Draw Your Weapons by Sarah Sentilles

Author:Sarah Sentilles
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2017-05-19T00:00:00+00:00

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I projected a photograph of an Iraqi girl splattered with her parents’ blood onto the screen at the front of the classroom. The girl is young—five years old—and there is blood in her hair, on her hands, on her dress. Her mouth wide open, she screams.

She’d been riding in a car with her family to take her brother to the hospital when American soldiers at a checkpoint opened fire, killing her mother and father. I didn’t yet know the girl’s name (Samar Hasan), but I wanted my students to look at her. To look at her gray dress patterned with flowers as red as the blood on her body, on the concrete, on the toe of the boot of the soldier standing next to her, who is holding a gun and shining a light in the dark.

The students’ desks faced the screen onto which all semester I’d projected image after image of other people’s pain. Men lying facedown in the dirt next to a bus, hands cuffed behind them, shot in the head. A body floating in the water after Hurricane Katrina. A man falling headfirst out of the towers. A line of dead bodies, each partially covered by a white sheet. A skeletal child curled up on the ground, a vulture waiting. The girl in the flowered dress.

A student raised her hand. But what are we supposed to do? she asked.

Through the classroom window, blue sky, sunlight, palm trees, birds-of-paradise, succulents growing out of the university’s tiled rooftops. The sound of someone cutting the lawn in the quadrangle just out of sight. The smell of pepper trees, eucalyptus, ocean.

I don’t know, I said.

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