Eater of Death

Each morning, between the plenary speeches and activists, there are talented performers that reinforce the message of saving the planet through their art. Saturday morning’s performance was the spoken word artist Shailja Patel who told the story of a woman in Afghanistan who lost her husband and six children at breakfast one morning to a US air strike. Her poem, “Eater of Death”, shook me and truly left me speechless.

She gave unbelievable descriptions of this poor mother who, after her family was ripped away from her, had to stay in an area set up by US troops for the survivors of the bombing. She was given packages that, like the bombs that had destroyed her family and her life earlier that week, were yellow and stamped with an American flag. She was forced to eat the food from those packages, as Patel described, to eat her children; the children that had grown inside of her, that she had named. The deaths of these children would not be recognized. They would not be remembered in the paper and no memorial would be constructed in their honor. Why? Because they were not American.

My description does not do her performance justice. As I listened to her words I felt the pain of that Afghani mother and the frustration of knowing that, in a world where economic power and bombs determine status, her children were seen as a disposable casualty in a greater war for democracy. Her children were less important than the American children. Patel exclaimed, through the mother’s mouth, “Have you no mothers, no children in America?”. Her words opened my eyes and made me ashamed to be associated with those that had dropped the bombs and destroyed so many lives. I wondered how people in America can wave their flags and exclaim their patriotism. How can they be proud to be American when it is associated with so much violence and destruction?

What I’ve realized is that we cannot focus only on the terrible things that have happened. Rather, we must join together to end the unjust destruction of Afghanistan and other countries and create a global community. Community has been a major motif of this conference because the environmental movement will not be successful unless it is a global effort. Climate change is going to affect every single living thing on this planet and it is largely the fault of major industrial nations, like the United States, that we have reached this pivotal point in the history of our planet. So the question remains, will we put aside our differences and forget the hatred or will we continue to drop bombs, destroying families and all chances at a global movement toward sustainable living?

Read Shailja Patel’s full poem here: http://shailja.com/work/eaterofdeath.html