You’re famous (by association)

Posted by Allyson | April 2, 2007 | 10 Comments

Ok, so maybe not “famous,” since I’m not famous. But I was on NPR the other day, reading an essay I wrote as part of the Listener Commentary series. And since you know Segullah, and I know Segullah, you therefore know me. Kind of. And with that, here are a vicarious fifteen minutes of broadcast fame:

“There is a new photography exhibit on campus you need to see,” my husband says. He tells me this a month ago as I am banging around in the kitchen. One of the kids is cranking through violin practice, while another is shouting homework questions. The noise level peaks and I miss the details. Photo exhibit. Notre Dame Campus. Got it.

During the next month I sporadically remember there is something I need to see at the Snite Museum, but I am having trouble finding time to go. After a while the whole idea just drifts out of my mind.

Today, however, I notice the museum as I pass and remember the exhibit. I park and pull out the stroller, and head in jauntily. Down the hall, around the corner, I suddenly find myself staring at the most disturbingly beautiful photograph I have ever seen. It’s not an elaborate set-up, this picture, only a helmet perched on a stick (or is it a knife?) in the swampy fog of southeast Asia. But the starkness of the photograph strips all the lilt from my step, and I walk forward like I have entered a cathedral or a mosque, or a burial ground. The exhibit is titled Requiem, and is dedicated to one hundred thirty-five photojournalists who lost their lives in the French Indochina and Vietnam Wars. More than two hundred photographs line the walls; some of them the photographer’s last.

This is not a one-room event. The exhibit moves and builds from room to room, following the escalation of the wars: early Indochina, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia. The rooms are laid-out counter-clockwise, I notice: left turn to enter, circle the room, back through the middle, left turn into the next room. I am not sure which way I am supposed to circle, so I walk clockwise through the first room, counter-clockwise in the next. Both directions feel awkward. Pushing a baby in a stroller with a chattering preschooler at my side feels awkward. Being safe, in this room with intact walls, looking at shattered lives and landscapes, feels awkward. It is a long time since I have clung to the feeling of being safe, and a long time since I was so embarrassed at how much I take it for granted.

I have seen photographs of war before, but never up close and enlarged. These faces seem almost three-dimensional, almost alive. In the last room, dedicated to the expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia, there is a large photograph of a woman collapsed on the sidewalk with her mouth open in an agonizing wail. In her lap lies her daughter, maybe eight years old, cradled like an infant. The daughter is looking over her shoulder straight into the camera, with a supremely tranquil expression. Passers-by mill around the girl and her mother, as if headed to work or out on a walk, and as I approach I am distinctly confused about the woman’s grief. The pose reminds me of Michelangelo’s “PietÃ¡,” which should have prepared me for the caption. “Mother holding her dying child,” the description reads.

There is a tug on my shirt and I look down to find my three year-old daughter has skipped up behind me. “Why is that mother sad?” she asks. I don’t answer at first. I can’t even look at her. I feel like I am looking at her face in the picture, like I am the woman prostrate on the ground, and I don’t have an answer to give.

I have read many of the reasons people start wars, but I can’t think of one reason good enough to tell my daughter, or good enough to tell the woman in the photograph. My husband and I openly talk with our children about death, but I cannot even bring myself to tell my daughter the girl in the photograph is dying. I do not want her to ask me why. I tell her instead that the mother is sad because her daughter has been hurt. “She shouldn’t be,” she begins, as the baby starts screaming, and the rest of her sentence blurs. I think she has said “She shouldn’t be sad,” and I realize she is talking about the mother. In her mind, children get hurt all the time ”“ why should a parent be so upset? But even as I sort back over her words, I want her to have said, “She shouldn’t be hurt.” I am still looking at the girl.

Since 1945 there have been one hundred forty-nine major wars that have killed an estimated twenty-three million people. UNICEF estimates that in the last decade alone, more than two million children were killed, five million disabled, and another twelve million left homeless, as a result of war. They should never have been in a war in the first place.

The last wall I pass on my way out is covered with portrait after portrait of the photographers, some of them far older than me, others who look as young as my sons. When I entered the exhibit, I was struck by how confident and purpose-driven they seemed. But as I pass them now, I find myself looking around their faces for the mother, just out of range of the lens. She is cradling her forty-year old son, or her mid-twenties daughter, who within the next few days or years will be dead on the battlefield. And she is wailing.

Category: Liken the Journal

Comments

10 Responses to “You’re famous (by association)”

Emily M.
April 2nd, 2007 @ 3:58 pm

Wow. Very powerful. Thank you.

What is it about art that makes you need to write? I went to an exhibit a few weeks ago and was so irritated to discover that I had nothing to write with, and I needed to write to process everything I was seeing.
Julie P
April 2nd, 2007 @ 4:16 pm

That was a beautiful and emotional piece.
Justine
April 2nd, 2007 @ 9:46 pm

This is a powerful thought. I just finished reading Newsweek from last week(just in the nick of time for the next one), where they highlighted all these fallen soldier’s letters. Tough read. Photographs and written words are so interlinked, I agree Emily! I couldn’t take my eyes off the photos, and to read their words was wrenching.
Kathryn Soper
April 2nd, 2007 @ 10:20 pm

Wow. And wow again.

Can we download the broadcast somewhere?
Jennifer B.
April 2nd, 2007 @ 11:23 pm

Allyson–Fantastic piece! Very moving–Powerful and poignant. Thank you so much for sharing this. I’m with Kathy–I’d love to hear the broadcast.
Maralise
April 3rd, 2007 @ 8:03 am

The broadcast isn’t up yet ladies (on Allyson’s local NPR station)…I’ll post a link on the blog when it is.
Angie
April 3rd, 2007 @ 5:11 pm

This is this so powerful. Thank you.
CJane/Courtney K.
April 4th, 2007 @ 4:52 am

Thanks Allyson. I loved the comparison of PietÃ¡ and the victims of war.

Awesome essay.
j5t
April 4th, 2007 @ 8:42 am

This is very beautiful. I’ll be looking for it online.

(I feel famous because I knew you a few years ago. )
Carina
April 9th, 2007 @ 12:05 pm

This made me cry. I’ve often said that if mothers were in charge there would be no war. How could you look another mother in the face?