S and I have taken to watching the nightly (national) news, simply because television is no good at 5:30 pm.
Tonight, there was a story (and here is where the link is missing) about a Palestinian woman who was being treated in an Israeli hospital for burns who then turned and tried to martyr herself as a suicide bomber; the bombs failed and she lived.
The story is unremarkable in many ways; it's very easy to condemn a girl for turning on the people who (probably) saved her life. But this event was caught on tape, and her failure and anguish was laid bare on my nightly news, as the story of a girl gone wrong.
When the bomb fails to detonate the first time, the woman is pretty shocked (I think, anyway) that she is still alive, and so she attempts to detonate again. It doesn't work again, and the girl screams (no sound is broadcast, fyi). It's a loud scream, it's a scary scream, it's a scream of pain. It's anger too, yes. But the next thing that we see is the woman, looking up at the sky and frantically, madly gripping her throat, her scarred, burned, mangled throat in a way that you would immediately recognize. The insane scrambling as the claws at her throat, the eyes welling up, looking up, looking for answers that would probably never come.
In watching that tape, I stopped feeling righteous indignation that someone could behave in such a manner, and understood. I don't mean that I know what it's like to be horribly disfigured, or to live in a place where movement is restricted and rights are taken. I don't know what it's like to have my fiance break off our engagement because of the burns covering my body, to hover at the edge of death because of those burns. I don't know. But I recognized that immutable anguish, because I've seen it on the faces of people close to me. And I've felt the same sort of anguish, the kind that makes you claw at your throat, the kind that somehow calls your eyes upward to protest the unfairness of what's been done to you.
I've always believed the CSN line "If you smile at me, I will understand, because that is something everybody everywhere does in the same language." I think that anguish, in some ways, is the same. We can read it in the way humans move their bodies, in their tears, and in their eyes. I can't say I understand the impulse to explode yourself (and sadly, others) to deal with it, but I can understand that there is a pain so hard and so sharp that you do not know what to do with it. The anguish is universal; it is what we do with it that isn't.
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