"Murder Most Foul"
Every teacher, on occasion, has the opportunity to confiscate a student's amateur artwork in an effort to refocus that student's attention on the lesson. Usually, the student puts up some token resistance or, better still, is caught off-guard before they can censor their own work. Most of these doodlings are mindless enough and it is surprisingly rare that a teacher will stumble upon something of any real substance. The classic satirical portrayals of the teacher is rarer than one would think, though I am sure their are some unflattering portraits of me floating around in notebooks all over the world.
A few days ago, I caught one of my eighth graders, Irene, working on just such a diversion. Irene is quiet and good-natured enough so that I was surprised to find her drawing at all. Assuming the figure in the picture was me, I was even more shocked that she was engaged in this act of insubordination, even as trivial as it was. In the middle of my lesson, I didn't think much of it.
After class ended, though, a longer look at Irene's drawing showed me that it was anything by trivial and I was decidedly not the subject. God in heaven, I only wish that I was, for that would have been something short of a tragedy. As it was though, this picture was deeply troubling.
To a degree, this gruesome picture speaks for itself, but a little analysis has helped bring me to a fuller appreciation of the magnitude of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The figure on the right, of course, is an Israeli soldier. He is identified as such by the mark on his left leg, which is a crude "Star of David" and a patch found on Israeli uniforms. In his hands, of course, are blood stained knives. It also strikes me that his hands, too, are bloody, which lends a sense of personal culpability to match his words: "I am a murderer."
The smaller figure to the left is a Palestinian, whose hair seems to indicate that this is a Palestinian girl. To match the Israeli attacker, she says, "I am murdered." Her most striking feature, besides the gaping hole in her chest, is her small size, especially in contrast with the soldier on the right. A more literal interpretation would suggest this figure's small stature is a sign of youth. Symbolically, though, the difference in size could be a thinly veiled statement about the comparative power of Israel and Palestine. Either way, the tragedy of this scene - be it the abuse of a young girl or an otherwise powerless person - is fairly comparable.
For me, though, the real tragedy was that this was the product of a thirteen year-old girl's imagination. In another time, in another place, surely Irene would be distracted by more pleasant flights of fancy.