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My mother
and the wars
©2002 Elana Dykewomon
I
Sometime after the bombing started--the
bombing of Afghanistan by the
United States in the fall of 2001--my friend Dolphin and I are
in
my mother's generic apartment.
Three years in Florida and only one painting on the wall: children
at the beach.
Every visit she tells what a
swimmer she was, how her mother dropped the four
of them off, little girls, youd never do that nowadays, and came
back hours later
unaware how my mother swam from
town to town counting breaths and waves while
her sisters grumbled in the sand.
II
My mother has Dolphin and me
drive her to a ladies lunch: old friends from home
who've found the same geography. We take the coast road and mom
marvels at my
ability not to get lost. Easy, I protest, but she wont hear about
it, content
to praise me to Dolphin as we
pass under palms and strangler figs.
Her friends condo has an ocean view. My mother and one other
go
out to the balcony for a smoke and somehow Dolphin is telling
the women at the table about going to Africa--the lions, the
jeep.
Id be afraid. Werent you afraid?
Im not afraid of lions. Im afraid of George Bush, Dolphin says,
with the soft mouth of someone young, nineteen, maybe, home from
sophomore year, arrested once on a picket line. One of the women
rolls her eyes, buries her head in her arms.
Later my mother tells us the
eye-roller is a staunch Republican. "Your friends--"
Dolphin says, considering, and I can tell shes fingering years
of lesbian contention over
hair length, money, prayers, a long string of beads on which
we count and recount our
loyalties,"--love each other despite your different politics."
"Oh we dont let politics
get in the way. Were just glad for the visits that work out.
We all
had young children together once. Some of them, you wouldnt believe
the lives they
had. Delinquent daughters, rotten husbands, worse backs. Each
of them is generous.
Each of them has done something unexpectedly, exceptionally kind."
III
Dolphin insists I give my mother
an article we find in the local Jewish paper
by Letty Cottin Pogrebin critical of Israeli government policy.
Can policy be poetic, in a California
night where I am trying for accuracy,
not to set my mother up to bear the burden of my rightness, my
passion for my grief
when so much of what I grieve is that I cannot communicate
beyond those who already agree.
"Anything Israel does
to defend itself is necessary," my mother says, aggravated,
rummaging
through her clippings file for columns on the other side. In
the ink
I experience only a body count --wenty in your graveyard,
thirteen in mine--the ballots
of death. Dolphin says, "Well, think of it
this way. You and your mother only have one area of conflict,
and she
still thinks you spin gold. Thats a lot more than most."
IV
An Israeli cousin in America
e-mails the family, convinced that snipers use,
if not plant, each Palestinian olive tree, that every Afghan
is complicit:
"My congratulations to those of you who have convinced yourselves
we are bombing innocent people," he sneers, although
e-mail is famous for hiding nuance--perhaps
he sighs as he writes, or shrugs.
Angers bleed into sarcasms. My e-mail box is full,
the living room carpeted in newspaper. More Afghans have been
killed
by us than died in the world trade towers, the pentagon and
even discounting suicide bombers
the ratio of Palestinian to Israeli dead is: ah, I don't
know--not exactly, not precisely, the kind of missing statistic
my cousin, my mother would use to dismiss this argument.
Am I arguing? Many more Palestinian
than Israeli dead. Do the numbers
make a difference? Your dead, my dead harbor threats, the tiny
worms
that decompose flesh have grown ravenous, wriggle towards us.
My mother
is wrenched by our contention.
She paces her apartment despite her bad leg. How is
this possible? Am I still in adolescent rebellion, could I be
among
the self-hating? Don't I remember how she and my father fought
for Israel,
and why? "They want to drive us into the sea."
Mom, you can swim.
V
Isn't that glib of me? My mother:
of whom my father once said, "When we first met
if someone made a racial joke or used a slur, she'd pointedly
leave the room;"
who wrote to my lover, Susan, because they sparred over Zionism,
"I was watching
Martina give the speech at the rally in Washington and realized
I admire you because,
like Martina, you have the courage to say what you believe."
Dolphin and I try to craft a
theory that for her, her generation, the holocaust
was specific--whereas we have globalized our understanding of
ethnic fear
so its no surprise even Jews can excuse the blockades of hate,
even Americans
can be proud to cause suffering.
You can't push us around. We owe it to our widows,
the brave firemen. But my brother said: "They came onto
my block. You bet I want to
fight back. If I was twenty, Id enlist." He's younger than
me, generous
at home but adept at separating us and them, ownership, territories.
Whose block is this?
I dont want to write about war.
War comes on big, as if it were the
center of gravity. I used to think we could build a world for
women, a vision
so compelling the guys would have to work it out for themselves
when
we were gone.
But look: in the great lens,
on the single page where history records a decade
in a paragraph, the most women have been able to write is:
we want our own lives.
The next chapter is about the world wide reaction of the men.
I feel naive in the face of patriotisms.
Unable to grasp why
anyone who ever understood the word patriarchy as will to power,
power over can
now believe nationalism will work to make the better world
the peace on earth
or perhaps everyone operates
at a level of cynicism I dont see:
in the absence of peace, of possibility
give me revenge
give me borders to defend
give me identity
oh, identity
VI
Women in Black you know what
that is?
In San Francisco, mostly middle-aged
and old women, mostly lesbians,
mostly Jews, standing once a month on a business corner at rush
hour
with signs: End the occupation. No more violence in my name.
Dismantle the
settlements. Peace: in English, Hebrew, Arabic. In that hour
we claim bodies that connect
us to women standing in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv,
Sarajevo, Bosnia, Buenos Aires, Chicago and it gives us comfort
gives us
righteousness gives us visibility if not power
And tells me its not "generational
" how we take in the holocausts of the 20th century,
how we tremble in front of the 21st--
it's simply identity.
To change your opinion on war,
on consequence, on retribution, on defense is
to wriggle out of your skin at the moment everyone is zipping
themselves in
to gas masks and armor. And if Ive learned anything its that
vision needs to be not only stirring
but comforting. Flags are warm
whether worn as shawls or shrouds.
VII
My mother used to dream that
she was standing on a beach
watching one of her children drown, opening her mouth to scream,
unable to make a sound.
Years before we were all adults.
But now I think she still fears
some undertow will take us What kind of logic is that?
Dream logic. What women know: impulse, subconscious, time
are dangerous. Most mothers try
to create a boundary, that
space of safety, that plain clarity: us and them, this food,
street, job but
not that, the world is a peril, a plague of hostile whims.
VIII
Whether we protest or are compliant
the governments dont care.
They dont have to.
Yet I engage my mother. I e-mail
my brother: If it had been me in those towers
I hope you would hear my dying thought: don't use my death
to kill others use it to stop war. "You're a better person,
then,"
my brother or my mother said,
"because" this was my mother, I remember,
"what I'd want you to hear if it was me burning is, 'Get
those bastards.'"
I am not gratified to be better. How can we--
IX
I stop. I stare.
In the interim, I have the luck to meet Margaret Randall, who
tells me a story about her
gym filled with war veterans at the hour she goes. One man
on a treadmill bellows to the air, "You think I lose sleep
over the women and children I
killed in Viet Nam? Damn straight I dont. We
should go in there, bomb them all."
But I lose sleep. You--my mother,
my family, my strangers on the street, my kin I
have the same question I always have--
why dont you recognize each other as at least
caught in the same terrible cross
fire of ideologies
shouting to be heard, ready to kill
to end the pain of conversation?
X
That's too easy. Not an answer,
not a direction. Do I want to engage in discussion with everyone,
anyone willing to talk about war? No.
Why do you think I'm writing this? For control.
I try to listen: mom, brother,
cousin, politicians, its important to me
you know Im not the only one struggling for validation.
At rallies I hand out fliers. I dislike confrontation, dont want
to argue. Read: here's
the facts as we see them.
Read or not. In the leafleting
dance smiling
works best. Project gentleness, offer the paper as a gift, a
canap at a party, something
to read on mass transit, "Flier? Flier, maam? "Downtown,
Black men are most likely to
take one, and then single white women who have
a free hand. After that its hard
to make a statistic --tourists and teenagegroups with at
least one girl in them--once an apparently Jewish man balled
up the flier, threw it back
at women who stood silent, holding a huge banner, a black quilt
onto which theyd sewn helicopters and women fleeing
flames. Im not an organizer.
I just show up when I can, when my feet arent
too painful to stand. In the San Francisco Bay area, the place
where, statistically, more people are at odds with majority American
sentiment, we have demonstrations two,
three, sometimes five nights a week about
everything: the juvenile detention
hall, the supreme court decision, environmental racism, profiling,
this new war. But even here
when I want to put a bumper sticker on my car, "Nationalism
Kills"
Im afraid. I settle for the old symbol of peace.
XI
And none of this helps. I want
to have a conversation with my mother
in which she agrees that the Israelis have done terrible things
to Palestinians, in which she sees that famous photograph of
a hundred Nazi guns trained on one Jewish boy is the prototype
for how we make boys in Palestinian
camps into enemies; in which
she knows that security based on someones humiliation is not
secure
that Israel must find another way that
fundamentalism is the constant
oil slick on the beach and we are seeing it here
seeing it there Muslims, Jews, Christians Arafat Sharon Bush
bin Laden
use the same sleek vocabularies--
I am like that girl in the class
waving her hand frantic teacher pick me
I know the answer!
Every morning I wake up clear:
--let the women take their power--
Hah! is the glare in the teacher's
eyes --
what if your mother was on the committee to negotiate?
I want to say: if she wasn't
surrounded by men
if she were one among twenty women and half were Palestinian
if she were responsible instead of reacting
she'd do what responsible women do:
come to terms.
The teacher smirks, passes over
me,
calls on a boy.
Once again, we are drowning in
history
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Fall
2002