The Children of This Madness by Gemini Wahhaj

Author:Gemini Wahhaj
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: 7.13 Books
Published: 2023-09-05T20:58:53+00:00

31. Defense

Houston, May 2003

During the last week of the semester, there was an incident in one of the classes Beena taught. She had shared an article with her class from Z magazine, one of the online news sources to which Lenin had introduced her. This article criticized the war in Iraq. Beena was working with the students on reading comprehension, leading the class through the text paragraph by paragraph. Now she asked the students to analyze the argument by writing down the thesis of the article, the claim of each paragraph, and the evidence presented to support each claim.

A pretty young woman named Rose with long, straw-colored hair and hooded eyes sat in the front row. She put down her pen and bit her lips, staring at Beena through red eyes and furrowed brows.

“Is everything okay, Rose?”

Rose shook her head violently. She ran her painted nails through her hair, then gathered it up with a scrunchy and spat out, “These are lies! All lies!”

Beena looked at her in surprise. Rose’s face was contorted in an anguished expression.

“Sure. That’s possible,” Beena said slowly. “Those are the author’s opinions. We’re not reading the text as content. We are trying to analyze it as argument and engage with it. Perhaps we can respond to the text now. What are your thoughts, Rose?”

“I don’t want to share my thoughts!” Rose shouted. Tears streaked her cheeks.

Beena stiffened. Her heart was racing. Tears on young women students’ cheeks were frightening to all the student teachers. She ended the class ten minutes early. The students filed out slowly, but Rose stood with crossed arms, waiting. She was dressed in a beige peasant blouse and blue jeans, pretty and innocent.

When Beena began to gather her markers and textbook, Rose approached the teacher’s desk. She was crying openly now, wiping away her tears with both hands.

“My boyfriend is there,” she said. “He is eighteen. The sweetest boy you know. He and his friends are over there, giving their lives, and you say that this is an…unjust war!”

Just the past week, she said, hiccupping, she had received a letter from her boyfriend. In it, in shaky handwriting, he had written that he had held a gun to a young Iraqi boy’s face. The boy was perhaps his age. An insurgent. They had both been trembling. He had never killed anyone before in his life. She started to shout at Beena, accusing Beena of endangering her boyfriend’s life. Beena suggested that they walk to the English department office together.

The faculty supervisor Dr. Greta Bauer was busy in another meeting. They waited in front of her office, standing stiffly side by side. At last, Dr. Bauer opened the door and called them inside. Greta Bauer was Professor of British Romantic literature and one of the readers on Beena’s PhD defense committee. She was almost six feet tall and lithe, with long, straggly hair that she called hippie hair. Usually, she piled it into an untidy bun and stuck a twig in it, with a bunch of leaves sticking out from the knot.

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