Tuesday, December 16, 2014

Rawya Charafeddine:Bitterness of war

    Afflicted mother… I could hear her voice shouting, yelling, and crying … I could see through her eyes the bodies of small children… I could smell death on the streets … she succeeded in sharing with me, and with all readers, her emotions, her tears, her pain and her fears… I suffered with her, I cried with her, I prayed with her and I felt her anger, anxiety and depression … although she refrained from mentioning how she discovered her girl’s death; I could imagine easily her terrible situation, and I could relive her memories… every lamentable memory she evoked could be a trial to bring back her daughter to life.
    In fact, I made a big effort to continue reading this article for many reasons:
    At first, instead of making the text gripping for the readers, the introduction, confusing and ambiguous, seems discouraging; this revolting feeling is intensified and reinforced by the very long sentences and the sophisticated and exaggerated style.
    Secondly, it wasn’t easy to me to read such  touching text putting the Lebanese war on the spot; this article, full of sad memories and bleeding images, reminded me of the horrible moments in my life .I could relive the war. All in this story made me suffer and every detail made me distressed ; the mother presented and described her only daughter “innocent child”; she also wrote their discourse ,and she mentioned the last time she saw her and the last air kiss she got from her… and at the end, she tore my heart by the death of that  child “broken like her toy” … the end was shocking and depressing because I could relive the past with the mother and imagine her situation; it’s so bitter .
     This synopsis resumes all the writer- mother’s life…we don’t need even to predict anything about her life after she lost her daughter because she gave us a clear idea about how she was spending her empty life “… I watch the news every day… and I strike my baby girl’s kitten…”;  this kitten seems helping her to bear her loss and her pain… Even Lebanon became a part of her new life… in this country, she buried her soul… So at the end, she couldn’t leave…
    But, I couldn’t stop myself from wondering if she was feeling guilty about what happened to her daughter “I promised to keep her safe, and I broke that promise”, “I am a murderer”!!?
    Also, this article could be a way to immortalize her pain, her daughter and Lebanon as a disheartened place and a vicious circle. Actually, from her own story, she wrote the story of a country, the story of every person living in Lebanon and especially the story of every mother living her situation. Indeed, she revealed a similar and analogous situation between her childhood and her daughter’s one, to say implicitly that the awful socio-political situation in Lebanon didn’t and doesn’t and will never change and that who lives in this despairing place will live the incessant war and instability.

    Thus, she tried to generalize her own experience to transmit a message of peace to her readers. Through this article ,she was trying to sensitize the readers by showing them the disaster, the violence and the misdeeds of the war. She wanted to tell all Lebanese people how terrible the  war is !!

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