City of Graves

Thirty-four pictures of limbless human torsos and bodiless heads. This is what I discover in my inbox on a crisp Monday morning after Thanksgiving break, before I’ve even had time to take my first sip of coffee. They are spread out across a string of emails, the images comprised of too many megabytes to be encapsulated in a single missive. Each message bears the identical, understated subject line: quick question. What she wants to know is whether these images are appropriate for class consumption. It’s for her end-of-the-year PowerPoint presentation in our community college rhetoric class. She is to detail her position on an issue of local or national significance, keeping in mind the principles of logic we’ve discussed over the course of the semester.

This is my first semester back teaching after the birth of my son, who has yet to sleep through the night. Add to that the cross-country holiday travel to eat turkey and play football with my father, newly diagnosed with Stage IV cancer that has spread into the bone marrow, and I’m not feeling up to most tasks, let alone this one. I click quickly through each of the images, backtracking on several occasions when I realize I’ve skipped one, as if that one missing bloodied corpse was going to tip the balance on the great scale of propriety. Or, perhaps, because more than the grisliness of the images themselves, I am impressed by the sheer quantity of them, the cumulative effect somehow more impactful than a single anonymous image.

It’s hard to find information on my topic, the student writes, in the terse shorthand I’ve come to expect from electronic correspondence. Still, we both know that in this case it is true. She knows it because, until recently, she visited our border city of Reynosa on weekends. I know it from the papers, both what is printed, and what is not. Six journalists have been abducted in Reynosa over the past year. Two never reappeared. El Mañana, the Reynosa newspaper, has altogether stopped running stories about the Mexican civil war raging eight miles south of our campus. Our local newspaper, The Monitor, runs brief sidebars about exploding grenades, school evacuations, and mass graves of never-identified Central American immigrants, without a byline.

I found these on Facebook. What do you think?

Thinking, though, is not what I want to be doing. Not now. I want to be clicking, deleting, closing, forgetting. Appropriate? Please. No. No, No, No, No. Still, the problem of what to actually write. It’s clear, given the time she dedicated to uploading all thirty-four—thirty-four—that she wants to use them. She perhaps has even thought through some of the ethical and rhetorical considerations: Are these photos an effective hook, or does she risk alienating her audience? Will she be appealing to pathos, our sympathy going out to the families of the victims as we put ourselves in their place? Or will we just see them as what they appear to be: mutilated Ken dolls abandoned in an ethereal social media sandbox?

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my years of teaching, it’s that I am wise to assume that the student knows more than she lets on. The crystalline surface of a one-line e-mail masks more obscure profundities paddling below. Years ago, as a new instructor, I’d assumed that my students, whether children of poverty or of privilege, just had nothing to say. But years of conferences and revision workshops have taught me that the opposite is sometimes true. What they have to say is so important that words fail to be adequate.

In other words, I need to take her seriously. Which means that I need to come up with a decent reason to say no.

Are they real? My first instinct is no, a convenient cop-out, but in truth, it’s hard to say. I’m sure Photoshop could do an adequate job of sawing off some appendages, splattering splotches of blood here and there...