After the Killings in Chapel Hill

It’s less than forty-eight hours since Craig Stephen Hicks shot and killed three Muslim students in Chapel Hill.

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It’s nearly four full days since Deah Shaddy Barakat, Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha, and Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha were shot in the head.

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When they are not your children, you can turn your attention to other matters: Sutra on the Four Establishments of Mindfulness.

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When you are not the one dead—now in paradise or the ground—you can resume your regularly scheduled programming: thousands of small irritations appearing in your brain.

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When you are not Muslim in America, it’s just another Saturday.

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It’s Thursday, less than forty-eight hours after.

Like the world, your heart is broken. Yesterday, throughout the day following the shooting, you visited the Daily Tar Heel, UNC Chapel Hill’s student newspaper. You checked the Raleigh News & Observer for updates. You checked Facebook, the page of the Carolina Union Activities Board (UNC Chapel Hill’s student union) and UNC’s Muslim Student’s Association Facebook page, for information on a vigil and prayer service that you knew was being planned for that evening.

Why do you care? Is it just because your two stepdaughters, alumni of Carolina, lovingly serve and care for, each in her profession, those most vulnerable in the Bronx, in Harlem, in Brooklyn—in America?

Why do you care? Is it because your son, a senior at Carolina, called you from Chapel Hill that morning fighting tears? Is it because he, President of Carolina Union, was at the table yesterday, with the student president of Carolina’s Muslim Student Association, the Chancellor, the Dean of Students, the Director of the Carolina Union, and others planning last night’s vigil and prayer service?

Did she, the MSA president, know them? you asked. Yes, he said, I think so. She’s strong, he said. Our job now, he said, is to support MSA and the Muslim community.

Why do you care? Later that day, at your university, you saw one of the brightest, sweetest students—a future English teacher who, despite our state government’s assault on education, has not lost her optimism or dedication to her future profession. She graduated from high school with your son. She wears a hijab. She’s Muslim. She tells you, with no anger or fear in her lovely voice, that her neighbor closes his door when she’s outside. It could happen anywhere, she says.

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It’s four days later. Do you still feel it, the heart opened wide with grief? The heart that said, I am holding two heartbroken families inside, I am holding a campus, a community inside. Or has the heart folded in on itself, returned to the size of a fist, doing its work unacknowledged in the dark?

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The work of a weapon.

The work of compassion.

The work of a heart: Taha Muhammad Ali’s heart, his poem “Revenge.”

At times…I wish
I could meet in a duel
the man who killed my father
and razed our home,
expelling me
into
a narrow country.
And if he killed me,
I’d rest at last,
and if I were ready—
I would take my revenge!

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But if it came to light,
when my rival appeared,
that he had a mother
waiting for him,
or a father who’d put
his right hand over
the heart’s place in his chest
whenever his son was late
even by just a quarter-hour
for a meeting they’d set—
then I would not kill him,
even if I could.

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Likewise…I
would not murder him
if it were soon made clear
that he had a brother or sisters
who loved him and constantly longed to see him.
Or if he had a wife to greet him
and children who
couldn’t bear his absence
and whom his gifts would thrill.
Or if he had
friends or companions,
neighbors he knew
or allies from prison or a hospital room,
or classmates from his school…
asking about him
and sending him regards.

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But if he turned
out to be on his own—
cut off like a branch from a tree—
without a mother or father,
with neither a brother nor sister,
wifeless, without a child,
and without kin or neighbors or friends,
colleagues or companions,
then I’d add not a thing to his pain
within that aloneness—
not the torment of death,
and not the sorrow of passing away.
Instead I’d be content
to ignore him when I passed him by
on the street—as I
convinced myself
that paying him no attention
in itself was a kind of revenge.

Nazareth, April 15, 2006

(Translated by Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi, and Gabriel Levin.)

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Craig Stephen Hicks, the man charged with the murder. In his photo, you see him for “who he is”: exactly the kind of man who could do such a thing.

But he has a wife. You saw her make a statement, attorney by her side.

But he has a teacher at Durham Technical Community College who characterizes him as bright, hardworking, and kind.

He is not alone.

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Your heart, just a few days ago, was it wide enough to hold all the damage done by Craig Hicks, the damage caused by a culture, your culture, a culture that helped create Craig Hicks?

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The fathers call for justice.

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Before Tuesday evening, you lived as if you didn’t know you were connected to them, Deah Shaddy Barakat, Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha, and Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha. And, though you don’t want to say it, connected to him, too: Craig Hicks.

For you, the intensity of grief diminishes. It’s 160 hours after the killings. Have you done a thing to help shape a way to live so that others, all the others, yourself included, may lovingly serve, may safely dream and live?

Richard Chess is the author of three books of poetry,Tekiah, Chair in the Desert, and Third Temple. Poems of his have appeared in Telling and Remembering: A Century of American Jewish Poetry, Bearing the Mystery: Twenty Years of IMAGE, and Best Spiritual Writing 2005. He is the Roy Carroll Professor of Honors Arts and Sciences at the University of North Carolina at Asheville. He is also the director of UNC Asheville’s Center for Jewish Studies.

The photo above was found through wikimedia, used under Creative Commons License.