Daily Mail 2005

A MOTHER’S ELOQUENCE

It was the most astonishing sight. Dressed in traditional Nigerian clothes, a mother stood  near the wreckage of a London bus. She stood firm, though sometimes her voice began to waver. Like so many of those with hearts are full of anguish as they wait for news of their loved ones, she clutched a precious photograph, which spoke of happy times, of family love. It showed herself, with her pride and joy, her only son, Anthony - the 26 year old old oil executive who couldn’t get to work by Tube so boarded a bus last Thursday morning....

And so it was that Maria Fatayi-Williams, who had flown in from Lagos, became one of the iconic figures of the July 7th atrocity. In simple words she said more than any politician or policeman could manage, try as they might. In staccato sentences she expressed truth about love and morality that the Archbishop of Canterbury might have matched. With powerful eloquence she spoke for mothers down the centuries who have let their tears fall down, as they raised their voices to the implacable heavens to ask, ‘Why?’

I cut out the page in yesterday’s Mail and will keep it in my file of special, inspirational

articles. It will be something I turn to in the future, to remind me (and even an inveterate optimist like me needs reminding sometimes) of all that is majestic about the battered human spirit. But why was it so affecting? There are cogent reasons for the effectiveness of her words - for the fact that hundreds of people must have wept, as I did, to see her on the television news. I believe that in the letter, as well as the spirit, of Maria Fatayi-Williams’s words, there are lessons for us all.

Words should be worthy of the feelings that inspire them. Every minute, all over the world somebody, somewhere is making a speech, whether  a seasoned politician or an embarrassed groom at his own wedding - and usually they are pitiful efforts. When people say what they truly feel, speaking from the heart in phrases which measure its life-affirming beats, everybody notices, because it is so unusual. Something there is to lift the spirits, when somebody dares reach for noble words.

This has never been truer than today, when cynical jokiness, casual colloquialism and gutteral grunting rule. When the  best public figures and private individuals alike seem to manage to encapsulate extreme disappointment or sadness is that inept word. ‘gutted’.  And yet we have a gift of language - the rolling, magnificent, subtle, English language of Shakespeare, Milton, Donne, George Eliot, W.H.Auden - which is is the jewel in the crown of our culture. How strange that it has taken a lady from Lagos to show us what it is capable of. Instinctively using  many devices  from the ancient art of rhetoric, Mrs Fatayi-Williams found a language to match outrage and sorrow which are at once individual and universal.

You cannot separate what she said from how she said it. In the first place, her bewildered anger cut through all the relativism of the most well-meaning in our society - that which suggests we can talk to terrorists, or that somehow actions somewhere else in the world justify slaughter on our streets. Mrs Fatayi-Williams dismissed any supposed aims or justification for barbaric acts of terrorism in seven short paragraphs. Repeatedly ‘death’ hammered home, like a nail in a coffin, with no attempt to understand and forgive those who dealt it to the innocents in New York, Madrid and now London.

By naming Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Ghandi and Martin Luther King, she widened the scope - reminding young hotheads everywhere of the dignity which struggles for freedom gain when their figureheads preach discipline and peace. By invoking ‘God or Allah’ who are ‘full of mercy’ she reminded us how vital it is to disentangle negative fundamentalism from the philosophical strengths inherent within the great faiths, and the emphasis all attach to compassion, to doing good to your fellow men and women. This needs to be said.

How moving it was when this fifty -year old woman from Nigeria used the phrase ‘our common humanity’. All parents watching or reading her speech (perhaps with children in their twenties who have moved beyond our everyday protection, like her beloved Anthony) could identify with her anguish - which transcends race, colour and creed. ‘That could be me’ I thought, as the tears came. That feeling of empathy, that emotional leap towards others, is what can save us from (speaking metaphorically) the devil and all his works. For if you can imagine what it is like to be somebody else, if you can hear the echo of your own sobs within theirs, how can you hate them? How can you think of them as ‘other’? Psychopathic killers who masquerade as martyrs, revolutionaries or freedom fighters are devoid of such feelings; that is what makes them what they are.

And in opposition to the evil  they stand for is the deep love of Christian, Muslim, Jew, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Humanist, Atheist for close family, which (because love is the best of teachers) becomes universal love. That is why Mrs Fatayi-Williams  spoke of the ‘millions’ of friends back home who care about Anthony. She wasn’t talking literally - or was she?  For all of us learn from witnessing such love and once it extends its wings there is no telling where it might fly. This is the universal good which always wages war on the evil which threatens. It’s the ‘love, actually’ which (in the message of that movie) defeats the multifarious evils which seek to divide humanity.  Because in the end what matters is what unites us:  celebrating a wedding full of hope, having a baby, caring for an elderly parent, giving money to a poor person on the street, remembering the hunger pangs of an African child as you enter the supermarket, being able to cry in sympathy with any person searching fruitlessly around Kings Cross.....Nothing is as powerful as that.

The language was fine, the feelings universal, but of course in the end Maria spoke as one mother, desperate to know what had happened to one grownup child. Her pride in this son who had done so well, the repository of all her hopes, rang out in a lament which would not have disgraced a Greek tragedy. Any woman who has carried a child for nine months, endured the pangs of birth, then delighted in every hair on its head, every gurgle, even every cry, will truly understand her feelings. 

That small, slightly plump figure standing on a London street in the typical patterned cotton dress and turban of her country, reminded us that throughout history, and in every corner of the world, it is the mothers who wait and weep - women changed utterly by the act of giving birth. For once you become a mother you are placed permanently on a rack, beset by dread that one day something terrible will happen to your child, which you cannot prevent. That is Mrs Fatayi-Williams’s tragedy, but it is also - strangely - her glory.