Seeing this performance live forced me to conceive, appreciate, and attempt to reconcile the sheer enormity of the suffering precipitated by the Iraq war. Reading, or hearing read the names of both the soldiers and the civilians killed since the invasion is an utterly overwhelming experience. If we choose to recognize the meaning of each of those names we realize that each is the epicenter of several waves of additional destruction. Together they signify a vast swath of anguish amalgamated from the individual experiences of each parent, sibling, relative, friend.
I think that I often reduce the significance of death, overwhelmed by volume. The numbers associated with the well-known genocides and the great wars lose their meaning, for me. How is that I can casually read of the twenty to twenty-five million civilian and military deaths in the Soviet Union during World War II without a thought to what those numbers denote?
When a name replaces a number it begins to hold meaning, value. But why does it take a name to hold meaning? At Bilal's performance, I read from a list of Americans killed in Iraq. I can only imagine what each soldier believed was the significance of what they had been sent to do; what promise they believed a career in the military would offer; where their thoughts gamboled in the instants before death. The Iraqi list was daunting in a different respect: it revealed the destruction of entire households.
From the destruction of Bilal's brother comes a work of living art which compels us to recognize of the significance of the individual death within its overwhelming context.
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