“One does not come down from a cross alive.”—Julio Cortázar

A mother is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion.

In the New York Times on the day after Thanksgiving, this headline: “Grandmother Blows Self Up in Suicide Attack on Israeli Forces” (Friday, November 24, 2006, A20). The article says that Fatima Omar Mahmud al-Najar, mother of nine children and grandmother to more than 40, detonated an explosive belt in Gaza on Thursday, killing herself and slightly wounding two Israeli soldiers. Hamas took responsibility for the attack, its first claimed suicide bombing in nearly two years. The article summarizes other recent incidents of mayhem surrounding the presence of what the Israeli Army reports as around a thousand Israeli soldiers in northern Gaza “in operations intended to try to stop Qassam rockets” from being fired into Israel (assorted Palestinian deaths and slight woundings of at least 7 Israeli soldiers); it then quotes the dead woman’s oldest daughter explaining the motives behind the attack: “Fathiya al-Najar [the daughter]…said that her son had been killed by Israelis, that her mother’s house had been destroyed, and that another grandson was in a wheelchair with an amputated leg. ‘She and I went to the mosque,’ she told reporters. ‘We were looking for martyrdom.’”

“Maternal thinking,” to use a phrase invented by philosophy Sarah Ruddick, is a knife that cuts many ways. It has been the inspiration for women’s peace movements, for the heroic organizing efforts of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, who demanded an accounting of the politically-motivated disappearances and death-squad killings conducted during Argentina’s “dirty war.” Maternal thinking, and feeling, is the inspiration behind peace activist Cindy Sheehan’s courageous, poignant, and hugely consequential “Camp Casey” protest against President Bush’s murderous Iraq policy. For so many, many women, maternity as lived experience and as metaphor is the most powerful, meaningful, far-reaching, formative, informative experience of their lives.

Mothers “give” life and thereby extend the life of the species; a simple-minded literalist approach therefore embraces the notion that since death would appear to be life’s opposite, mothers who take their maternal role seriously are naturally opposed to deliberate killing. But that reductive formula leaves out of the equation the fact that war, killing, hierarchical violence, and violent resistance to that violence are so ingrained in the fabric of human life on this planet that it can appear to be the most natural thing in the world to reproduce death as an integral part of reproducing life.

Mothers reproduce death to spare their children death (take me instead of my child—what is Fatima al-Najar’s act but a tragic literalization of the logic behind the Raging Grannies’ civil disobedience protest, which involved a sit-in at a recruiting station where they demanded to be sent to Iraq in place of the young cannon fodder). Mothers reproduce death because the logic of civilization says that our lives and prosperity are bought with “boots on the ground.” (Go to Iraq and fight the terrorists, my child, so the smoking gun won’t be a mushroom cloud over Cleveland—it’s what your daddy did in Nam, it’s what your granddad did in World War II.) Mothers reproduce death because some fates are worse than death. (But where, in a Grand Guignol world like ours, does the freedom struggle end and indiscriminate slaughter start?)

So there on page A20 of the Times is a picture of Fatima Omar Mahmud al-Najar, her serious, strong features framed in a close-fitting white hijab that extends down over her shoulders, topped by a broad headband with Arabic lettering (presumably what the article describes as a “Hamas bandanna”). Her large untapered fingers with blunt nails, swollen and warped-looking, the fingers of an aging woman whose life has spared her hands nothing (she is variously reported to have been 57 or 64, explains the article) arrange themselves on the barrel and stock of an M-16 rifle almost as if she were fingering the keys of an accordion, or guitar strings. She is surrounded by Hamas iconography—a rippling banner, again with Arabic lettering, and some sort of seal plastered just above her head. Her features do not really look recognizably masculine or feminine. Her lips are parted as though she were on the point of speaking.

But the martyrdom of Fatima al-Najar is not the most striking instance of maternal thinking that I’ve had to consider this week. I’ve been pondering an article by Kathryn Joyce that appears in the November 27, 2006 issue of The Nation, “The Quiverfull Conviction: Christian Mothers Breed ‘Arrows for the War’.” The article describes a movement of thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of fundamentalist families devoted to producing as many kids as possible; the little Christian soldiers-to-be are metaphorically regarded as “arrows” in God’s “quiver.” Joyce writes that “Quiverfull began with the publication of Rick and Jan Hess’s 1989 book, A Full Quiver: Family Planning and the Lordship of Christ, which argues that God, as the ‘Great Physician’ and sole ‘Birth Controller,’ opens and closes the womb on a case-by-case basis. Women’s attempts to control their own bodies—the Lord’s temple—are a seizure of divine power….Quiverfull women are more than mothers. They’re domestic warriors in the battle against what they see as forty years of destruction wrought by women’s liberation: contraception, women’s careers, abortion, divorce, homosexuality and child abuse, in that order” (11). Quiverfull adherents home-school their children, support absolute patriarchal authority within the household, and subscribe to florid metaphors combining the gory glory of Christian martyrdom and Maryolatry (women’s bodies are a “living sacrifice”) with a militant pronatalism worthy of the Nazi Party (Joyce describes Quiverfull author Mary Pride as claiming that “Only a determination among Christian women to take up their submissive, motherly roles with a ‘military air’ and become ‘maternal missionaries’ will lead the Christian army to victory” [13]).

I don’t have time to summarize Joyce’s useful arguments about why the Quiverfull women’s embrace of militant maternal martyrdom makes a kind of sense—hence why it won’t do to say simply that these nutty women are voting with their bodies against their own as well as their children’s interests. Rather than argue the rationality of the case, I want to propose a somewhat different idea, one that has bearing on the stories of the Quiverfull women and Fatima Omar Mahmud al-Najar alike. The idea is simply this: we live in dreadful times that show every sign of worsening. For a vast variety of local as well as global reasons, especially vulnerable or sensitive people everywhere are responding to an intuitive sense that what passes for “normal life” is profoundly unsustainable. In a world like this, it’s awfully hard to know what it even means to be a “good mother”–to protect one’s children, to give them a decent chance.

Extremism is an inevitable though not universal response to extreme circumstances. We’d better get used to the fact that our planet’s trajectory is bound to elicit more and more forms of extreme motherhood—and those of us who want to see everybody just getting along are not going to be happy with some of the forms that motherhood takes. To tell the truth, isn’t there something horribly compelling in these instances of maternalism run amock? Isn’t there something useful in the sounding of a warning, even when it emerges as an incoherent shriek, when the alternative is business as usual?

In a fine interview in the December, 2006 issue of The Writer’s Chronicle, poet Alicia Ostriker comments (in response to a question from poet Eleanor Wilner): “In your poem, ‘Sarah’s Choice,’ God commands Isaac’s mother Sarah to sacrifice Isaac, and Sarah just says no. My own Sarah in The Nakedness of the Fathers recognizes that the story is about the defeat of Motherhood by Fatherhood—which of course is what still runs our world” (34). So, here’s a riddle: what if we were to supply the unwritten portion of the story as it actually occurs in Genesis? What do you suppose Isaac’s mother might have said to Abraham when father and son came home from the mountain where Abraham had almost sacrificed his child at the behest of a patriarchal deity? (Where he would indeed have done so had not his Commander in Chief said, “Just kidding” at almost the last second.) Did she even know what was up with those two? (How could she not have guessed?) Did she think that if her husband was willing to sacrifice the prospect of continuing his line, the supreme interests of his selfish genes—she, who thought first of the boy himself, all her long, loving, close knowledge of him, his shaky-legged bravery, and how frightened he must have been, how scarred he would be from this day forth by the tamped-down memory of a terrible hour whose full implications could never be uttered–then surely her own weak womanly pity and tenderness ought to be shelved?

Did she say “Thy will be done?”

Probably.