On a Sunday morning in January, 2002, 27-year-old Wafa Idris, a volunteer ambulance medic who cared for the wounded, took her niece a container of fruit juice before going to Jerusalem, where she carried 22 pounds of explosives on her back. She detonated herself on a crowded downtown street, killing herself and two Israelis, while wounding over 100 others. Wafa was the first female suicide bomber in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She was a Martyr.
Martyr is a beautiful word. The way it flows from the tongue in one determined and frothy breath – martyr. “Constant sufferer” (1550). “Exaggerated desire for self-sacrifice” (1920). Adopted directly into Germanic languages from Greek (martyr), but pislarvattr (“torture-witness”) in Norse. A martyr is one who sacrifices his or her life for the sake of a principle, or to sustain a cause. Being a martyr is an identity, a way out of the daily squalor and emotional turmoil, most simply a way to feel some agency.
In images of war, women are casualties, widows fleeing combat, and victims of militant rapes, while men are the aggressors, the militant rapists, the ones fighting for a cause, fighting to prove a point. For male suicide bombers, their reasons and motivations are assumed to be clear and grounded in religious and/or political ideation, but analysts have a hard time explaining the phenomenon of militant females that challenge the typical expectations of women. Female suicide bombers challenge the notion that women are physically and emotionally weak and incapable of determining and defending the course of their lives. To explain this deviation from the typical female gender role, which suicide bombers like Wafa represent, journalists often search for an individualized psychological explanation to explain their actions. They claw through a woman’s history for any possible personal reason that explains how she could have been enticed into becoming a human weapon.
Western media theorized that Wafa was unhappy with her life because she was infertile and her husband had recently married another woman so he could become a father. Perhaps infertility made Wafa’s life unworthy to her. Perhaps she was a victim of her own grief.
But this is not how I imagine it.
It was fall when she felt the bloodshed finally starting to get to her. The two hottest months of the year had passed, leaving the sticky air of Palestinian turmoil stuck to her skin. Wafa found herself walking through the devastated streets of her neighborhood on a Friday night, unable to shake the image of an armless man she had tried to save earlier in the evening while volunteering as a medic for the Red Crescent Society’s emergency medical response. She always volunteered on Fridays because it was a peak time for riots after prayer.
On her last run, Wafa’s ambulance had picked up a man whose left arm had been blown off. It wasn’t just a finger, or a hand, but his entire arm. In the back of the dark and poorly stocked ambulance, Wafa pressed a towel of gauze to the gaping wound where his arm should have been. Covered in his own blood and screaming, he resisted Wafa’s effort to hold him down. Wafa tried to stop the bleeding, but blood continued to spurt out of his body, quickly soaking the towel and Wafa’s hands. She tried to apply more pressure and gauze to the wound with one hand, while pressing firm on his chest with the other, trying to keep him down on the cot.
His screams were deep and guttural, coming from an abysmal pain. Wafa couldn’t help but stop and think, a silly thought of course, that his pain came from something deeper than his missing arm. She thought for a moment that his voice carried the same pain that she felt. And even once she took her bloody hand away from his wound to grab her throat, thinking that the screams came from her voice, and that she was crying out for all the pain in the world.
The screams eventually stopped as Wafa’s efforts to control the bleeding failed and he drifted in and out of consciousness. Too pained to speak, Wafa said nothing, even though she wanted to plead for him to stay with her. By the time they got to the hospital, which wasn’t much of a hospital at all, Wafa had grown cold. It was like she had been the one drained of blood, even though she was covered in an ample supply of it, and her own blood still pumped through her veins. After they had carried the man into the hospital, Wafa snuck out around the side of the building and threw up in the weeds before walking home.
When Wafa got home, her husband was in a bad mood. He sat in the dark on their couch with his legs spread apart, one foot thumping impatiently and his arms crossed. He was always in a bad mood because he didn’t understand Wafa’s need to volunteer. He didn’t see why she was so wrapped up in the cause and the idea of helping people. “Where have you been?” He asked coldly, even though he already knew the answer.
“You know where I was. The same place I am every Friday,” Wafa responded, walking past him into the adjoining kitchen where she opened the refrigerator. She was in no mood for an argument, but her husband got off the couch and followed her into the kitchen where he stood towering over her from behind.
“I know where you should have been,” he barked.
Wafa rolled her eyes as she pushed aside a jar in the refrigerator, looking for something worth eating.
“You should have been here taking care of me,” he went on. “Instead of playing nurse and kissing tiny scrapes and bruises.”
Wafa turned around, her jaw gritted tight in frustration. “I wasn’t playing nurse!”
Her husband moved closer on her, backing her into the refrigerator. The cool light from inside illuminated her face in shadows, making her eyes look sunken and her jaw stronger than it really was. Her husband saw her as weak, too idealistic, and ridiculous, on a mission to save the world. He extended his arm and pushed his hand against the edge of the refrigerator door. “If you want to play nurse, you can start by taking care of my needs.”
Wafa ducked under his arm, escaping. “You’ve got two arms, take care of your own needs,” she said coldly and headed to bed.
I remember the year, the morning, the very moment my life as an anorexic and bulimic began. When I was 12 years old I saved enough money to order a weight loss plan called “The Final Solution” from an advertisement in the back of one of my Seventeen magazines. Reading Seventeen made me feel grown up, and when I sent $15 off in an envelope, I knew I was going to get a miracle in return. I waited for a magic weight loss cure by mail, something big, but I wasn’t sure what. Most of all I was waiting for some hope in a world where I was “too pretty to be fat.”
I learned that juice has calories earlier that year, and to my disappointment, that it could make me fat. Sometimes I used to drag the bathroom scale into my bedroom when no one was looking so I could stand on it while I ate cookies or cheese wrapped in bologna, or anything else that was bad. I wanted to know the damage. I wanted to see how much weight I would gain by eating this or that. But the scale didn’t move. What a disappointment. No concrete results, just another cookie wasted, another piece of lunchmeat I didn’t need to eat. That’s why I wanted to order the The Final Solution. If I could just lose weight, if I could just be skinny, then my mom wouldn’t hide food from me, my dad wouldn’t tell his friends how much I weighed, and I could drink as much soda pop as my grandma, as much as I wanted. I thought when I was thin, my family would leave me alone.
When the package containing The Final Solution finally arrived, it came in a small box. I picked it up off the porch one day after school before anyone else saw it and snuck it into my room, excited and eager to open it. But I knew I had to wait until no one else was around. I had to wait until there would be no interruptions. It was my secret. I knew this wasn’t the first package I’d ever gotten, but for some reason, I can’t remember any of the other ones or what they contained. This was the first thing I spent my money on, though, the first serious thing at least. I slid the box under my bed for later and went into the living room to be social. I had gotten a bit antisocial lately and my parents hated that. My dad was always coming into my room and he didn’t even knock, which was super annoying. This was part of the reason why I had to wait until later to open the box.
When I was finally alone in my room later that night, I stretched out across my mattress and leaned over the edge to grab the package from under my bed. I pulled it up slowly like it was fragile, breakable, magic. Since it was late and I was supposed to be sleeping, the lights were off and I had the blinds in my room open, so the illumination from the apartment building next door could shine in my room and offer enough light to explore my miracle. Once I straightened myself up in the bed, I held the box between my hands, excited, nervous, hopeful. I was overcome by an anxious feeling in my body. It was like the blood tried to leave my body, rushing down into my arms and legs, pooling at my finger tips and toes, looking for a way out of me. I wished fat would do that, but the world didn’t work that way. I always felt this way when I got anxious, but this wasn’t the bad kind of anxious, it was the good kind, the kind where I wanted to squeal with excitement. I told myself enough with the suspense, and I tore open the box like I’d torn the wrapping paper off a pair of lavender overalls my mom had bought me for Christmas the year before. But this was much more exciting. This was life changing, and the stupid overalls didn’t fit anyway. I dug through the box, but all I found at the bottom of it was a book.
To my disappointment, The Final Solution wasn’t even half the miracle I thought it would be. Instead, it was a book with a black and white picture of a girl, a little older than me, on the cover dressed only in her underwear. I held it up to my window and examined the inside of it, but I didn’t understand how a book was going to help me lose weight. I didn’t even like to read—probably because I wasn’t good at it and had to have extra help and tutoring after school. But I wanted to be skinny enough that I was willing to stay up half the night reading this book, hoping that the miracle was somewhere inside.
I searched all the pages and between every line. I saw black and white photographs (before and after pictures) of legs, how they used to be so fat that they touched, but didn’t anymore. I glanced at meal plans, instructions that were useless because my mother cooked my meals. And being the picky eater that I was, I didn’t like most of the things the book suggested – grapefruits and cottage cheese? Yuck! I found no miracles, and The Final Solution became just another book that was going to be left forgotten on my bookshelf, unless I wanted to look at some pictures of legs that didn’t touch and girls with concave stomachs. Oh how I wished I was one of those girls.
This was the moment that anorexia and bulimia were loaded in me, the moment when I realized that there were no miracles and no other options. But it wasn’t until a couple of years later that I made the conscious effort to become anorexic. It would be too simple to say that I woke up one morning and decided I wanted to have an eating disorder, but in a way, it was also that simple. I was fifteen when I made the choice. Surprisingly it wasn’t because I thought it would help me fulfill the desire I had to be thin and attractive, but instead it was about the fact that I had the desire. I thought about twelve year old me with that stupid book, and how I could still see that picture of that girl’s legs when I closed my eyes. My mother had always told me that she wanted me to lose weight, but she didn’t want me to develop an eating disorder. The image of thinness, the image of ideal, was etched into my mind, and I knew it shouldn’t be. So I made the choice to not eat because I wanted send a message; I was going to be anorexic to spite both my parents and the society that fostered the idea that thin equals beautiful and worthwhile. I thought if I died on the outside—starved myself, became scary skinny, nothing but bones—that everyone would finally see how much it hurts to feel fat and imperfect. I wanted to tell the world how much the push for thinness could really tear a person up inside. But I didn’t have the words, so I decided to sacrifice my body for the greater good. I didn’t want any other little girl to ever feel the way I did.
Wafa wouldn’t have told anyone about this because she wasn’t the kind of woman to talk, and she felt some things were best kept private, but she felt powerless. Not about her life, or her marriage, or her family, or even her role as a woman, but about the state of the world, the world she lived in. She hated the conflict with Israel; she hated the militancy of it all. She probably wouldn’t have used a word like hate, but that’s how she felt. She wanted her people to have their own state, she wanted them to be free, but the struggle had become too much. There was so much violence, and most of it went unacknowledged. All the death she had seen was overwhelming.
She remembered being a young girl, playing outside with her friends. She had chased a ball through some brush when she saw two Israeli soldiers gun down an innocent woman from behind, who had been rinsing her clothes in a stream. But no one cared about that. The world didn’t care about the Palestinians who were dying every day. Terrible, violent, painful deaths. No one cared that Palestinians had their land stolen from them. They were only fighting for the right to belong. No, the world viewed her people as the militant ones, the ones perpetuating violence, unwilling to compromise. Palestinians were the ones who killed innocents, not the innocents who were killed. But Wafa knew different; she saw Palestinian casualties every day. She was the one trying to save them, but usually failed. It infuriated her that no one cared about the deaths that she saw. That no one cared about the Palestinian suffering. She wished the world would see. If only the world would see, then maybe there would be less suffering.
It’s fall of my junior year in high school when the eating disorder starts to get to me. What started out as a juice fast, and a mission to prove a point to the world, has become overwhelming. I didn’t think it would take this long to starve to death, and I wish that I could just lie in bed every day and not eat. That would be perfect. But of course I can’t do that. I have to go to school, which means I can’t lie in bed all day, and my mother has decided that I’m losing too much weight, so she has been trying to make me eat lately. She’s also been really mad at me about everything, which isn’t helping at all. I think the only one who is actually enjoying this process is my best friend Jo-Jo, who has been spreading my secret around school, or at least she spilled it to a couple different people who asked her why I always look so pale.
I imagine that Jo-Jo smiles when anyone asks her about me because she likes the idea of being associated with losing weight and not eating. “Well,” she probably says, taking a long pause, drawing things out for suspense. “She never eats and she takes all kinds of diet pills.” Jo-Jo’s answer is met with “Wow!” and “That’s so cool,” and she smiles in satisfaction at these responses. I wish what Jo-Jo says was true and that I never ate. Life would be so much simpler if I never ate, but instead I have to count calories and make it look like I eat.
Last night I cooked dinner for my parents. I made smothered pork chops, macaroni and cheese, and salad. I was trying to be all nice and make some yummy food so my mom wouldn’t have to cook when she got home from work, but it turned into a big mess. As soon as I handed my parents their plates, which I had gone through the trouble of fixing, my mom looked at me all evil-like and accused me of not eating.
“So you’re not going to eat anything,” she said harshly.
It wasn’t a question, it was a statement. And that probably should have been my cue to disengage, but I fed her the lie I had been working on all afternoon. “I ate while I was cooking.” It wasn’t a complete lie. I had nibbled a bite of macaroni and cheese, but don’t even get me started on how big of a failure I am for that.
“No you didn’t,” she pronounced.
“Yes I did. I had mac and cheese.”
“That’s all?” She sounded disgusted. “You have to eat more than that.”
I might have lost it a little after this and maybe I raised my voice a little. “I told you, I already ate! I’m not hungry. What do you want, to make me eat when I’m not hungry?”
“Don’t yell at me!” My mom was yelling now. “You need to eat.”
“Fine,” I said and grabbed a plate of salad and stomped off to my room. I put the salad in a plastic bag and shoved it under my bed. I’ll throw it out on trash day, along with the other food, I’ve hidden. My mom was pretty mad for the rest of the night, even after I tried to be nice and make up with her. She even snapped at me when I offered to do the dishes as a peace offering.
The day after the man with the blown off arm, Wafa was in the ambulance again when her friend, and fellow volunteer, Habib, approached her.
“Wafa,” he said low and quiet, putting the emphasis on the ‘w’ in her name, like music.
She looked up from where she was doing an inventory of supplies.
“How would you like to do something to help your people?” Habib asked. He knew about Wafa’s frustration with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; they had discussed their concerns in the past.
“What do you think I’m doing now?” Wafa replied as she wrote down the number of bandages on board the ambulance. Volunteering as a medic was only Wafa’s most recent effort to make a difference with her life. As a teenager, during the first Palestinian uprising against the Israeli occupation, Wafa served on the Am'ari refugee camp's women's committee where she assisted in food distribution and helped prisoners’ families. Volunteering was her calling.
“No. I mean something amazing,” Habib responded.
Wafa laughed. “Like what? Kill a bunch of Israelis? Blow up the Israeli government? Put Palestine on the map?”
Habib was silent for a moment, as he studied her. He looked at her round eyes, the hair pulled back and clipped behind her ears, and her chapped lips still in a slight grin from laughing at the idea. After a brief moment of consideration, Habib continued, “Yes.”
Wafa’s lips lost their grin. “What are you talking about?” she asked, almost startled.
“Just think about it,” Habib said, backing off slightly.
“Think about what?” Wafa demanded.
“Just think about it,” Habib said again, crawling over a seat to return to the front of the ambulance.
Habib knew that Wafa would think about what he had suggested. He knew Wafa better than she knew herself. And the truth was that Wafa couldn’t stop thinking about what Habib had said. He had piqued her interest, but she wasn’t sure why. She wasn’t even sure what he had been talking about, but part of her wanted to find out more. She agreed to meet with Habib, so he could tell her more, but she was having second thoughts and didn’t know if she would really go.
Habib wanted to be secretive about it, and insisted that they meet outside of work. He arranged for them to meet at a back alley café that Wafa had never been to. It was on one of the routes that their ambulance sometimes took, so Wafa figured she wouldn’t have much trouble finding it, but it still seemed out of the way. On the date of their meeting, Wafa was still deciding whether or not to go, when her husband walked in from work. She had been avoiding him since their argument a few nights prior.
“I’m sorry about the other night,” Wafa’s husband said as soon as he saw her.
Wafa shrugged, unimpressed with his apology.
He squeezed in next to her on the couch where she was sitting. “I didn’t mean that what you are doing is unimportant,” he continued. “I just think that maybe you could get a real job.”
“Being a medic is a real job,” she informed him.
“No. It’s a volunteer job. You don’t get paid for it. And it’s starting to take over your life.”
“Is that what you’re worried about? Me getting a real job? What do you want me to do, waste my life serving food at some restaurant? Well I don’t want to waste my life. I want to make a difference with it.”
“That’s not what I meant,” he said putting his arm around her shoulder. “I just want you to be happy.”
“I am happy.”
“I’m glad. I also want us to be happy. I mean, what about kids? I thought we wanted to have kids.”
Wafa pulled away from him. “Do you know what’s going on around you? Look outside. I can’t in good conscience bring a kid into this world.”
“Listen to yourself, Wafa. This is exactly what I mean—volunteering is taking over your life. You are becoming obsessed with this shit.”
She got up from the couch. “I’ve got a meeting, can we talk about this later?”
“What kind of meeting?” he demanded.
“Just a meeting,” she reassured him. “I’ll be back later.”
Wafa grabbed her purse and walked out the door.
The day after the dinner argument with my mom, my dad wakes me up at 6am and I slowly struggle out of bed. I start by sticking one leg out from under my pink follower-print comforter where the cool morning air creeps up towards my thigh. I lie like this for a minute before I work up the motivation to stick the other leg out. I’ve only gotten to this point of getting out of bed, and I’m starting to drift back to sleep when my dad yells from outside my door that it’s 6:05am and he doesn’t hear my feet hitting the floor.
“I’m getting up,” I yell back as I roll my feet onto the floor and pull myself out of bed. I give myself my usual pep talk as I fumble around in the dark for clean clothes. Today is a new day, I tell myself. There will never be another day exactly like it. If it’s a bad day, it will be over soon enough. I really shouldn’t hate getting up this much, but I do. Living is such a chore. Sometimes breathing is a chore. Not to mention putting on my clothes. One foot in the right pants leg, one foot in the left, all while maintaining my balance, especially when I’m usually dizzy in the mornings.
After I get my clothes on, I head to the bathroom to brush my teeth. I figure I’m clean enough otherwise. After I finish brushing my teeth, I begin arranging my breakfast. I go to the kitchen and pour myself half a cup of red Gatorade, which I take back into my bedroom. I set the cup on my desk as I open a drawer to pull out a Ziploc bag containing three fourths of a chocolate nutrition bar. I take the bar out of the bag and break off another forth of the bar, then seal up the rest and put it back in my drawer for tomorrow.
Mornings aren’t so bad. I get to eat a little bit. I’ve found it tends to work out better if I do. At least I have a little energy to make it through the day. I also get to nap on the bus ride to school, or part of the way to school. I get off the bus early and spend 30 minutes on the swing set at Washington Park, alone with my Discman and earphones, then I walk the rest of the way to school. Usually it’s a 15 or 20 minute walk, depending on how fast I go. This is by far the best part of any day, then it starts to get bad with boring school and homework and my mom being in a bad mood when she gets home. I should be excited that this is the last day of school for the week, and tomorrow I plan to get ice cream since I’ve been good and saved up my calories all week, but I’m not looking forward to spending the rest of the weekend with my mom trying to force me to eat.
When Wafa arrived for the meeting, she found Habib sitting with another man that she didn’t recognize in the back corner of the café at a booth. Habib waved Wafa over when he noticed her standing awkwardly at the front of the café. Once she made her way back to the booth, Habib scooted over and Wafa sat next to him.
“Do you want something to drink?” he asked quickly.
Wafa shook her head, and then took note of her surroundings. She looked up at the light dangling over their heads above the booth. It was just a light bulb in a socket hanging from a cord, and a dirty bulb at that. Wafa was nervous; she didn’t know what she was getting herself into, and the decrepit mood lighting and dingy booth weren’t helping.
Habib proceeded to introduce Wafa to the man sitting across from them. “This is Wafa, the one I’ve been telling you about,” he said. “She is eager to obtain greatness.”
The man nodded while sizing Wafa up. He thought her eyes were a little too small, and her nose slightly crooked, but he figured she would do. He wanted someone pretty, someone the newspapers would love. The newspapers might not love her, but they would like her; she was pretty enough, and it’s not like there were women lined up, giving their left arms to blow themselves up. As he looked at her, Wafa timidly examined the man as well. He had light skin and oily, dark, curly hair, with moldy stubble covering his jaw. She wasn’t impressed, and wondered where Habib had met a man like this.
“Wafa works on the ambulance with me,” Habib informed the man, as if to reassure him that she was trustworthy.
The man nodded and took a sip from the cup in front of him, which smelled like beer. “She’ll have to stop that,” he informed Habib, referring to Wafa’s ambulance work. “She needs to devote herself to the cause. And you two should not be seen associating.”
Forgetting her nerves, Wafa raised her voice, “Excuse me? I will not give up volunteering on the ambulance!”
Feeling a tension about to grow, Habib jumped in to remedy the situation. “It might look suspicious if she suddenly stopped volunteering,” he stammered. “So maybe she should continue working.”
“Fine, she can work,” the man said, brushing the issue aside. “But different shifts. You two must work different shifts. No associating.”
Habib nodded in understanding while Wafa, still riled up and getting tired of being talked around rather than talked to, raised a brow at the man.
He liked the fire in her eyes, and thought that she might work out better than he originally imagined. “Are you sure you’re ready for this?” he asked Wafa.
“Exactly what is this?” Wafa asked in response.
The man took another sip from his cup and smiled. “We’re going to give you a bomb, and you’re going to strap it to yourself, and then KA-BLOO-EY!”
“KA-BLOO-EY?” Wafa raised her brow at him again.
He laughed, “Blow yourself up and the one hundred Israelis next to you. You’ll be in all the papers. On TV.” He paused to admire the ingenious of it all, and then continued, “A female suicide bomber, you will bring the Palestinian cause to the world.”
What the man said made sense. No one paid attention to male suicide bombers other than to use them as proof demonstrating that Palestinians were the militant ones, the cause of all the conflict with Israel. But the world would look at a female suicide bomber differently. For a woman to detonate herself there had to be some greater reason besides militancy, or a violent nature. A female suicide bomber would garner attention, make people think and reevaluate their opinions on the conflict. Maybe a female suicide bomber really could bring the Palestinian cause to the world.
Wafa nodded. For the first time in her life, she felt a warm knot of hope starting to form in her chest, and it felt good. She was ready.
Sometimes I get irritable when I don’t eat. And angry. And depressed. And sometimes I snap, especially when it involves food. Today I had a bit of a meltdown. Let me start by saying that I was really good and I even got away with not eating two days this week. I saved almost all of my allotted calories (which isn’t many) for the week just so I could have ice cream today. Yes, even girls on anorexic missions eat ice cream sometimes. My mom was supposed to take me to the Baskin Robbins near my house this afternoon, but she went out with some friends and said she was too tired when she got home.
It was dumb, but I might have freaked out just a little bit when I found out that I wasn’t going to get the ice cream cone I wanted so badly. I went to my room, slammed the door and lay face down on my bed. I just got so frustrated and sad. Before I knew it, irritation bubbled up inside of me, turned to sadness, then overflowed from my body in a soup of hot tears. I cried heaving tears until my nose started bleeding. I let the blood run down my nose and lips and into my mouth that was gasping for breath for a minute before I stopped crying. I’ve been getting a lot of nose bleeds lately, especially when I cry. Or maybe I’ve just been crying more, or harder, lately. Sometimes I just let the tears and blood run until it feels like my body can’t give up anything more, and then I gently stop crying and shove a cotton ball up my nostril to stop the bleeding. But tonight, I headed to the bathroom and tried to clean myself up quickly. I blew my nose hard to try to get most of the bloody mucous out, and then I washed my face with cold water before sticking a cotton ball up my nose and pinching it shut. Within a minute, I watched in the mirror as blood escaped my nose and ran down my face. I stuffed more cotton up my nose and pinched it harder. It took 10 minutes for the bleeding to finally stop.
I shouldn’t have been so upset about not getting ice cream. I don’t need ice cream. I don’t deserve ice cream. I mean, my mom tries to pretend like she wants me to eat, but she doesn’t want me to eat ice cream. I’m too fat to deserve ice cream. I obviously haven’t proven my point yet. Starting Monday, I’m never going to eat anything else again!
After her meeting with Habib and the unnamed man, Wafa stopped volunteering on Fridays, so she would not be seen associating with Habib. She decided to pick up extra shifts throughout the week and on weekends, and quickly found herself spending more and more time on the ambulance, giving as much as she could, before her final act of giving. Of course, her husband, who knew nothing of her larger plans for martyrdom, was less than pleased with Wafa’s intensified devotion to the cause. He did his best to put an end to her volunteering.
“I forbid you to spend every minute of your day volunteering for a lost cause,” he announced at the dinner table one evening.
“You can’t forbid me from doing anything,” Wafa snapped.
Her husband felt the rage building between the temples of his forehead and he tried to calm himself. He took a deep breath, and forced a smile towards his wife. “If you love me, you will stop volunteering.”
“But I don’t love you,” Wafa said bluntly.
“This is exactly what I’ve been talking about, volunteering is making you crazy and unreasonable,” he hollered and slammed his fist on the table.
In that split second, Wafa realized that she had truly lost all love for her husband. She wondered if she had ever loved him at all. “No. I really don’t love you,” she said.
The rage rose in his body and he wanted to smack Wafa across the face. “That’s it. You’re done volunteering!”
“No,” Wafa said raising her voice. “I’m done with you.”
Her husband jumped up from the table. He threw his dinner plate to the floor, and then knocked his chair over before calming himself slightly. “You know what? I’m done with you and your crazy obsessions. We’re over.”
He grabbed his coat and his car keys and walked out of the apartment, slamming the door behind him. A few days later he came home, collected all of his belongings, and left a note on the kitchen counter that read:
Wafa,
Keep your volunteer work. I found someone else.
Wafa rolled her eyes at the note and the fact that her husband always had to think he was getting the final say, but she was glad that she could finally devote her full attention to training for the mission at hand.
The first day of my fast is the hardest because it’s the easiest point to turn back. I tell myself to be strong and that I just need to make it through today. By the beginning of my last period chemistry class, I am hot and clammy despite being lightly brushed with dampness from walking across the quad in the rain. It has been cold and dreary all day, but the rain just started, so I was caught off guard without an umbrella. I know the clamminess is a result of not eating, rather than the first symptom of a cold, so I sit in my assigned seat at the end of the table closest to the door, and try to shake the fevered feeling from my body and prepare for another day of fuzzy chemistry.
My chemistry teacher, Mr. Ferriter, is an import from Roundup, Montana, which seems to be a place of transit as he starts with his weight planted firmly on his left leg when he says it, but ends with it planted on his right leg as he emphasizes the “-tana” with a wink that aims for rugged, but misses. Instead of teaching chemistry, Mr. Ferriter likes to talk about Montana. Most of the students in my class like to listen to him tell stories because as long as he is talking about Montana we don’t have to learn the periodic table.
Personally, I think he likes to talk about Montana because he doesn’t know anything about chemistry. Whenever anyone asks a question related to chemistry, he stands still and thinks for about the answer for a while before responding that we don’t need to know that because it won’t be on the test. But I’m not really complaining.
When Mr. Ferriter enters the classroom today, he’s wearing a white lab coat, goggles on top of his head and an excited grin on his face. He announces that we will be doing an experiment and instructs us to pair up and grab Bunsen burners, test tubes and safety goggles while he writes instructions for the experiment on the board. I end up working with Megan, who is a soccer player, pretty and popular, but nice enough and funny. After Mr. Ferriter finishes writing the instructions on the board, he goes around the room handing out the rest of the supplies we will need for the experiment. I watch as he places two jars of barium chloride, a white, powdery chemical, in the middle of our table for Megan and me to share with the other two pairs at our table.
My heart speeds up slightly when I see the barium chloride. I’ve been researching poison at home on the internet, usually when I’m sad and frustrated at the prospect of not eating for the rest of my life. The idea of poison is really just a backup plan, in case I can’t fulfill my starving to death plan to completion. I think killing myself with poison would still prove a point to the world, but I don’t entertain the idea too seriously. I ordered a couple of hypodermic needles from a pet catalogue, but I haven’t invested in poison yet. In my research, I recently came across barium chloride, so I can’t help but think it’s a sign when Mr. Ferriter puts it down in front of me.
Trying not to seem too excited about the chemical, I focus my attention towards Megan and the experiment at hand. We snap on our goggles, hook our Bunsen burner up to the gas, and begin the experiment. Once we have a beaker of boiling water, we set one of the test tubes inside of it and then slowly add the barium chloride to another substance inside. The test tube is supposed to turn colors, but ours fizzles, starts bubbling over, and explodes sending tiny pieces of glass flying across our table instead. Megan lets out a girly scream and we jump back from the table, as Mr. Ferriter notices our explosion.
Mr. Ferriter is clearly puzzled by our explosion. He spends at least 5 minutes scratching his head when we explain that we followed the instructions written on the board exactly. He finally suggests that perhaps we put a pinch too much barium chloride in the test tube. His experiment wasn’t foolproof. When he leaves, Megan and I start giggling. Somehow blowing up a test tube makes me feel happy and alive.
After the experiment is over and everyone has returned their supplies to the carts at the front of the room, Mr. Ferriter begins collecting the jars of barium chloride. He starts at the other end of the room. My heart begins pounding; there is a jar right in front of me and I can’t help but feel that this is a sign. I casually look around the room. No one is looking at me. I know this is my chance to take the barium chloride. Mr. Ferriter is two tables away when I make the split-second decision and grab the jar off the table and drop it in my backpack between my history book and pencil case. As Mr. Ferriter approaches my table, my heart is beating out of my chest. I try to act normal, but my leg is shaking and I’m sure I’m going to get caught. He picks up the two jars of barium chloride, then pauses, looking for the third. A look of confusion crosses his face briefly, but he turns and walks away from the table with only two jars. He does a quick recount of the chemicals at the front of the classroom, then shrugs. I guess he figures that he had one less jar than he thought.
The bell rings and I leave the classroom as fast as I can. When I get home, I hide the jar of chemicals at the bottom of my underwear drawer in case I decide I need to use it.
For three weeks, Wafa met in secret with the ones orchestrating the bombing. She never learned their names, where they came from, or even their motivations. The last time she spoke to Habib, before they stopped associating at work, he told her never to ask questions; it was dangerous to ask questions. So she assumed that everyone was involved for the same reasons she was: because they were sick of the violence and bloodshed and wanted to send a message that it had to stop. Despite not asking questions, which was sometimes hard for her, Wafa learned the details of what she was supposed to do.
The bombing was planned for January 20th. Wafa would be taken to Jerusalem where she was to detonate herself on the crowded streets. She was to make sure that she was in a well-populated location with plenty of Israelis. If she even thought that someone suspected her, which was unlikely because she was female, she was to detonate herself right away. If she could not detonate herself and was caught, she was to say that she was Layla Al Massri from Rafah and that she was working alone. Once she got the explosives on there was no turning back, but Wafa was ready.
After seven days of not eating, I’m too weak to go to school, so I pretend to be sick and convince my parents to let me stay home. I feel too weak to do much of anything, and I try to spend my day lying in the bath tub. But after my second bath, I find that getting in and out of the tub is too much of a struggle, so I make myself content to lie in bed. I can’t believe I’ve gotten away with not eating for 7 days. I feel terrible and dead, but I lost 20 pounds, so maybe it’s worth it. I know it’s mostly water weight, but I don’t care. Any weight loss is good weight loss.
I watch TV—daytime talk shows mostly, Sally Jessy Raphael, Maury Povich, Jenny Jones—as I lie in bed. During commercial breaks I force myself to do sit ups in bed until I get dizzy and decide to take a break. Somewhere between Maury Povich and Jenny Jones I fall asleep and dream of drinking a glass of fresh squeezed orange juice. The dream is so vivid that I can feel the orange juice in my stomach, and I wake up from my dream in a panic, terrified that I ruined my fast. I look around for an empty cup, any sign that I drank orange juice. I see none. I move my tongue around mouth; there is no juice residue. I’m relieved and I start crying. And then my nose starts bleeding, but I’m too tired to get up, so I let the blood run down my face and pool on my pillow.
The morning of January 20th came faster than Wafa had planned. She awoke with knots in her stomach and a nauseous feeling in her chest. She went about her morning as usual, showered and washed her hair, and she wondered if she was doing the right thing. She was so distracted by her sudden uncertainty that she merely swallowed breakfast rather than eating it. She barely realized that she’d even consumed food when she put her bowl in the sink and rinsed it out. She considered aborting the plan and hiding out in her apartment forever. What was the worst that could happen if she didn’t show up? With second thoughts chewing her up, Wafa decided that she needed to see her family one last time, even though she wasn’t supposed to. Just in case she decided to go through with the plan, Wafa took anything out of her purse that could identify her before she left her apartment for her sister’s house.
When Wafa got to her sister’s house, her niece opened the door and threw her arms around her. Wafa leaned down and kissed the young girl on the forehead. She had stopped on the way and bought a carton of juice, which she handed to her niece once their embrace was over. The niece reached out her hands, gratefully taking the juice from her aunt. She opened the carton quickly and poured it in her mouth.
“Mom’s at the market, and dad is in the back yard practicing with his shot gun,” the niece informed Wafa after a few swallows of the juice. “But you can come in.”
Wafa smiled as she looked at her niece for a short time before responding. She studied her big eyes and their youthful innocence, the sweet smile and joy on her face, and the juice dripping from the corner of her lips. It was then that Wafa knew that she had to go through with the bombing so her niece, and the rest of her generation, could have a future free from turmoil and war.
“Just tell your mom I stopped by.” Wafa leaned down again and hugged the girl goodbye. “I love you.”
“Love you too,” the niece responded. “See you later, ‘k?”
Wafa waved as she walked away from the house and headed to the café where she had met with Habib and the unnamed man. She would be picked up there and driven to Jerusalem.
On the ninth day of my fast, I can barely breathe. I stupidly convince myself to eat and I have a cheese sandwich. I feel better as soon as it touches my mouth, at least physically, but emotionally I’m exhausted and angry and depressed and I just want to punch a wall or stick a knife in my stomach. I don’t think I can take it. I don’t think I can do it anymore. I’m just so unhappy. The whole eating disorder, the not eating to prove a point to the world, has spiraled and control is slowly slipping out of my grasp. As the cheese sandwich digests, I make an impulse decision to inject myself with barium chloride.
I take a pen and my prettiest pieces of stationary paper and write two notes, one to my parents that says it isn’t their fault and one to the world that says: Look what you can do to a person. Look what pain you can cause. I’m dying so no one else has to feel the pain of not measuring up to standards of beauty. I’m dying so no one else wants to die because they aren’t thin or pretty enough. I put the notes under my pillow where they will be found.
I don’t know what I really think is going to happen. Maybe what I always wanted to happen, that my tragic death from self-starvation, from suicide, will be noticed—in the newspapers, on TV, maybe even in an article at the back of Seventeen magazine—and people will start to rethink all the pressure society puts on women and girls to be thin and fit into the pre-prescribed mold of beauty. Somehow my death will make a difference and be a catalyst for change in the world.
I dig the jar of barium chloride out from my underwear drawer. I set a small cup of water on my desk and add the chemical. I’m not sure how much I should add, but a teaspoon seems good, and I stir it around in the water until it is mostly dissolved. I fill the syringe with the mixture, leaving the cup more than half full. I suppose I will have some of the mixture left over in case this doesn’t work. I look at the needle in my hand, as I move it towards the vein that is visible in my left wrist. I hope this is painless. I hope I only feel a small needle prick.
I push the needle into my wrist.
Wafa walked down the crowded streets of Jerusalem with 22 pounds of explosives strapped to her back. Her reason for doing this—her niece, that she would know freedom—was fresh in her mind. Wafa was no longer afraid of her destination, just slightly afraid of the pain that would take her there. She spoke quietly to herself, looking down at the ground as she walked. “It will be over before you know it. This is for the greater good. It will be over before you know it. This is for the greater good. You won’t feel a thing. This is for the greater good.”
Quietly, Wafa pulled the cord hanging from her backpack and detonated herself.
The pain is incredible. It flows all the way up her arm to her spine, and all the way down her spine to her arm. The pain burns like fire across her skin. Her arm is on fire. Her whole body is on fire. The chemical reactions, the atoms igniting in her blood, cause a buzzing in her head. She sees flashes of light in front of her and the world begins to spin. She falls slowly until she hits the ground. It feels like she is exploding into a million pieces.
Martyr is a beautiful word. The way it flows from the tongue in one determined and frothy breath – martyr. “Constant sufferer” (1550). “Exaggerated desire for self-sacrifice” (1920). Adopted directly into Germanic languages from Greek (martyr), but pislarvattr (“torture-witness”) in Norse. A martyr is one who sacrifices his or her life for the sake of a principle, or to sustain a cause. Being a martyr is an identity, a way out of the daily squalor and emotional turmoil, most simply a way to feel some agency.
In images of war, women are casualties, widows fleeing combat, and victims of militant rapes, while men are the aggressors, the militant rapists, the ones fighting for a cause, fighting to prove a point. For male suicide bombers, their reasons and motivations are assumed to be clear and grounded in religious and/or political ideation, but analysts have a hard time explaining the phenomenon of militant females that challenge the typical expectations of women. Female suicide bombers challenge the notion that women are physically and emotionally weak and incapable of determining and defending the course of their lives. To explain this deviation from the typical female gender role, which suicide bombers like Wafa represent, journalists often search for an individualized psychological explanation to explain their actions. They claw through a woman’s history for any possible personal reason that explains how she could have been enticed into becoming a human weapon.
Western media theorized that Wafa was unhappy with her life because she was infertile and her husband had recently married another woman so he could become a father. Perhaps infertility made Wafa’s life unworthy to her. Perhaps she was a victim of her own grief.
But this is not how I imagine it.
It was fall when she felt the bloodshed finally starting to get to her. The two hottest months of the year had passed, leaving the sticky air of Palestinian turmoil stuck to her skin. Wafa found herself walking through the devastated streets of her neighborhood on a Friday night, unable to shake the image of an armless man she had tried to save earlier in the evening while volunteering as a medic for the Red Crescent Society’s emergency medical response. She always volunteered on Fridays because it was a peak time for riots after prayer.
On her last run, Wafa’s ambulance had picked up a man whose left arm had been blown off. It wasn’t just a finger, or a hand, but his entire arm. In the back of the dark and poorly stocked ambulance, Wafa pressed a towel of gauze to the gaping wound where his arm should have been. Covered in his own blood and screaming, he resisted Wafa’s effort to hold him down. Wafa tried to stop the bleeding, but blood continued to spurt out of his body, quickly soaking the towel and Wafa’s hands. She tried to apply more pressure and gauze to the wound with one hand, while pressing firm on his chest with the other, trying to keep him down on the cot.
His screams were deep and guttural, coming from an abysmal pain. Wafa couldn’t help but stop and think, a silly thought of course, that his pain came from something deeper than his missing arm. She thought for a moment that his voice carried the same pain that she felt. And even once she took her bloody hand away from his wound to grab her throat, thinking that the screams came from her voice, and that she was crying out for all the pain in the world.
The screams eventually stopped as Wafa’s efforts to control the bleeding failed and he drifted in and out of consciousness. Too pained to speak, Wafa said nothing, even though she wanted to plead for him to stay with her. By the time they got to the hospital, which wasn’t much of a hospital at all, Wafa had grown cold. It was like she had been the one drained of blood, even though she was covered in an ample supply of it, and her own blood still pumped through her veins. After they had carried the man into the hospital, Wafa snuck out around the side of the building and threw up in the weeds before walking home.
When Wafa got home, her husband was in a bad mood. He sat in the dark on their couch with his legs spread apart, one foot thumping impatiently and his arms crossed. He was always in a bad mood because he didn’t understand Wafa’s need to volunteer. He didn’t see why she was so wrapped up in the cause and the idea of helping people. “Where have you been?” He asked coldly, even though he already knew the answer.
“You know where I was. The same place I am every Friday,” Wafa responded, walking past him into the adjoining kitchen where she opened the refrigerator. She was in no mood for an argument, but her husband got off the couch and followed her into the kitchen where he stood towering over her from behind.
“I know where you should have been,” he barked.
Wafa rolled her eyes as she pushed aside a jar in the refrigerator, looking for something worth eating.
“You should have been here taking care of me,” he went on. “Instead of playing nurse and kissing tiny scrapes and bruises.”
Wafa turned around, her jaw gritted tight in frustration. “I wasn’t playing nurse!”
Her husband moved closer on her, backing her into the refrigerator. The cool light from inside illuminated her face in shadows, making her eyes look sunken and her jaw stronger than it really was. Her husband saw her as weak, too idealistic, and ridiculous, on a mission to save the world. He extended his arm and pushed his hand against the edge of the refrigerator door. “If you want to play nurse, you can start by taking care of my needs.”
Wafa ducked under his arm, escaping. “You’ve got two arms, take care of your own needs,” she said coldly and headed to bed.
I remember the year, the morning, the very moment my life as an anorexic and bulimic began. When I was 12 years old I saved enough money to order a weight loss plan called “The Final Solution” from an advertisement in the back of one of my Seventeen magazines. Reading Seventeen made me feel grown up, and when I sent $15 off in an envelope, I knew I was going to get a miracle in return. I waited for a magic weight loss cure by mail, something big, but I wasn’t sure what. Most of all I was waiting for some hope in a world where I was “too pretty to be fat.”
I learned that juice has calories earlier that year, and to my disappointment, that it could make me fat. Sometimes I used to drag the bathroom scale into my bedroom when no one was looking so I could stand on it while I ate cookies or cheese wrapped in bologna, or anything else that was bad. I wanted to know the damage. I wanted to see how much weight I would gain by eating this or that. But the scale didn’t move. What a disappointment. No concrete results, just another cookie wasted, another piece of lunchmeat I didn’t need to eat. That’s why I wanted to order the The Final Solution. If I could just lose weight, if I could just be skinny, then my mom wouldn’t hide food from me, my dad wouldn’t tell his friends how much I weighed, and I could drink as much soda pop as my grandma, as much as I wanted. I thought when I was thin, my family would leave me alone.
When the package containing The Final Solution finally arrived, it came in a small box. I picked it up off the porch one day after school before anyone else saw it and snuck it into my room, excited and eager to open it. But I knew I had to wait until no one else was around. I had to wait until there would be no interruptions. It was my secret. I knew this wasn’t the first package I’d ever gotten, but for some reason, I can’t remember any of the other ones or what they contained. This was the first thing I spent my money on, though, the first serious thing at least. I slid the box under my bed for later and went into the living room to be social. I had gotten a bit antisocial lately and my parents hated that. My dad was always coming into my room and he didn’t even knock, which was super annoying. This was part of the reason why I had to wait until later to open the box.
When I was finally alone in my room later that night, I stretched out across my mattress and leaned over the edge to grab the package from under my bed. I pulled it up slowly like it was fragile, breakable, magic. Since it was late and I was supposed to be sleeping, the lights were off and I had the blinds in my room open, so the illumination from the apartment building next door could shine in my room and offer enough light to explore my miracle. Once I straightened myself up in the bed, I held the box between my hands, excited, nervous, hopeful. I was overcome by an anxious feeling in my body. It was like the blood tried to leave my body, rushing down into my arms and legs, pooling at my finger tips and toes, looking for a way out of me. I wished fat would do that, but the world didn’t work that way. I always felt this way when I got anxious, but this wasn’t the bad kind of anxious, it was the good kind, the kind where I wanted to squeal with excitement. I told myself enough with the suspense, and I tore open the box like I’d torn the wrapping paper off a pair of lavender overalls my mom had bought me for Christmas the year before. But this was much more exciting. This was life changing, and the stupid overalls didn’t fit anyway. I dug through the box, but all I found at the bottom of it was a book.
To my disappointment, The Final Solution wasn’t even half the miracle I thought it would be. Instead, it was a book with a black and white picture of a girl, a little older than me, on the cover dressed only in her underwear. I held it up to my window and examined the inside of it, but I didn’t understand how a book was going to help me lose weight. I didn’t even like to read—probably because I wasn’t good at it and had to have extra help and tutoring after school. But I wanted to be skinny enough that I was willing to stay up half the night reading this book, hoping that the miracle was somewhere inside.
I searched all the pages and between every line. I saw black and white photographs (before and after pictures) of legs, how they used to be so fat that they touched, but didn’t anymore. I glanced at meal plans, instructions that were useless because my mother cooked my meals. And being the picky eater that I was, I didn’t like most of the things the book suggested – grapefruits and cottage cheese? Yuck! I found no miracles, and The Final Solution became just another book that was going to be left forgotten on my bookshelf, unless I wanted to look at some pictures of legs that didn’t touch and girls with concave stomachs. Oh how I wished I was one of those girls.
This was the moment that anorexia and bulimia were loaded in me, the moment when I realized that there were no miracles and no other options. But it wasn’t until a couple of years later that I made the conscious effort to become anorexic. It would be too simple to say that I woke up one morning and decided I wanted to have an eating disorder, but in a way, it was also that simple. I was fifteen when I made the choice. Surprisingly it wasn’t because I thought it would help me fulfill the desire I had to be thin and attractive, but instead it was about the fact that I had the desire. I thought about twelve year old me with that stupid book, and how I could still see that picture of that girl’s legs when I closed my eyes. My mother had always told me that she wanted me to lose weight, but she didn’t want me to develop an eating disorder. The image of thinness, the image of ideal, was etched into my mind, and I knew it shouldn’t be. So I made the choice to not eat because I wanted send a message; I was going to be anorexic to spite both my parents and the society that fostered the idea that thin equals beautiful and worthwhile. I thought if I died on the outside—starved myself, became scary skinny, nothing but bones—that everyone would finally see how much it hurts to feel fat and imperfect. I wanted to tell the world how much the push for thinness could really tear a person up inside. But I didn’t have the words, so I decided to sacrifice my body for the greater good. I didn’t want any other little girl to ever feel the way I did.
Wafa wouldn’t have told anyone about this because she wasn’t the kind of woman to talk, and she felt some things were best kept private, but she felt powerless. Not about her life, or her marriage, or her family, or even her role as a woman, but about the state of the world, the world she lived in. She hated the conflict with Israel; she hated the militancy of it all. She probably wouldn’t have used a word like hate, but that’s how she felt. She wanted her people to have their own state, she wanted them to be free, but the struggle had become too much. There was so much violence, and most of it went unacknowledged. All the death she had seen was overwhelming.
She remembered being a young girl, playing outside with her friends. She had chased a ball through some brush when she saw two Israeli soldiers gun down an innocent woman from behind, who had been rinsing her clothes in a stream. But no one cared about that. The world didn’t care about the Palestinians who were dying every day. Terrible, violent, painful deaths. No one cared that Palestinians had their land stolen from them. They were only fighting for the right to belong. No, the world viewed her people as the militant ones, the ones perpetuating violence, unwilling to compromise. Palestinians were the ones who killed innocents, not the innocents who were killed. But Wafa knew different; she saw Palestinian casualties every day. She was the one trying to save them, but usually failed. It infuriated her that no one cared about the deaths that she saw. That no one cared about the Palestinian suffering. She wished the world would see. If only the world would see, then maybe there would be less suffering.
It’s fall of my junior year in high school when the eating disorder starts to get to me. What started out as a juice fast, and a mission to prove a point to the world, has become overwhelming. I didn’t think it would take this long to starve to death, and I wish that I could just lie in bed every day and not eat. That would be perfect. But of course I can’t do that. I have to go to school, which means I can’t lie in bed all day, and my mother has decided that I’m losing too much weight, so she has been trying to make me eat lately. She’s also been really mad at me about everything, which isn’t helping at all. I think the only one who is actually enjoying this process is my best friend Jo-Jo, who has been spreading my secret around school, or at least she spilled it to a couple different people who asked her why I always look so pale.
I imagine that Jo-Jo smiles when anyone asks her about me because she likes the idea of being associated with losing weight and not eating. “Well,” she probably says, taking a long pause, drawing things out for suspense. “She never eats and she takes all kinds of diet pills.” Jo-Jo’s answer is met with “Wow!” and “That’s so cool,” and she smiles in satisfaction at these responses. I wish what Jo-Jo says was true and that I never ate. Life would be so much simpler if I never ate, but instead I have to count calories and make it look like I eat.
Last night I cooked dinner for my parents. I made smothered pork chops, macaroni and cheese, and salad. I was trying to be all nice and make some yummy food so my mom wouldn’t have to cook when she got home from work, but it turned into a big mess. As soon as I handed my parents their plates, which I had gone through the trouble of fixing, my mom looked at me all evil-like and accused me of not eating.
“So you’re not going to eat anything,” she said harshly.
It wasn’t a question, it was a statement. And that probably should have been my cue to disengage, but I fed her the lie I had been working on all afternoon. “I ate while I was cooking.” It wasn’t a complete lie. I had nibbled a bite of macaroni and cheese, but don’t even get me started on how big of a failure I am for that.
“No you didn’t,” she pronounced.
“Yes I did. I had mac and cheese.”
“That’s all?” She sounded disgusted. “You have to eat more than that.”
I might have lost it a little after this and maybe I raised my voice a little. “I told you, I already ate! I’m not hungry. What do you want, to make me eat when I’m not hungry?”
“Don’t yell at me!” My mom was yelling now. “You need to eat.”
“Fine,” I said and grabbed a plate of salad and stomped off to my room. I put the salad in a plastic bag and shoved it under my bed. I’ll throw it out on trash day, along with the other food, I’ve hidden. My mom was pretty mad for the rest of the night, even after I tried to be nice and make up with her. She even snapped at me when I offered to do the dishes as a peace offering.
The day after the man with the blown off arm, Wafa was in the ambulance again when her friend, and fellow volunteer, Habib, approached her.
“Wafa,” he said low and quiet, putting the emphasis on the ‘w’ in her name, like music.
She looked up from where she was doing an inventory of supplies.
“How would you like to do something to help your people?” Habib asked. He knew about Wafa’s frustration with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; they had discussed their concerns in the past.
“What do you think I’m doing now?” Wafa replied as she wrote down the number of bandages on board the ambulance. Volunteering as a medic was only Wafa’s most recent effort to make a difference with her life. As a teenager, during the first Palestinian uprising against the Israeli occupation, Wafa served on the Am'ari refugee camp's women's committee where she assisted in food distribution and helped prisoners’ families. Volunteering was her calling.
“No. I mean something amazing,” Habib responded.
Wafa laughed. “Like what? Kill a bunch of Israelis? Blow up the Israeli government? Put Palestine on the map?”
Habib was silent for a moment, as he studied her. He looked at her round eyes, the hair pulled back and clipped behind her ears, and her chapped lips still in a slight grin from laughing at the idea. After a brief moment of consideration, Habib continued, “Yes.”
Wafa’s lips lost their grin. “What are you talking about?” she asked, almost startled.
“Just think about it,” Habib said, backing off slightly.
“Think about what?” Wafa demanded.
“Just think about it,” Habib said again, crawling over a seat to return to the front of the ambulance.
Habib knew that Wafa would think about what he had suggested. He knew Wafa better than she knew herself. And the truth was that Wafa couldn’t stop thinking about what Habib had said. He had piqued her interest, but she wasn’t sure why. She wasn’t even sure what he had been talking about, but part of her wanted to find out more. She agreed to meet with Habib, so he could tell her more, but she was having second thoughts and didn’t know if she would really go.
Habib wanted to be secretive about it, and insisted that they meet outside of work. He arranged for them to meet at a back alley café that Wafa had never been to. It was on one of the routes that their ambulance sometimes took, so Wafa figured she wouldn’t have much trouble finding it, but it still seemed out of the way. On the date of their meeting, Wafa was still deciding whether or not to go, when her husband walked in from work. She had been avoiding him since their argument a few nights prior.
“I’m sorry about the other night,” Wafa’s husband said as soon as he saw her.
Wafa shrugged, unimpressed with his apology.
He squeezed in next to her on the couch where she was sitting. “I didn’t mean that what you are doing is unimportant,” he continued. “I just think that maybe you could get a real job.”
“Being a medic is a real job,” she informed him.
“No. It’s a volunteer job. You don’t get paid for it. And it’s starting to take over your life.”
“Is that what you’re worried about? Me getting a real job? What do you want me to do, waste my life serving food at some restaurant? Well I don’t want to waste my life. I want to make a difference with it.”
“That’s not what I meant,” he said putting his arm around her shoulder. “I just want you to be happy.”
“I am happy.”
“I’m glad. I also want us to be happy. I mean, what about kids? I thought we wanted to have kids.”
Wafa pulled away from him. “Do you know what’s going on around you? Look outside. I can’t in good conscience bring a kid into this world.”
“Listen to yourself, Wafa. This is exactly what I mean—volunteering is taking over your life. You are becoming obsessed with this shit.”
She got up from the couch. “I’ve got a meeting, can we talk about this later?”
“What kind of meeting?” he demanded.
“Just a meeting,” she reassured him. “I’ll be back later.”
Wafa grabbed her purse and walked out the door.
The day after the dinner argument with my mom, my dad wakes me up at 6am and I slowly struggle out of bed. I start by sticking one leg out from under my pink follower-print comforter where the cool morning air creeps up towards my thigh. I lie like this for a minute before I work up the motivation to stick the other leg out. I’ve only gotten to this point of getting out of bed, and I’m starting to drift back to sleep when my dad yells from outside my door that it’s 6:05am and he doesn’t hear my feet hitting the floor.
“I’m getting up,” I yell back as I roll my feet onto the floor and pull myself out of bed. I give myself my usual pep talk as I fumble around in the dark for clean clothes. Today is a new day, I tell myself. There will never be another day exactly like it. If it’s a bad day, it will be over soon enough. I really shouldn’t hate getting up this much, but I do. Living is such a chore. Sometimes breathing is a chore. Not to mention putting on my clothes. One foot in the right pants leg, one foot in the left, all while maintaining my balance, especially when I’m usually dizzy in the mornings.
After I get my clothes on, I head to the bathroom to brush my teeth. I figure I’m clean enough otherwise. After I finish brushing my teeth, I begin arranging my breakfast. I go to the kitchen and pour myself half a cup of red Gatorade, which I take back into my bedroom. I set the cup on my desk as I open a drawer to pull out a Ziploc bag containing three fourths of a chocolate nutrition bar. I take the bar out of the bag and break off another forth of the bar, then seal up the rest and put it back in my drawer for tomorrow.
Mornings aren’t so bad. I get to eat a little bit. I’ve found it tends to work out better if I do. At least I have a little energy to make it through the day. I also get to nap on the bus ride to school, or part of the way to school. I get off the bus early and spend 30 minutes on the swing set at Washington Park, alone with my Discman and earphones, then I walk the rest of the way to school. Usually it’s a 15 or 20 minute walk, depending on how fast I go. This is by far the best part of any day, then it starts to get bad with boring school and homework and my mom being in a bad mood when she gets home. I should be excited that this is the last day of school for the week, and tomorrow I plan to get ice cream since I’ve been good and saved up my calories all week, but I’m not looking forward to spending the rest of the weekend with my mom trying to force me to eat.
When Wafa arrived for the meeting, she found Habib sitting with another man that she didn’t recognize in the back corner of the café at a booth. Habib waved Wafa over when he noticed her standing awkwardly at the front of the café. Once she made her way back to the booth, Habib scooted over and Wafa sat next to him.
“Do you want something to drink?” he asked quickly.
Wafa shook her head, and then took note of her surroundings. She looked up at the light dangling over their heads above the booth. It was just a light bulb in a socket hanging from a cord, and a dirty bulb at that. Wafa was nervous; she didn’t know what she was getting herself into, and the decrepit mood lighting and dingy booth weren’t helping.
Habib proceeded to introduce Wafa to the man sitting across from them. “This is Wafa, the one I’ve been telling you about,” he said. “She is eager to obtain greatness.”
The man nodded while sizing Wafa up. He thought her eyes were a little too small, and her nose slightly crooked, but he figured she would do. He wanted someone pretty, someone the newspapers would love. The newspapers might not love her, but they would like her; she was pretty enough, and it’s not like there were women lined up, giving their left arms to blow themselves up. As he looked at her, Wafa timidly examined the man as well. He had light skin and oily, dark, curly hair, with moldy stubble covering his jaw. She wasn’t impressed, and wondered where Habib had met a man like this.
“Wafa works on the ambulance with me,” Habib informed the man, as if to reassure him that she was trustworthy.
The man nodded and took a sip from the cup in front of him, which smelled like beer. “She’ll have to stop that,” he informed Habib, referring to Wafa’s ambulance work. “She needs to devote herself to the cause. And you two should not be seen associating.”
Forgetting her nerves, Wafa raised her voice, “Excuse me? I will not give up volunteering on the ambulance!”
Feeling a tension about to grow, Habib jumped in to remedy the situation. “It might look suspicious if she suddenly stopped volunteering,” he stammered. “So maybe she should continue working.”
“Fine, she can work,” the man said, brushing the issue aside. “But different shifts. You two must work different shifts. No associating.”
Habib nodded in understanding while Wafa, still riled up and getting tired of being talked around rather than talked to, raised a brow at the man.
He liked the fire in her eyes, and thought that she might work out better than he originally imagined. “Are you sure you’re ready for this?” he asked Wafa.
“Exactly what is this?” Wafa asked in response.
The man took another sip from his cup and smiled. “We’re going to give you a bomb, and you’re going to strap it to yourself, and then KA-BLOO-EY!”
“KA-BLOO-EY?” Wafa raised her brow at him again.
He laughed, “Blow yourself up and the one hundred Israelis next to you. You’ll be in all the papers. On TV.” He paused to admire the ingenious of it all, and then continued, “A female suicide bomber, you will bring the Palestinian cause to the world.”
What the man said made sense. No one paid attention to male suicide bombers other than to use them as proof demonstrating that Palestinians were the militant ones, the cause of all the conflict with Israel. But the world would look at a female suicide bomber differently. For a woman to detonate herself there had to be some greater reason besides militancy, or a violent nature. A female suicide bomber would garner attention, make people think and reevaluate their opinions on the conflict. Maybe a female suicide bomber really could bring the Palestinian cause to the world.
Wafa nodded. For the first time in her life, she felt a warm knot of hope starting to form in her chest, and it felt good. She was ready.
Sometimes I get irritable when I don’t eat. And angry. And depressed. And sometimes I snap, especially when it involves food. Today I had a bit of a meltdown. Let me start by saying that I was really good and I even got away with not eating two days this week. I saved almost all of my allotted calories (which isn’t many) for the week just so I could have ice cream today. Yes, even girls on anorexic missions eat ice cream sometimes. My mom was supposed to take me to the Baskin Robbins near my house this afternoon, but she went out with some friends and said she was too tired when she got home.
It was dumb, but I might have freaked out just a little bit when I found out that I wasn’t going to get the ice cream cone I wanted so badly. I went to my room, slammed the door and lay face down on my bed. I just got so frustrated and sad. Before I knew it, irritation bubbled up inside of me, turned to sadness, then overflowed from my body in a soup of hot tears. I cried heaving tears until my nose started bleeding. I let the blood run down my nose and lips and into my mouth that was gasping for breath for a minute before I stopped crying. I’ve been getting a lot of nose bleeds lately, especially when I cry. Or maybe I’ve just been crying more, or harder, lately. Sometimes I just let the tears and blood run until it feels like my body can’t give up anything more, and then I gently stop crying and shove a cotton ball up my nostril to stop the bleeding. But tonight, I headed to the bathroom and tried to clean myself up quickly. I blew my nose hard to try to get most of the bloody mucous out, and then I washed my face with cold water before sticking a cotton ball up my nose and pinching it shut. Within a minute, I watched in the mirror as blood escaped my nose and ran down my face. I stuffed more cotton up my nose and pinched it harder. It took 10 minutes for the bleeding to finally stop.
I shouldn’t have been so upset about not getting ice cream. I don’t need ice cream. I don’t deserve ice cream. I mean, my mom tries to pretend like she wants me to eat, but she doesn’t want me to eat ice cream. I’m too fat to deserve ice cream. I obviously haven’t proven my point yet. Starting Monday, I’m never going to eat anything else again!
After her meeting with Habib and the unnamed man, Wafa stopped volunteering on Fridays, so she would not be seen associating with Habib. She decided to pick up extra shifts throughout the week and on weekends, and quickly found herself spending more and more time on the ambulance, giving as much as she could, before her final act of giving. Of course, her husband, who knew nothing of her larger plans for martyrdom, was less than pleased with Wafa’s intensified devotion to the cause. He did his best to put an end to her volunteering.
“I forbid you to spend every minute of your day volunteering for a lost cause,” he announced at the dinner table one evening.
“You can’t forbid me from doing anything,” Wafa snapped.
Her husband felt the rage building between the temples of his forehead and he tried to calm himself. He took a deep breath, and forced a smile towards his wife. “If you love me, you will stop volunteering.”
“But I don’t love you,” Wafa said bluntly.
“This is exactly what I’ve been talking about, volunteering is making you crazy and unreasonable,” he hollered and slammed his fist on the table.
In that split second, Wafa realized that she had truly lost all love for her husband. She wondered if she had ever loved him at all. “No. I really don’t love you,” she said.
The rage rose in his body and he wanted to smack Wafa across the face. “That’s it. You’re done volunteering!”
“No,” Wafa said raising her voice. “I’m done with you.”
Her husband jumped up from the table. He threw his dinner plate to the floor, and then knocked his chair over before calming himself slightly. “You know what? I’m done with you and your crazy obsessions. We’re over.”
He grabbed his coat and his car keys and walked out of the apartment, slamming the door behind him. A few days later he came home, collected all of his belongings, and left a note on the kitchen counter that read:
Wafa,
Keep your volunteer work. I found someone else.
Wafa rolled her eyes at the note and the fact that her husband always had to think he was getting the final say, but she was glad that she could finally devote her full attention to training for the mission at hand.
The first day of my fast is the hardest because it’s the easiest point to turn back. I tell myself to be strong and that I just need to make it through today. By the beginning of my last period chemistry class, I am hot and clammy despite being lightly brushed with dampness from walking across the quad in the rain. It has been cold and dreary all day, but the rain just started, so I was caught off guard without an umbrella. I know the clamminess is a result of not eating, rather than the first symptom of a cold, so I sit in my assigned seat at the end of the table closest to the door, and try to shake the fevered feeling from my body and prepare for another day of fuzzy chemistry.
My chemistry teacher, Mr. Ferriter, is an import from Roundup, Montana, which seems to be a place of transit as he starts with his weight planted firmly on his left leg when he says it, but ends with it planted on his right leg as he emphasizes the “-tana” with a wink that aims for rugged, but misses. Instead of teaching chemistry, Mr. Ferriter likes to talk about Montana. Most of the students in my class like to listen to him tell stories because as long as he is talking about Montana we don’t have to learn the periodic table.
Personally, I think he likes to talk about Montana because he doesn’t know anything about chemistry. Whenever anyone asks a question related to chemistry, he stands still and thinks for about the answer for a while before responding that we don’t need to know that because it won’t be on the test. But I’m not really complaining.
When Mr. Ferriter enters the classroom today, he’s wearing a white lab coat, goggles on top of his head and an excited grin on his face. He announces that we will be doing an experiment and instructs us to pair up and grab Bunsen burners, test tubes and safety goggles while he writes instructions for the experiment on the board. I end up working with Megan, who is a soccer player, pretty and popular, but nice enough and funny. After Mr. Ferriter finishes writing the instructions on the board, he goes around the room handing out the rest of the supplies we will need for the experiment. I watch as he places two jars of barium chloride, a white, powdery chemical, in the middle of our table for Megan and me to share with the other two pairs at our table.
My heart speeds up slightly when I see the barium chloride. I’ve been researching poison at home on the internet, usually when I’m sad and frustrated at the prospect of not eating for the rest of my life. The idea of poison is really just a backup plan, in case I can’t fulfill my starving to death plan to completion. I think killing myself with poison would still prove a point to the world, but I don’t entertain the idea too seriously. I ordered a couple of hypodermic needles from a pet catalogue, but I haven’t invested in poison yet. In my research, I recently came across barium chloride, so I can’t help but think it’s a sign when Mr. Ferriter puts it down in front of me.
Trying not to seem too excited about the chemical, I focus my attention towards Megan and the experiment at hand. We snap on our goggles, hook our Bunsen burner up to the gas, and begin the experiment. Once we have a beaker of boiling water, we set one of the test tubes inside of it and then slowly add the barium chloride to another substance inside. The test tube is supposed to turn colors, but ours fizzles, starts bubbling over, and explodes sending tiny pieces of glass flying across our table instead. Megan lets out a girly scream and we jump back from the table, as Mr. Ferriter notices our explosion.
Mr. Ferriter is clearly puzzled by our explosion. He spends at least 5 minutes scratching his head when we explain that we followed the instructions written on the board exactly. He finally suggests that perhaps we put a pinch too much barium chloride in the test tube. His experiment wasn’t foolproof. When he leaves, Megan and I start giggling. Somehow blowing up a test tube makes me feel happy and alive.
After the experiment is over and everyone has returned their supplies to the carts at the front of the room, Mr. Ferriter begins collecting the jars of barium chloride. He starts at the other end of the room. My heart begins pounding; there is a jar right in front of me and I can’t help but feel that this is a sign. I casually look around the room. No one is looking at me. I know this is my chance to take the barium chloride. Mr. Ferriter is two tables away when I make the split-second decision and grab the jar off the table and drop it in my backpack between my history book and pencil case. As Mr. Ferriter approaches my table, my heart is beating out of my chest. I try to act normal, but my leg is shaking and I’m sure I’m going to get caught. He picks up the two jars of barium chloride, then pauses, looking for the third. A look of confusion crosses his face briefly, but he turns and walks away from the table with only two jars. He does a quick recount of the chemicals at the front of the classroom, then shrugs. I guess he figures that he had one less jar than he thought.
The bell rings and I leave the classroom as fast as I can. When I get home, I hide the jar of chemicals at the bottom of my underwear drawer in case I decide I need to use it.
For three weeks, Wafa met in secret with the ones orchestrating the bombing. She never learned their names, where they came from, or even their motivations. The last time she spoke to Habib, before they stopped associating at work, he told her never to ask questions; it was dangerous to ask questions. So she assumed that everyone was involved for the same reasons she was: because they were sick of the violence and bloodshed and wanted to send a message that it had to stop. Despite not asking questions, which was sometimes hard for her, Wafa learned the details of what she was supposed to do.
The bombing was planned for January 20th. Wafa would be taken to Jerusalem where she was to detonate herself on the crowded streets. She was to make sure that she was in a well-populated location with plenty of Israelis. If she even thought that someone suspected her, which was unlikely because she was female, she was to detonate herself right away. If she could not detonate herself and was caught, she was to say that she was Layla Al Massri from Rafah and that she was working alone. Once she got the explosives on there was no turning back, but Wafa was ready.
After seven days of not eating, I’m too weak to go to school, so I pretend to be sick and convince my parents to let me stay home. I feel too weak to do much of anything, and I try to spend my day lying in the bath tub. But after my second bath, I find that getting in and out of the tub is too much of a struggle, so I make myself content to lie in bed. I can’t believe I’ve gotten away with not eating for 7 days. I feel terrible and dead, but I lost 20 pounds, so maybe it’s worth it. I know it’s mostly water weight, but I don’t care. Any weight loss is good weight loss.
I watch TV—daytime talk shows mostly, Sally Jessy Raphael, Maury Povich, Jenny Jones—as I lie in bed. During commercial breaks I force myself to do sit ups in bed until I get dizzy and decide to take a break. Somewhere between Maury Povich and Jenny Jones I fall asleep and dream of drinking a glass of fresh squeezed orange juice. The dream is so vivid that I can feel the orange juice in my stomach, and I wake up from my dream in a panic, terrified that I ruined my fast. I look around for an empty cup, any sign that I drank orange juice. I see none. I move my tongue around mouth; there is no juice residue. I’m relieved and I start crying. And then my nose starts bleeding, but I’m too tired to get up, so I let the blood run down my face and pool on my pillow.
The morning of January 20th came faster than Wafa had planned. She awoke with knots in her stomach and a nauseous feeling in her chest. She went about her morning as usual, showered and washed her hair, and she wondered if she was doing the right thing. She was so distracted by her sudden uncertainty that she merely swallowed breakfast rather than eating it. She barely realized that she’d even consumed food when she put her bowl in the sink and rinsed it out. She considered aborting the plan and hiding out in her apartment forever. What was the worst that could happen if she didn’t show up? With second thoughts chewing her up, Wafa decided that she needed to see her family one last time, even though she wasn’t supposed to. Just in case she decided to go through with the plan, Wafa took anything out of her purse that could identify her before she left her apartment for her sister’s house.
When Wafa got to her sister’s house, her niece opened the door and threw her arms around her. Wafa leaned down and kissed the young girl on the forehead. She had stopped on the way and bought a carton of juice, which she handed to her niece once their embrace was over. The niece reached out her hands, gratefully taking the juice from her aunt. She opened the carton quickly and poured it in her mouth.
“Mom’s at the market, and dad is in the back yard practicing with his shot gun,” the niece informed Wafa after a few swallows of the juice. “But you can come in.”
Wafa smiled as she looked at her niece for a short time before responding. She studied her big eyes and their youthful innocence, the sweet smile and joy on her face, and the juice dripping from the corner of her lips. It was then that Wafa knew that she had to go through with the bombing so her niece, and the rest of her generation, could have a future free from turmoil and war.
“Just tell your mom I stopped by.” Wafa leaned down again and hugged the girl goodbye. “I love you.”
“Love you too,” the niece responded. “See you later, ‘k?”
Wafa waved as she walked away from the house and headed to the café where she had met with Habib and the unnamed man. She would be picked up there and driven to Jerusalem.
On the ninth day of my fast, I can barely breathe. I stupidly convince myself to eat and I have a cheese sandwich. I feel better as soon as it touches my mouth, at least physically, but emotionally I’m exhausted and angry and depressed and I just want to punch a wall or stick a knife in my stomach. I don’t think I can take it. I don’t think I can do it anymore. I’m just so unhappy. The whole eating disorder, the not eating to prove a point to the world, has spiraled and control is slowly slipping out of my grasp. As the cheese sandwich digests, I make an impulse decision to inject myself with barium chloride.
I take a pen and my prettiest pieces of stationary paper and write two notes, one to my parents that says it isn’t their fault and one to the world that says: Look what you can do to a person. Look what pain you can cause. I’m dying so no one else has to feel the pain of not measuring up to standards of beauty. I’m dying so no one else wants to die because they aren’t thin or pretty enough. I put the notes under my pillow where they will be found.
I don’t know what I really think is going to happen. Maybe what I always wanted to happen, that my tragic death from self-starvation, from suicide, will be noticed—in the newspapers, on TV, maybe even in an article at the back of Seventeen magazine—and people will start to rethink all the pressure society puts on women and girls to be thin and fit into the pre-prescribed mold of beauty. Somehow my death will make a difference and be a catalyst for change in the world.
I dig the jar of barium chloride out from my underwear drawer. I set a small cup of water on my desk and add the chemical. I’m not sure how much I should add, but a teaspoon seems good, and I stir it around in the water until it is mostly dissolved. I fill the syringe with the mixture, leaving the cup more than half full. I suppose I will have some of the mixture left over in case this doesn’t work. I look at the needle in my hand, as I move it towards the vein that is visible in my left wrist. I hope this is painless. I hope I only feel a small needle prick.
I push the needle into my wrist.
Wafa walked down the crowded streets of Jerusalem with 22 pounds of explosives strapped to her back. Her reason for doing this—her niece, that she would know freedom—was fresh in her mind. Wafa was no longer afraid of her destination, just slightly afraid of the pain that would take her there. She spoke quietly to herself, looking down at the ground as she walked. “It will be over before you know it. This is for the greater good. It will be over before you know it. This is for the greater good. You won’t feel a thing. This is for the greater good.”
Quietly, Wafa pulled the cord hanging from her backpack and detonated herself.
The pain is incredible. It flows all the way up her arm to her spine, and all the way down her spine to her arm. The pain burns like fire across her skin. Her arm is on fire. Her whole body is on fire. The chemical reactions, the atoms igniting in her blood, cause a buzzing in her head. She sees flashes of light in front of her and the world begins to spin. She falls slowly until she hits the ground. It feels like she is exploding into a million pieces.
