your mouths but it will be a sword this time, a real one, not his
obscene bragging, one clean cut, and there will be blood, the
w ay God likes. I didn’t want to see the children die and I was
tired o f God. Enough, I said to Him; enough. I didn’t want to
see the wom en die either, the girls who came after me, you get
old and you see them different, you see how sad their
obedience is, how pitiful; you see them whole and human,
how they could be; you see them chipped aw ay at, broken bit
by bit, slowed down, constrained; tamed; docile; bearing the
weight o f invisible chains; you see it is terrible that they obey
these men, love these men, serve these men, who, like their
God, ruin whatever they touch; don’t believe, I say, don’t
obey, don’t love, let him put the sword in your hand, little
sister, let Him put the sword in your hand; then see. Let him
bare his throat to you; then see. The day before it happened I
quieted down, I didn’t howl, I didn’t rant or rave, I didn’t
want them to lock me up, I wanted to stay out on the rock,
under the hot sun, the hot, white sun; m y companion, the
burning sun. I was an old woman, wild, tough, proud, strong,
illiterate, ah, yes, the people o f the Book, except for the
women and girls, God says it’s forbidden for us, the Book,
illiterate but I wanted to write it down today, quiet, in silence,
not to have to howl but to curl up and make the signs on the
page, to say this is what I know, this is what has happened
here, but I couldn’t write, or read; I was an old woman, tough,
proud, strong, fierce, quiet now as if dumb, a thick quiet, an
intense, disciplined quiet; I was an old woman, wild, tough,
proud, with square shoulders muscled from carrying, from
hard labor, sitting on a rock, a hard, barren rock, a terrible
rock; there was a wom an sitting on a rock, she was strong, she
was fierce, she was wild, she wasn’t afraid, she looked straight
ahead, not down like wom en now , she was dark and dirty,
maybe mad, maybe just old, near naked with rags covering
her, her hair was long and shining and dirty, a gleaming silver
under the hot, white sun; but wild is perhaps not the right
word because she was calm, upright, quiet, in intentional
solitude, her eyes were big and fearless and she faced the world
head-on not averting her eyes the w ay women do now; she
could see; she didn’t turn her eyes away. She was sitting on a
hard, barren rock under a hot, white sun, and then the sun
went down, got lower in the sky, lower and lower yet, a little
lower; the sun got lower and the light got paler, then duller;
the sun got low and she took a piece o f rock, a sharp piece o f
rock, and she cut her throat; I cut my throat. N o Romans; no
fascist Jew ish boys however splendid their thighs or pristine
their ideals; no. Mine was a righteous suicide; a political refusal
to sanction the current order; to say black was white. Theirs
was mass murder. A child can’t commit suicide. You have to
