Silent
and accommodating
Her name was Du’a Aswade. She was 17.
The mouth breathing neighbor from the second floor,
the one who makes aggressively defensive jokes about
porn all the time tries to chat me up when I go out
with the dog to breathe for a minute, to let the
news reports, the ones on every channel settle.
Up to the minute, CNN live coverage of a 17
year old girl’s death by stoning.
I duck past the neighbor.
Right now I don’t want him near me with his insistent
non-accountability, his culpable participation in the
dynamic central to reducing every woman I know.
That cheerful, snide innocence shirking responsibility
for his collaboration and entitlement.
A reader comment on my blog:
“The first thing I thought when the camera pulled back and
her half-naked young body was visible, I wonder how many
men are going to get a boner?”
I try to resist thinking I agree, and with a mild
unease I recall her sky blue underwear, a singular
covering for a broken, bruised body dead in the street.
The similarities to a gang rape are not lost on me.
I shut off CNN when the no neck carcass of Larry King
barks “Her father wants it known that her hymen was
intact. She may very well have been a virgin.”
Thanks, Larry.
Yes, she may be dead, but look, her hymen’s intact.
Score one for the dad, no shame on his house!
Then I think about rape, what it is to be raped and
violated, I think about our culture and that which is
death and wonder is end of life always synonymous
with that end trajectory we call death?
I think there are ways people die a little every
day while very much still a part of this world.
On my way inside the neighbor winks, cracks a
joke about his “mail order bride”, a Horny Susie
doll arriving in the mail today, he hopes.
Silent, and accommodating.
