CURRENT AFFAIRS: Long Time Passing: Mothers Speak About War and TerrorBy Sue Galleymore Pluto Press, 256pp. £16.99
ANWAR WAS coming home from visiting her family in another part of Baghdad one night in 2003. She was pregnant and sitting in the passenger seat beside her husband, with four children in the back seat. Two American Humvees appeared “out of nowhere”.
“Without provocation, they began randomly shooting. When my husband shouted, ‘Stop shooting, my family is in this car’, they started shooting at us. They shot for about 15 minutes. I was wounded in the stomach and the leg. My husband was shot eight times, and as I laid his head on my lap, I was covered in his blood. The soldiers continued shooting randomly into the neighbourhood and my husband told me to run and hide. I ran about 150m, then stopped to see what had happened to my family. People from my street found me unconscious behind a concrete barrier.
“I learned that my son was dead, shot through the head. My oldest daughter was dead, shot through the face. My youngest daughter was dead, shot in the head, the arm and the leg.”
The middle daughter, Abir, was still alive. An American soldier tapped her with his foot and, thinking she was dead, bent down and removed her gold earrings.
Susan Galleymore’s book gives a voice to this woman, as it does to many others. Which story is the most heartbreaking? What about the one about Lebanese woman Semadar Haran, who hid in a closet with her two-year-old during an Israeli raid? When the little girl started to cry her mother clamped her hand over her mouth so tightly she suffocated her.
Hard to keep typing. The mind runs on and thinks of the little girl’s body, still warm, but limp in her mother’s arms.
As a parent of young children, I feel a visceral outrage at the death of a child. It is this immediate empathy that Susan Galleymore is attempting to channel with this book (and the website www.motherspeak.org), as well as her work on Raising Sand Radio and as a GI Rights counsellor. She has come much closer to the agony and futility of losing a child in war than most Irish parents: her son went to Iraq with the US military (and returned).
South African-born, a graduate of kibbutz life in Israel, Galleymore was horrified but could not stop her son. What she did instead was follow him there, which was described by one US general on national television as “a politically motivated act that endangered the troops”.
She responded: “General, perhaps you have to be a mother to understand.”
This is really where the book falls down, however. While you can make some generalisations about mothers, you cannot make many, and certainly not as many as Galleymore does: “ . . . mothers are nurturing, the military is authoritarian; mothers encourage sensitivity, the military desensitises; mothers support uniqueness, the military demands conformity; mothers dialogue, the military pronounces . . . ”.
While most mothers feel a superhuman love for their children, they express it in different ways. Galleymore gives a voice to the mother of a man who died fighting for Hizbullah: “The mothers in America must understand that we believe they are stupid to send their sons to fight us, because we will not give up. We will fight as long as we have to, even if we all die, but their sons will die here too.”
It is good to read an Israeli woman talking about the tradition of mothers’ resistance going back to biblical times. But in real life few stand up to the military: “Most Israeli mothers cannot think cleanly about Israel’s situation because they are in it. Education here is so heavily biased toward the military that most mothers cannot say to themselves, ‘My husband is a murderer, my son is a murderer, and I have to do something about that’.”
In other words, they are like most other people. Galleymore is a passionate and brilliant anti-war campaigner, but she will have to look for allies in a more sophisticated way than by simply reaching out to mothers. That she is capable of this is clear when she rages eloquently about the destruction her son helped to wreak in Iraq: “A real war on terror would outlaw the arms industry, stop pushing weapons as free or low-cost components of foreign aid, valorise people over capital, insist upon open discussion of Arab grievances regarding Western powers invading and supporting the colonisation of their lands, and promote alternatives to the West’s geostrategic self-interest and fossil-fuel addiction.”
Victoria White is a freelance writer researching a book on motherhood in Ireland, to be published next year by Currach Press