to take up violence as a means to an end, then the lines between getting people to kill their enemy with traditional or non-traditional methods becomes blurred. 1940s Imperial Japan, with its machismo attitude towards “the way of the warrior,” bushido, was a prime example. Even after members of the Emperor's own council felt the war was lost the High Command still sent thousands upon thousands of its soldiers, sailors and pilots off on suicide missions to “die gloriously” rather live in shame with defeat.
But Japanese state-sponsored Buddhism isn't alone here; cultures all around the world appear to embrace the notion that “dying gloriously” for ones ideals is actually a spiritual act. That is why, when I examine any culture that gives women so few options to realize their potential, it is easy to see the motivations of their young women. On January 27, 2002, PLO leader Yasser Arafat told a crowd of over a thousand women that they were to participate in violent resistance against Israeli occupation. “You are my army of roses that will crush Israeli tanks.” In his speech he coined the term shahida; the feminized version of shahide, the Arabic word for martyr. On that very same day 26 year-old Wafa Idris blew herself up in a Jerusalem shopping mall, killing an 81 year-old man and wounding 131 others and with that Palestine had its first female martyr.
I do not wish to single out any set of people or beliefs as being inherently perverse; any culture where an educated woman is considered abnormal will do. Indeed, pick any part of the world where fathers and brothers kill their sisters, daughters and mothers to keep their families' honor intact; where girls' only options are to be mothers and wives; where being queer or taking a lover or having an unwanted pregnancy is a crime punishable by death and then we might begin to discover the words necessary in order to have this sort of conversation.
I.
I asked, who'd want to be a single bloom
on an army of roses? No. Make me fruit
instead; something red and juicy; perfume
from pulp and endless mustard gas. The brute
who fired rubber bullets at my mother
can sink his teeth into this. Let Beirut
burn, I don't care. I shall become daughter
to plums and ash, sister of figs and soot.
I asked, who'd want to be a single thorn,
mere prick, when even a lime can splash
against the root of our misery? Scorn
all who must ask why. Watch me. In a flash
I shall become lover to saints, devils,
lemons, soot. A thing of ash and apples.
II.
One more scholar I'll never meet, one more
friend I'll never meet, one more poet I'll
never meet. Sister, even now in your
village some wretched Imam or senile
Rabbi is decreeing out your future:
arranged marriage, six children and a vile
husband blind to your passion and wonder.
Willful women are killed here; the sterile,
too, the mystics, erotics, mavericks.
We talk of traditions like they're a curse;
things so smothering nothing can survive.
Please. Tell me of your mother's politics,
sister's PhD, daughter's brilliant verse.
Tell me they're alive. Tell me they're alive.
III.
This is why I'm doing it. The small girl
in the hijab, satchel on her shoulders.
The small girl that stares with eyes wide, all curl
like the dead. Yes. This is why; a daughter's
worth, the ticking seconds – I shall claim you.
You shall be my flesh, my joy. Yours. Mine. Ours.
Put down the satchel. Come back, love. You who
I call love, come back to me. The Martyr's
Road is a lie. This is why I'm doing
it. I want you to live. I've lost enough
sisters in this world. I want you to live.
Forget them, with their vile honor killing,
curses and God. You are brilliant, the stuff
of love, my flesh, the one who can forgive.
