Refugee Mother & Child by Chinua Achebe
No Madonna and Child could touch
that picture of a mother's tenderness
for a son she soon will have to forget.
The air was heavy with odors
of diarrhea of unwashed children
with washed-out ribs and dried-up
bottoms struggling in labored
steps behind blown empty bellies.
Most mothers there had long ceased
to care but not this one; she held
a ghost smile between her teeth
and in her eyes the ghost of a mother's
pride as she combed the rust-colored
hair left on his skull and then -
singing in her eyes - began carefully
to part it... In another life
this would have been a little daily
act of no consequence before his
breakfast and school; now she
did it like putting flowers
on a tiny grave.
********************************************
Posted on Mother's Day, 2013.
I read the commencement address by John Green, and was reminded of this poem I had saved a long time ago. The excerpt from the commencement speech that struck me:
And lastly, be vigilant in the struggle toward empathy. A couple years after I graduated from college, I was living in an apartment in Chicago with four friends, one of whom was this Kuwaiti guy named Hassan, and when the U.S. invaded Iraq, Hassan lost touch with his family, who lived on the border, for six weeks. He responded to this stress by watching cable news coverage of the war 24 hours a day. So the only way to hang out with Hassan was to sit on the couch with him, and so one day we were watching the news and the anchor was like, “We’re getting new footage from the city of Baghdad,” and a camera panned across a house that had a huge hole in one wall covered by a piece of plywood. On the plywood was Arabic graffiti scrawled in black spraypaint, and as the news anchor talked about the anger on the Arab street or whatever, Hassan started laughing for the first time in several weeks.
“What’s so funny?” I asked him.
“The graffiti,” he said.
“What’s funny about it?”
“It says, Happy Birthday, Sir, Despite the Circumstances.”
For the rest of your life, you are going to have a choice about how to read graffiti in a language you do not know, and you will have a choice about how to read the actions and intonations of the people you meet. I would encourage you as often as possible to consider the Happy Birthday Sir Despite the Circumstances possibility, the possibility that the lives and experiences of others are as complex and unpredictable as your own, that other people-be they family or strangers, near or far-are not simply one thing or the other-not simply good or evil or wise or ignorant-but that they like you contain multitudes, to borrow a phrase from the great Walt Whitman.
*
When I first read and saved the poem by Chinua Achebe, I was so deeply moved by the tragedy of it; a mother's loving act in the face of anguish.
That point of view hasn't wavered, but reading it again now, I am reminded of the other layer: in environments that are so hostile, in war-torn lands and in refugee camps painted with the permanence of despair, living alongside the struggle to survive, are the gentle heartbeats of love from a mother to her child, not as a 'response to horror or pain', but merely present in the reality of their being.
She's not just a refugee preparing for the inevitable goodbye to her child; she's not just someone praying for her life and the life of her family to change; she is breathing and living and loving in this very moment, not in spite of anything else, but because she is a person, a woman, a mother.
And so to her I bid, Happy Mother's Day, Despite the Circumstances.
that picture of a mother's tenderness
for a son she soon will have to forget.
The air was heavy with odors
of diarrhea of unwashed children
with washed-out ribs and dried-up
bottoms struggling in labored
steps behind blown empty bellies.
Most mothers there had long ceased
to care but not this one; she held
a ghost smile between her teeth
and in her eyes the ghost of a mother's
pride as she combed the rust-colored
hair left on his skull and then -
singing in her eyes - began carefully
to part it... In another life
this would have been a little daily
act of no consequence before his
breakfast and school; now she
did it like putting flowers
on a tiny grave.
********************************************
Posted on Mother's Day, 2013.
I read the commencement address by John Green, and was reminded of this poem I had saved a long time ago. The excerpt from the commencement speech that struck me:
And lastly, be vigilant in the struggle toward empathy. A couple years after I graduated from college, I was living in an apartment in Chicago with four friends, one of whom was this Kuwaiti guy named Hassan, and when the U.S. invaded Iraq, Hassan lost touch with his family, who lived on the border, for six weeks. He responded to this stress by watching cable news coverage of the war 24 hours a day. So the only way to hang out with Hassan was to sit on the couch with him, and so one day we were watching the news and the anchor was like, “We’re getting new footage from the city of Baghdad,” and a camera panned across a house that had a huge hole in one wall covered by a piece of plywood. On the plywood was Arabic graffiti scrawled in black spraypaint, and as the news anchor talked about the anger on the Arab street or whatever, Hassan started laughing for the first time in several weeks.
“What’s so funny?” I asked him.
“The graffiti,” he said.
“What’s funny about it?”
“It says, Happy Birthday, Sir, Despite the Circumstances.”
For the rest of your life, you are going to have a choice about how to read graffiti in a language you do not know, and you will have a choice about how to read the actions and intonations of the people you meet. I would encourage you as often as possible to consider the Happy Birthday Sir Despite the Circumstances possibility, the possibility that the lives and experiences of others are as complex and unpredictable as your own, that other people-be they family or strangers, near or far-are not simply one thing or the other-not simply good or evil or wise or ignorant-but that they like you contain multitudes, to borrow a phrase from the great Walt Whitman.
*
When I first read and saved the poem by Chinua Achebe, I was so deeply moved by the tragedy of it; a mother's loving act in the face of anguish.
That point of view hasn't wavered, but reading it again now, I am reminded of the other layer: in environments that are so hostile, in war-torn lands and in refugee camps painted with the permanence of despair, living alongside the struggle to survive, are the gentle heartbeats of love from a mother to her child, not as a 'response to horror or pain', but merely present in the reality of their being.
She's not just a refugee preparing for the inevitable goodbye to her child; she's not just someone praying for her life and the life of her family to change; she is breathing and living and loving in this very moment, not in spite of anything else, but because she is a person, a woman, a mother.
And so to her I bid, Happy Mother's Day, Despite the Circumstances.