“How do our cultural frames for thinking the human set limits on the kinds of losses we can avow as loss? After all, if someone is lost, and that person is not someone, then what and where is the loss, and how does mourning take place? ”
“Maybe when we undergo what we do, something about who we are is revealed, something that delineates the ties we have to others, that shows us that these ties constitute what we are, ties or bonds that compose us. ”
Judith Butler Violence, Mourning, Politics
saman hassan hamid- was hit by shrapnel while walking with her baby metal balls and fragments designed to break up on impact resulting in a huge increase in surface area scattered into her brain hemispheres her soft ligaments armpit pupil patella breasts tender with milk and being chewed ovaries intestines spleen earlobe floating rib aorta flared nostril kidney bones heartbeat muscle marrow clavicle gluteus glandular blood type unknown the heart a muscle the size of a fist fatma six months old chubby slightly charred found wriggling in her arms change the information please in lieu of flowers change it rapidly and intersperse it with golf tournaments in lieu of flowers our fists pumping inside rib cages stuffed between the traffic reports and kids in my country who are fatter than ever this thursday said the front page of a paper thrown onto the porch
12 iraqi army recruits- loving brothers of space space and space beloved husbands of space were killed on february second by armed men on a road near kirkuk loving fathers of space and space and space according to reports the armed men stopped a convoy of iraqi army recruits in the village of zab near kirkuk forced them to lie facedown on the dirt road and shot them one by one devoted grandfathers devoted fathers-in-law of space
somewhere near a thousand shiite pilgrims- were trampled to death crushed against barricades drowned in the tigris thirty feet below wednesday when a procession across a baghdad bridge was engulfed in panic over rumors that a suicide bomber was at large family and friends are invited to wander about lifting sheets in search of their kin and upon finding them to shriek out loud in grief and pound their chests with their fists or else to collapse on the earth nearby family and friends are invited to become bare-chested and jump into the tigris to recover the bodies that are floating downstream families and friends are invited to form in large packs on the beaches as bodies float down river as children flounder in the muddy waters trying to reach dry land family and friends are invited to visit the two-lane 300-yard-long bridge that is littered in sandals lost in the pushing and panic family and friends are urged to pay homage to the barriers meant to keep sunni and shiite extremists out of each other’s neighborhoods at either end of the bridge