The Language of Dead Bodies

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/07/11/2437/

The Language of Dead Bodies
by Robert Shetterly

everywhere instead of a name there is a lie…
– W. S. Merwin

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars
of light ….
– Mary Oliver

snip//

Let the dead speak.

Let the dead bear witness.

Insist that the hobgoblins of the Green Zone handle the fruits of their labor. Let’s see who would dare to come out to clean up this mess. Let the limp dead be battering rams against the implacable lies. Lies are finally no match for reality. And the reality of a sliced open child’s head, its brain covered in blood and flies, its one remaining eye still asking why, can be persuasive, perhaps more persuasive than a senator with a non-binding resolution, more persuasive than the measured duplicity of an imperfectly born-again Colin Powell, more persuasive than a Democrat who wants to keep the war going to run against it in 2008.

I appeal to the Iraqis to lay the bodies of children and loved ones out like a moat, a sacred circle, a noose around those walls. What could be more eloquent?

I know full well that such an idea is grotesque. What parents wouldn’t want to lay to rest a dead child with dignity, respect, and sanctity even if they can’t find all the parts? A little peace, a resting place apart from the obscenity of indiscriminate bombs. A private place to grieve separate from the marketplace of death. Who would want to lay down a mutilated sister at the base of the anonymous and arrogant edifice behind whose walls electricity runs, beer is cold, air conditioners bathe the generals in air as cool as the Rockies, pretty young women jog in red, white, and blue halter tops, pizza has all the toppings, the wages are high, and not a word is ever said anymore about wining hearts and minds. Would I, crazed with anger and grief, abandon my own dead son or daughter at the imperial gates of the Green Zone?

I don’t know. There is grotesque and then there is grotesque. And then there is the grotesque that may stop this monstrosity.

I have a mask from the Ngala tribe in the Congo. It’s large and dark brown. The woman’s features are sketched in with pale white paint. The downcast eyes are weeping white tears down the round cheeks. It’s a “Women sue for Peace” mask. When the men have been fighting too long, the women don the masks. I wonder if it ever worked. You might say it’s the mask that Cindy Sheehan wore in Crawford. Surely it wouldn’t work in Baghdad.

Reverend Coffin said, “Improve the quality of your suffering.” Sometimes only an act born from the most outrageous grief and love, an act that tears your own heart, can actually do that — save the life of a not yet shattered child.

Robert Shetterly lives in Brooksville, Maine