An emotional photographic tale
I recently glanced at a picture that was taken. I would love to meet the photographer one day and ask what they felt and what they did after the truth was told. It was a simple black and white picture of a mother, clothed in poverty standing at a relatively modern looking subway station in front of a stopped train holding a sleeping child. It was quite touching and my heart felt saddened and soft for this heart felt picture. A poor woman having to carry her very small child because perhaps she could not afford the luxuries of modern transport and so had to go by foot.
This was not the story. Underneath I read the investigative report. She was a poor woman indeed. Yet the child she was carrying was dead. She has been the victim of gang rape a few hours earlier and her child was murdered in the process. She had covered up her child with dignity yet had no way to return home so was in midst of traveling back to her village. The shame of rape only heightened by the loss of her child and the holding back of her tears for the sake of embarrassment or perhaps preserving the modicum of strength left in her to simply take her and her deceased child home.
What did this evoke in me? Initially solemn sadness of a tale of poverty coupled with the tenderness of a mother and child. A picture says a 1000words, but it does not paint the entire story. I was emotionally turned to a gut wrenching nausea and anger with the apparent violation and immediate anger and the need for justice against the perpetrators. It has taken me a long time to wrestle with this turbulence of emotional unrest. Yet these sort of atrocities happen daily through out the world yet is rarely publicized.
There is no easy soft way to go through emotional suffering. It must pass like waves of sea sickness. In the end my anger rested on the shores of understanding of the love of a mother and child and not in the fiery hatred of the violators of crimes. What was done, was done and the past cannot be undone. The queasiness will never go away, nor should it. The message is that human emotion in all its spectrums must be experienced and therefore known and it is in the unfolding we become who we were always meant to be, spiritual beings having a limited human experience.
