Free And the World Changed by Muneeza Shamsie Page B

everyone she knows.”
    The USIS is the United States Information Service, the overseas version of the United States Information Agency thatfostered cultural activities and cultural exchange, and was once very active in Karachi.
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    For the last fifteen years I have been writing down notes and sketches of some of the wars I have lived through and yes, often with a survivor’s guilt. Notes on the back of receipts, scraps of paper, note cards, letters, books, bookmarks, whatever has been at hand. I find it difficult to put them together in any formal, traditional format as I attempt to make some kind of sense of the unending wars I have watched and lived through. Wars that have taken the shape of an adult’s slap on a child’s face, of the red, orange, green, blue, and yellow flames engulfing the body of a monk or the body of a woman, of the stooped shoulders and traumatized eyes of a man or woman whose dignity has been broken through conquest and poverty, and of the corpses, the obscene slaughter of human beings and the earth in the name of God, truth, revenge, and justice. Seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching war, sometimes from the very center and sometimes from the sidelines, that leads to a pattern of war existence that seems terrifyingly close to that of walking within a mandala. It continues to be a journey without any detachment or insight that might lead to any kind of understanding, wisdom, and action against the very nature of war and toward the essence of peace. Wars remind me of age-old hauntings begging to be exorcized from the body of our planet.
    OCTOBER 31, 2001
    EL DÍA DE LOS MUERTOS . THE DAY OF THE DEAD
    The two little girls sat beside me, laughing, as we made silly sentences out of words. They in English and I in Spanish. When we came to the words, ghosts and fantasmas , they became very serious. They asked me, “ Tía , why does that ghost woman make awful noises and carry away children so that we can never see our families again?” One of their teachers had gone in for amulticultural Halloween. She had turned off the lights and told them the story of la llorona —the weeping woman who haunts so much of Mexico and the southwest of the United States, which was of course taken by force from Mexico, which was of course taken by force by the European conquistadors, which was of course taken by force by—and so on and so forth.
    According to the accepted legend, la llorona wails as she wanders all over the countryside and through desolate places in towns, searching for naughty children she can take away. She cries and looks for children because she has, through pride and insanity, killed her own. I have heard men talk about how they, too, have encountered la llorona when staggering home from an evening of drinking. Some survived, others never reached home again. One of the men who had seen her told me, “ Una guerra. Una mujer contra todos los hombres .” Why, I asked, was it a war? Why did he say that she was a woman against all men? Because, he said, one man dishonored a woman and made her so loca , so insane, that she killed the children she had had by him.
    The summer after the Zapatista uprising, a Zapoteca selling shawls across from my mamacita’s house in Oaxaca stopped me. She asked me if I had heard the cry of la llorona the evening before. I told her that I had heard the woman who sold tamales crying out her wares late into the night throughout Colonia Jalatlaco, the colonia where the house is located. Her cry, “tamaaaaleees, tamaaalees” was so triste , full of sorrow and anxiety, that it reminded me of the laments of women all over the world as they try to sell what little they have, what little they can make in order to feed their children. The woman selling shawls told me her version of the la llorona legend. It is a version I have not yet encountered in any book.
    According to the woman, it was the rich and