She did not, and she will not, and she cannot lead a decades-long movement to empower ... anyone.
She, a documentary filmmaker, and her husband, a writer/activist, will not abandon a life of some prosperity for the slums of some third-world country, determined to put enough important eyes on the plight of brown dirt farmers that, by the time she is 40, clean water is not a luxury for her, let alone her brown neighbors.
She will not get pregnant at 15 and decide to do anything amazing. She will not die in childbirth at 15 and inspire her child to do anything amazing.
Her name will not appear on any list with Forbes on it. She will not consult on local economic and political factors for a company seeking not to outsource to an area but actually improve an area where clean water is now not a luxury.
She died ... a week ago? Several weeks ago? See if you can figure it out.
I suggest that sincerely -- I don't know when she died. I don't know her name.
You know what I know.
That's what I say at work when some news has just broken and it's on the level of "person did thing," the very beginning of the newsgathering process, before we know if what happened is part of some larger trend, before we know what led to person doing thing, whatever.
You know what I know. A 13-year-old girl was assigned to marry a man ... forgive me, or perhaps sympathize with me, for being able to phrase that not more neutrally than that -- I can bullshit, but I can't LIE and say she married him because as the article makes pretty clear in subdued ways, these girls have about as much knowledge and understanding of everything that's going on as does your average towel. And you can't consent to do something you don't fully understand. (At least, you can't in this country, and for my money, you can't do so morally.)
Girls in active labor to whom nurses must explain the mechanics of human reproduction. "The nurses start by asking, 'Do you know what's happening?'" a Sanaa pediatrician told me. "'Do you understand that this is a baby that has been growing inside of you?'"
But a semantic argument here is perhaps not the most immediately useful angle.
I sometimes think about how fortunate we are to live in an age where we can feel such sorrow for people we don't know -- people we won't know.
Because of how much news we get, how much death we find out about as it is happening -- we watch videos of people dying, of their funerals, of them living their lives not knowing what would happen to them an hour or a day or a year later -- you might think we would just become numb to it all. And to an extent, we do become numb to it.
I work obituaries for my newspaper. The first week was nearly unbearable -- editing the obituaries of five, 10 people a day. Sixty years of life boiled down to a few paragraphs -- or just a few sentences. It was excruciating; I wanted to really focus on these people, to mourn them, but there was just not enough time because I had other things to do.
Three and a half years later, the obits are a list. People are pendings (short death notices), books (an obit more than 10 paragraphs), bricks (no paragraph marks -- I have to put them in) or novels (more than about a quarter of the page). The pictures require a keystroke process I could probably teach over the phone.
But a little boy accidentally shot and killed himself a few months ago, and any time his death comes up, ... that's not an obit. That's a little boy who died. We ran stories on his death. One of our reporters talked to his parents as they sat on his bed, his father holding and stroking a framed picture of their dead son.
If you can be proud of being able to feel that kind of loss amid a daily death toll, however separated from the situation, I am. Where some people see tears as a weakness, I see them as a strength. I have the strength to admit that something hurts.
Back in the day, I'm told, the situation was different. When the infant mortality rate was somewhere north of mind-boggling and people got "fevers" and died -- Shakespeare died of a fever, and that is all we know for sure -- you couldn't care that much about some girl dying impossibly far away.
Today, someone dies and we find out that day, sometimes. Hours or minutes later. At work, if an important government figure dies, I find out roughly five minutes after the Associated Press finds out.
For someone living even in 1930, before the newsreels of World War II, news came in the morning and maybe the afternoon on the radio or in the newspaper. Next day at minimum, unless you had the money for the afternoon edition, and that's in the developed world. On a dirt farm in Kansas? Their death news is confined to people in their town -- a child dying of lockjaw.
In 1830, far fewer places are getting nonlocal news, and deaths are more proportionally frequent -- you know only so many people, but so many of them are children dying young. Or they're adults who just don't wake up, or they're adults getting consumption and dying slowly and painfully at home. There is more death -- so you can't feel as much about it because if you do, that's all you feel.
And the farther back you go, the worse the human rights situation is. We mark the deaths of people like Medger Evers (47 years ago yesterday) and Malcolm X and Clara Luper. In 1830, if they are American, they are almost assuredly slaves. Forget crusading for the right to vote -- if they are working on civil rights, they are trying to get to Canada and freedom. That is what we are hoping for at that point -- not a rally on D.C. but the quietest, most boring trip possible to the great white north.
In 1930, and in 1830, and in 1730, we do not have the luxury of crying over this girl's death. We do not have the resources to find out. Who is reporting it? Child brides in Afghanistan? Who cares? Some teenage girl dying? Well, that's fine, but my cousin who lives down the block just broke his leg, and now who's going to help pay rent over there?
Or, hey. Let us say National Geographic covers it. They cover it as some exotic ritual in a faraway land. That is the perspective of the day, by and large, unless you are the Fawcett sisters covering the Boer War, in which case you see something horrible and say it's horrible. Back in the day, the lands of brown people are exciting, not excruciating, and the things that happen there are exotic, not eye-poppingly awful.
Our tears from afar have become a testament to our culture. We have the time to care about human rights situations half a globe away. Even as we have seen more violence, encountered more death and seen more to steel us against the things that hurt life, we feel.
And we are better for it.
In the days of slavery, the light of freedom and hope was starved as much as possible. You were on a goddamn plantation, and you were a slave, and that was basically it. This presents us with an object lesson on education: The earlier you teach someone that something is OK, the more that something actually becomes OK. (By this process do people form strong, unbreakable opinions about everything from the democratic process to how horrible watermelon is. Raise someone to be a Republican starting from when they can form words and breaking that bond is going to be pretty tough. Doable, but tough.)
The light -- that freedom was possible, that there was power in individuality, that they could find strength in faith -- was not just kept dark, it was legislatively supported darkness.
In the days when women were not formally educated in whatever land, or when they were not encouraged to think critically about anything bigger than if they had enough flour for bread, the darkness was enforced early -- again, so there would be fewer problems. The mayor was a man, the county judge was a man, the sheriff was a man, the general store was run by a man. (The women were the wives and the whores and the poor, single women with four children. Lesson: Men have power, and if you want power, marry a man. And if you don't find a man who wants you, you'll be degraded socially.)
Or ... sorry. I should say, in the places where women are still not formally educated, or where they are not encouraged to think critically about anything the men (a term I use loosely) in their lives don't wish them to think about too hard.
Like life beyond being uteruses with hair.
In the places where women are still seen as not even sex objects but as child-making factories, the light comes, it appears, when the man lights it for the girl once she is trapped for life.
But it could be worse, so thank God for that.
... or don't, actually. I've just received this memo from God:
Don't thank me for that shit, dude.
OK then. Moving right along.
We know it's going on.
People are fighting it.
Women are fighting it.
And they're fighting it with one of the best tools possible: education. (Would killing off every man in the area help more? And what about when other men heard about this new opportunity? Unless you have a system in place to remove the offending people and not only keep them out but remove their warped worldview from being considerable, ... )
They're reporting it. However many years ago, you don't know and I don't know and that reporter doesn't know what's happening, or it's framed differently.
Ignorance is bliss until the ignorance is ripped off -- not like a Band-Aid but like skin.
Your skin.
Ripped off your body.
That's how this feels -- for the girl, literally. For the reader, metaphorically.
Knowing about this hurts. But knowing means doing is possible.
Doing away with this system where being married at 5 is preferable to anything.
And it is preferable to some things, in the same way that being blinded in only one eye is preferable to being blinded in both.
But being blinded in neither ought to be an option, no?
And hey, how about introducing some positive options? Choosing from among the least bad thing is kind of sucky, I think. So it's nice that the people fighting this child bride epidemic are giving the girls options like hey, get the hell away from these nutso men and go learn something in a safe place. (I'd probably be teaching in one of those safe places if I were single, but I'm not interested in taking the wife to a place where she'd be seen as exactly who she's built herself up to be.)
We who are pushing for marriage equality here and elsewhere and we who are pushing to end the practice of child brides are pushing for the same thing:
Options.
Don't want to marry someone? Then don't.
Want to marry someone who wants you back? Then do.
The 13-year-old girl who does not want to marry anyone -- who wants to read more and know more and not have five children before she is 20 -- has that option here.
We need to make here bigger.
The 31-year-old woman who wants to marry a 41-year-old woman -- who wants to read alongside her wife and have five children with her before their bones start to creak too much -- has that options in some places.
We need to make those places be fruitful and multiply.
a light shined on darkened lives
eyes squint from power they dared not look at
hands cover faces so the light won't hurt
the right people get scared into making more darkness
into fighting the light
because squinting eyes grow stronger
and see the right people scared
scared tougher, but scared more desperate
clinging to what they know is wrong
what they all know is wrong
what they don't care is wrong
we are the people they were really worried about
we come to let people be
who
they
are
they know that light is power
but they can't put it out.
can't break it, can't take it, can't kill it, can't rape it, can't steal it, can't lie about it, can't torture it, can't unlight it
because once you've seen that light,
it fuels your heart to open
the eyes it lights to see
the school it straightens your legs to enter
for the book it reaches your arms out to grab
with the hands it opens
and the mind it teaches
and the soul it fills
with the words it helps you understand
until
you
can
light
your
own
way
Donate.
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