Woman-Bomb

A monologue for a woman-bomb, a nameless politician, his bodyguards and mistress, God, a choir of angels, a worm, Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, twenty friends of mine, my mother and myself.

1

In the following cases death is a modus operandi. The definition states: “The suicide attack is a politically motivated violent attack perpetrated by a self-aware individual (or individuals) who actively and purposely causes his own death through blowing himself up along with the chosen target. The perpetrator’s ensured death is a precondition for the success of his mission”; and furthermore: “The aim of suicide terrorism is to cause devastating psychological damage, through which it inflicts profound fear and anxiety. Its goal is to produce negative psychic effects on the entire population, rather than just the victims of the actual attack.” Research shows that after the end of the Cold War the attacks are no longer justified by the obsolete scare of Marxist or Maoist teaching. Instead, new, ethno-nationalist ideologies, phantasms, vengeances, historical right, territorial right, heavenly right, NO RIGHT AT ALL, are being invoked; reasons pile up into senseless mounds of justification and mass burials. By early 2000, in 14 countries world-wide, there were a total of 271 suicide missions: LTTE 168, Hezbollah 52, Hamas 22, PKK 15, PIJ 8, Al Qaeda 2, EIJ, IG, BKI and GIA one each. One third of all suicides were women.

It’s 10:33. February. I’m reading my agent’s notice that a theatre has cancelled a production of my play “RibCage” since the text and the imminent war in the Middle East resonate in an undesirable way, through, I quote: “individual resistance to superior violence.” I’ll probably cry later in the day. Maybe I should start writing postcards: “Love, underneath my window wriggles Lago di Como, and above the snow-bound hilltops of the Alps glare so hard that you can’t bear to watch them. Mist rises slowly from the water, but the sun is pinned into everything. It’s so early and spring is here already. I’m writing THE THING. I’m alone. I miss you. Me.”

A couple of weeks after that letter, the war really begins. Regardless of my decisions, metaphors, and momentary defeats. I pull the curtains. Acid rain falls in my room, angels and grenades. Red-daubed boys without genitals lie scattered around like so much broken china. Hoards of civilians and soldiers linger from corner to corner. Leaving marks on the walls, piss-stained carpets, eaten tins of meat, and the exhausted old. Their exhaling groans roll feathers and shards around the ravaged floor. The aeroplanes fly over my desk, scanning my manuscripts, my skull, ribs, spine and limb bones, noting my body postures, the composition of the fluid in my cup and the razed misery of a war-torn scenery. In my head, a nuclear cloud bursts; then slowly, very slowly, with a barely audible cough, the dust of the bang settles and the outline of a city strewn with flowers and decorated with slogans appears.

An avenue. Traffic brought to a halt. The traffic-lights are off. Between the pavement and the road, the nylon “police-line” straps. People swarm between the straps and the buildings. In the gentle sway of the mass. Waiting for the motorcade. Patiently.

The plot is simple: a woman-suicide will blow herself up as the crowd hails some important, unnamed politician. The radius of the explosion will be eighteen metres.

My own sentences scare me sometimes. I imagine people reading the text that has not yet been written. I don’t want to create a heroine. I’m in convulsions, but she speaks:

tick-tack tick-tack tick-tack tick-tack this is my first and last bomb tick-tack tick-tack I’m a pensive face among the little flags fluttering in the arms of the town my eyes are glassy shining moist and bloodshot and my body is glassy shining and bloodshot though dry dry as if it were about to crack burst into smithereens . . . all of my fifty kilos of...