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: Never In Our Names

To A Blind, Blind World

By blueness

An Iranian court has determined that a man who blinded a woman by pouring acid over her head should himself be blinded by the forced appplication to his eyes of five drops to each orb of the same chemical with which he blinded and disfigured his victim.

The victim, Ameneh Bahrami, has specifically sought such a punishment, rejecting the payment of "blood money" in favor of "eye for an eye" punishment, permitted under Iranian law.

Iranians who routinely decry such punishments as lashing, stoning, and amputation, have silently squirmed at the penalty sought by Bahrami. "It's hard," says Iranian journalist Asieh Amini, "not to get emotional over what has happened to her."  
Bahrami, today 31, was four years ago an amateur photographer and medical professional when she was attacked by Majid Movadhedi, a crazed "suitor" who determined that a bucketful of acid was the proper punishment for a woman who had refused his several demands to marry him.

Bahrami had earlier worried that Movadhedi's obsession might spur him to harm her, and so approached police. But Iranian law-enforcement officials had told her they could not act "before a crime ha[s] been committed."

On November 3, 2004, a crime was committed. Bahrami was walking through a Tehran park when someone tapped her on the shoulder. As she turned around, a burning liquid splashed onto her face.

"It felt like my head was stuck in a bowl of boiling water," she said. "I bent forward to allow the stuff to drip off my face, but the pain was intolerable."

Bahrami was taken to a hospital, where she was hosed down in the courtyard. Eventually she was transferred to a burn hospital; when sight-restoring efforts there failed, the Iranian government paid for her transfer to a clinic in Spain; there, too, they could not restore her sight. With the 2005 change in the government in Iran, the payments for her treatment stopped. Bahrami was evicted from her Barcelona apartment; a Spanish organization moved her into a homeless shelter. Finally, hopelessly blind, Bahrami returned to Iran, and there demanded that the Iranian court considering her attacker's case invoke qisas, "eye-for-an-eye" punishment  permitted under Islamic law.

"At an age at which I should be putting on a wedding dress, I am asking for someone's eyes to be dripped with acid," Bahrami said last month. "I am doing that because I don't want this to happen to any other women."

It would be nice to believe that when Bahrami's attacker has his eyes extinguished it will mean that no woman will ever again be assaulted by some madman splashing acid.

Problem is, "eye for an eye" has been enforced as a punishment for at least three millennia now, and there is simply no reason to believe that, as punishment, it will be any more effective now than it was in, say, 1001, BCE.

Which is round about when Yahweh--god, these days, of both Christians and Jews--was out and about commanding the yanking of eyes left and right, there in his commands set forth in Leviticus, that book inscribed back in the day when Yahweh daily screeched orders into the blistered earhole of Moses:

And he that killeth any man shall surely be put to death. And he that killeth a beast shall make it good; beast for beast. And if a man cause a blemish in his neighbour; as he hath done, so shall it be done to him; breach for breach, eye for eye, tooth for tooth: as he hath caused a blemish in a man, so shall it be done to him again.

Yowsah. And when, several centuries later, the Pauls of Islam set about scribbling the words they'd decided to put into their deceased prophet's mouth, these were among the words they nicked from the texts of the "People of the Book," and so ordered should govern the faithful of Islam as well, alpha and omega, forever and ever, amen. Fast-forward to today, where we have a "court" determining that some "court official" will, dutifully, serenely, coldly, justly, apply five drops of burning light-destroying acid to each of the two soon-to-be-dissolved orbs of the defendant.

Let's just pause here, for a moment, to consider whether any omnipresent omnipotent all-loving god would ever want to punish someone who'd put somebody's eyes out by putting that person's eyes out also. Or whether any god who would ever command or even sanction or allow such a punishment would not more properly be considered an anti-god, a demon, a slavering sadist.

A more serene consideration might go like this:  

The question is not: do we believe in God? but rather: does God believe in us? And the answer is: only an unbeliever could have created our image of God; and only a false God could be satisfied with it.

Here is a photograph of Bahrami. You look at that, and damn if among the first roiling thoughts that course through your disturbed brain is not, "fuck yeah her attacker should suffer--eye for an eye."

Problem is that, say, a year later, you'd look at a photograph of her attacker, once the sentence had been carried out, and there see him similarly tortured, scarred, blinded, abused, misused: you'd feel the same empathy you feel today for Bahrami.

So why not feel it for him now?

Yes, well, you could certainly say that I should butt out, because I have not had my face erased by acid, and so I have no right to determine what for that might be sufficient punishment.

You'd be right. I'm 52 years old, and have had pretty much an easy, regular ol' American life.

I guess the worst thing, in this sort of realm, that has ever happened to me, was when masked thieves with revolvers and baseball bats broke one midnight into my bedroom, and commanded me to duck me head under the blankets, 'less they split it open like a canteloupe.

I did so, and thereby ended, though in many-months slow-motion, my relationship with my then-lover, who couldn't quite convince herself that I had not emasculated myself, in failing to rise from the sheets to physically confront, Rambo-like, these miscreants.

Who were only there, after all, to steal our cocaine--for we were then cocaine dealers--which means we really deserved whatever we got, pretty much, eh?

Then there was my mother: burglars break into her house and steal all her meager working-class old-woman possessions; leave a pile of human shit, in a big steaming pile, in the middle of her kitchen floor.

Then there was my daughter: falling out of a loft, age 16, falling into permanent paralysis; a loft the builder of the home had explicitly been prohibited by the county from building.

Then there was my grandfather: shot twice in the head, his brains spluttering crazy fancy fandango patterns upon the wall; killed by thieves, who swaggered away with a grand total of $231.

Is the proper response:

--to somehow hunt down, twenty years later, my grandfather's killers, and then blow their brains out, splattering them and theirs against the walls of some low-rent motel?

--to, in "avenging" my broken daughter, shove the builder of my home out our loft, breaking her back and bones, sending her into the place where not even morphine can bring relief, shoving her into the eternal suffering of permanent paralysis?

--to identify the robbers of my mother, pull out and rummage through their drawers, and then shit like a fucking blank-brained animal all over their floors?

--to break into the home of some long-ago dope-fuck, there to wave a baseball bat over his hurting, hurtling, don't-remember head?

Nah. No thank you. Sorry. Ain't going there. Jesus wept, and so do I. I: I opt out.  

There is an opposite place from that of Ameneh Bahrami. It is the place where those of us who have not had our eyes erased with acid, are still unable to see.

There is a reason why the finest artists of the age have bestowed upon their works such titles as Finnegans Wake, Sleepers Awake, Eyes Wide Shut.

'Cause pretty much still sleepy newborn kittens, be we.

a lot of flowers in this world
are never seen

flowers and gardens
abandoned from view
cry for their love
like i do

The true, penultimate end of Stanley Kramer's 1959 filmic adaptation of Nevil Shute's novel On the Beach, finds an aging Australian admiral, and a female junior officer, grudgingly giving way to the debilitating effects of that radiation poisoning that will soon carry away all human life on earth.

Before they, forever, abandon their station, the admiral asks a question that has nagged him throughout the long twilight that is this film: why his young aide had not long ago abandoned her post, to spend the final days of the human race with one or more ardent lovers.

Her answer: "They never asked me."

The admiral considers. Nods ruefully. Carefully pours sherry. A glass for him; a glass for her. The glasses clink. Their eyes meet. The admiral pronounces, then, the epitaph for the film; for the entire human race:

"To a blind, blind world."

 

Full post as published by Never In Our Names on January 06, 2009 (boomark / email).