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Suicide BombersNovember 09, 2005 Up to a point, I'm pretty good at imagining myself into different lives, different heads, different circumstances. What if? is the starting point: what if I'd been born in a different time, a different country, a different part of this country, a different class, a male body? Suicide bombers are beyond that point. With suicide bombers the what if?s are too many and too huge: my mind recoils from the mere exercise, the imaginary threads between me and them melt down with the effort like so many overloaded wires. If I could for a moment glimpse the mind of a suicide bomber from the inside, what if I got stuck there? What if I started babbling like someone who's seen the divine or the devil and can't shape the words to make anyone else understand? What if?s like that, if allowed to accumulate too long, turn into massive writer's block. So I can't -- quite -- leave the scary stuff alone. Cerberus is lying there, terrifying but tethered to a sturdy enough chain; I sneak forward, peer into his half-open eye, touch his paw with one finger, and then dance back. Nyah nyah, nyah nyah . . . The wisdom from on high -- well, OK, from President George W. Bush -- is that the 9/11 bombers were cowards. I disagree. Whatever else they were, they were not cowards. To cancel one's own future is an act of supreme bravery. It may also be stupid, short-sighted, desperate, and unethical, but it's definitely not cowardly. To dismiss them and their actions as cowardly is a way of short-circuiting the what if?s. They're cowards; that's all there is to it; I don't have to think about why anyone would do such a thing. Ditto "they're religious fanatics." They do it because they're religious fanatics: what more do you need to know? I just read about a man who needed to know more. He's Hany Abu-Assad, a Palestinian living in the Netherlands, and he made a movie about suicide bombers, called Paradise Now. Abu-Assad was brave enough to stare his assumptions in the face, and to prove them wrong. In an interview, he said, "I was first of all surprised during the research [for the film] that I found a lot of stories that are human stories. That I couldn't believe. How stupid I was to think that they are not human beings, or they are different from me and you." I've never attempted suicide, but in my teens and early twenties, I thought about it a lot. Suicide is the classic safety valve: If it gets too bad, I can always kill myself. Somewhere along the line I made a deal with myself: I'll hang in there till I'm 26, and if life still sucks, then I'll kill myself. Don't ask me "why 26?" because I don't have a clue, but when I was 26 I escaped my hometown for the last time, moved back to Washington, D.C., found the local women's community, and came out. (There's much to be said for deadlines.) Thus began a journey that's had plenty of ups and downs and dead-ends, but the unfolding scenery -- not to mention the scenarios -- has made me want to keep moving forward, to get to what's next. What if I didn't believe in what's next, or that what's probably next was worth reaching? Cerberus growls. I jump back.
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