The above photograph of Aisha is by South African photographer Jodi Bieber for Time.
Unusual Choice for Magazine Cover: A Reality Hard to Face/ Speaking to Children About The Cover
This week, Time magazine’s managing editor Richard Stengel, blew out all stops for usual old school magazine propriety, and published a magazine cover that, when I saw it at the grocery store last night, I also saw a mother cover her child’s eyes as they passed the magazine rack. I understood.
The cover shows the reality of Aisha, a beautiful young 18 year old Afghan woman whose nose and ears were cut off.
We who have worked many decades in post-trauma recovery with war veterans who returned from war missing legs, arms, jaws, genitals, parts of skull and mind… are not ‘used to’ seeing such great harms–you never can be used to such harm to human beings and still keep your soul– but rather have ‘seen the worst of the worst.’
But we know others can be deeply shocked or hurt at first, sometimes nauseated by a sudden rush of fear that spills stomach acid and adrenaline… from seeing an injured person who is so often whole in brave heart, but has been harmed so.
Mr. Stengel weighs these factors in his “To Our Readers’ intro to the August 9, 2010 issue of Time, saying he knows how powerful and disturbing this image might be to some, and telling about how he showed the photo of Aisha to his very young sons who were immediately filled with compassion…
affirming what many of us in the helping professions tell parents regarding children and difficult sights, stories, and events: if the parents are not overwhelmed with fear, their children are unlikely to feel overly fearful. The steadiest parent is often the emotional model a child most tends to follow.
Thus, if children see this cover, speaking to them, telling them age-appropriately who and what this is a picture of… and, if they are very young and fear this might happen to them, giving them every assurance you can. And asking them questions about what they think on this. Invite them to ask questions now or later, so one can answer their questions… this will teach the child about some of the hardest things in the world they are inheriting, along with many others things that are very good. It may also spark some young ones who are called to help the world, to start doing that in some way, now. Many of us were called to whatever heartful work we do now, by something hard and harsh we saw, heard, lived, in childhood.
So, together we behold a highly unusual cover on Time, showing not a high-life person, but what is normally kept out of sight unless it is breaking news: the poorest of the poor, least of the least, one of the many of the many… Aisha is one of the many young women abused by spouses and during or after running away, captured and mutilated by their own male relatives and inlaws…
In Aisha’s case, her male relatives were ordered to do so by a Taliban commander in her spouse’s village, who promoted that cutting off women’s noses and ears will set an example to other women who want to flee beatings and rape from husbands they were pledged to in holy ceremony of marriage.
Or because they loved someone without approval. Or because they wanted to … be free to study, love, create.
Thus Aisha’s brother-in-law held her struggling small body down and her husband hacked off her ears and nose with a knife, and the man left her bleeding to death on the mountainside. But miraculously, she did not die. And eventually found her way to a remote safe house.
How The News Often Covers Torments, And What, As An Old Storyteller, I Hope To Support in A Journalism That Remembers Its Roots
As you know regarding torments of men, women, children, animals, life-giving lands… when modern news covers one soul who has been so deeply harmed, there are thousands more tormented, mutilated and killed who remain invisible and are never brought to light. Sometimes, even if one is highlighted, news of parts of the world out of our sight, is reduced to two lines in a ’roundup’ of world events.
But, think of what reach mainstream media has, television has, what amazing muscular reach, to teach, evenhandedly teach.
ByTime’s magazine cover this week, and its content, there’s a clear aim to teach… as Stengel offers the fuller stories in this issue about Aisha and others, and about WikiLeaks (restricted but suddenly released papers on US Afghanistan involvement) for readers to weigh and come to terms with, to face, in fact, what each thinks ought come next.
The inference is that offering more consciousness to hearts here and far across the world is a reasoned goal for this issue of this magazine. And the story of Aisha in those pages is not buried under short compilations, and thereby is not offered as what I call, ironic to this article’s main topic, ‘a severed story’: ” In small village of x, judge orders recalcitrant wife to have nose cut off…” and then no more story to the story– so that good souls cannot see, hear, smell, stand up, react, reach out in whatever way they can to bridge, to understand, to help.
On a side note, when I teach and speak to journalists and writers, I emphasize that the amputation of story so that souls reading the min-news-stories are ever shortchanged in understanding and kept from useful actions to help innocent others… that this, in my opinion, is one of the profound errors of way too often found in ‘fast food journalism.’
The amputation of ‘the rest of the story,’ or the ‘miniaturization of story,’ by my sights, severs the potential good and useful relationships between strangers who will reach across racial and ethnic and religious group lines, to meet one another in decent ways. Mainstream media, blogosphere, book in print, ebook… any writer telling the whole story from many different sides, and then taking a stand, is gold in our times.
Why Even Bother?
Because the stories and images in this issue of Time are so full, this is why I hope you will read this issue. And so you can be informed and see about answering the question posed on Time‘s cover… What happens when we leave Afghanistan.
The subtext to this questions is: What happens to the women and children and all vulnerable souls, when all restraints by foreign troops, like those of the USA, are withdrawn? Those of us who lived through the end of WWII when all of E. Eu was given over to Killer Joe Stalin so he could murder another 2 million; none of us with knowledge of the profound end of what is called ‘the fall of Saigon,’—or any other sudden troop pullout– ever again want to see that that brings certain death to utter innocents who can neither flee nor be rescued, and for whom no aid will arrive.
The essence of Time‘s question is actually not a new question for our times. It is an ancient question, centuries old: What happens to the women and children and men when emotional respect and bodily protections– and a more even-handed oversight– are withdrawn… and certain abject evil is waiting nearby to pounce?
The image and story of Aisha and all those stand behind her hurting too… makes many of us ask “What can we do?’ We feel so helpless.
I remember the first of the ongoing articles I’ve written here on themoderatevoice.com about women who were dishonor-murdered by their own families ( this mis-called ‘honor killings’ by those who do it and copied unfortunately by much of media without using quote marks…)
One of my commenters said in essence, Why do you bother? Why even write about these matters anymore? They’re going to go on. Those people are hopeless.
I understood the irritation as underlaid with deep sorrow, and I responded in essence, that for many of us, I think, the answer is most often to do ‘whatever is within our reach.’ Writing and keeping the stories alive of those who cannot tell them, is doing ‘what is within our reach.’
Regarding the stories about those who struggle anywhere, even though my reach and my power is limited compared to many in big media…
the absolute and definitive point is to keep the story above the waterline, to not let stories of struggle sink into obscurity as other ‘A topics’ scroll onward. And that is what many of us can do, and with strength. Tell the story. Tell all of it insofar as we have eyes to see, ears to hear.
By telling the living stories in any number of ways, by repeating the stories for good purpose elsewhere, we can hold the stories above water, hopefully long enough for those far more powerful to come to truly help the few and the many.
Time magazine is holding the story above the waterline. That is within their reach. Good on all of them.
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UPDATE: Aisha is said to be in transit to the US, to a sheltered place where reconstructive surgeons will see if there is a way to reconstruct her face. Perhaps this fortells a time when many women also huarmed will also be able to have form and perhaps function too, restored to them, Mr. Stengel from Time says you can visit time.com/aisha if one wanted to comment.
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Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés is a psychoanalyst and post-trauma recovery specialist working with veterans and those recovering from natural disasters and critical incidents. She served at Columbine High School and community for three years after the massacre listening to hundreds of true stories, and continues to work in post-trauma recovery with survivor families and individuals from the 9-11 terrorism bombing of the Trade Center Towers in NY.
CODA
Just this: blessings on the hands, eyes and hearts of the journalist Aryn Baker (see more of her brave work here) and photographer’s hands and eyes Jodi Bieber, and blessing for same on all writers and photographers and invisible editors, stringers, and layout and printing people who put this issue out.
The photo, really the eyes and heart of Bieber who took such compassionate photo of beautiful Aisha, is in the same life-changing category of the naked child napalmed and running down the road, the Capra photograph of the rifler shot in midair. This image of a woman maimed by her relatives, will never be forgotten by any who see it, and the reason Aisha represents countless others, will never be easily forgotten either.
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DISCLAIMER: I don’t work for Time, no one I know works for Time except sort of: the mailwoman delivers it to my rural mailbox…. along with Newsweek and other weeklies. However our worldwide weekly magazines might comport themselves via whatever topics they choose to carry to the surface and emphasize, or 86, they are still our most powerful town criers… who inform the smaller but significant town criers in many layers of our culture…. who then turn to inform family town criers… who turn to tell school town criers, and onward. Just speaking for myself, and with critical insight into all our foibles and charisms, I very often admire and am grateful.