Pearl Read Online Free PDF Page B

ordinary uniforms. This they would not do. They stripped themselves naked, wrapped themselves in blankets, and took the name of Blanket Men. The guards became truly sadistic; Pearl read Bobby Sands’s stories of having his testicles squeezed and his anus violated; having his toilet privileges denied, his food pissed in, his shit not emptied from the pot they gave him; given food that crawled with maggots. The kind of detail her mother would have read of the martyrs to the Romans, the Communists. But her mother would have read them triumphantly; Pearl had to force herself to go on.
    .  .  .  
    In protest against their filthy conditions, the prisoners treated the wardens with some of their own. They refused to wash; they wiped their shit on the walls of their cells. They called this the Dirty Protest, but these words were inadequate for Pearl. Blanket Men. Dirty Protests: she felt the cold, the filth, the wafer-thin foam mattresses soaked in urine, the plastic pen refill Bobby Sands hid up his rectum so he could pull it out and write on scraps of toilet paper the poems that were in his head, that he was denied permission to write. Pearl could not help noticing: the poems weren’t very good. Then she despised herself for such a thought. What did it matter if the language was clichéd if you hid the means of writing it up your ass, if you risked being beaten senseless to write it at all? You had to think of poetry in a new way, she told herself; you had to think of everything in a new way if someone was willing to give up so much.
    There were some things she didn’t understand. It seems that Bobby Sands and his comrades went on hunger strikes to protest being classified as ordinary prisoners. Margaret Thatcher stood firm: Bobby Sands and his kind were criminals, and criminals they would be called. She stood by as Bobby Sands starved himself to death. Eight weeks it took: he suffered horrible stomach cramps; he went blind; he lapsed into a coma. Then, as the world watched, he died. He was twenty-eight years old.
    Margaret Thatcher let Bobby Sands die—and nine others who followed him—because the force of their deaths was less strong than the force of her determination not to be defied. Some commentators thought her being a woman made it even more important to her that she appear strong. In the end, those deaths were strong enough to turn the head of the world; not strong enough for one woman to give up her terror of appearing to be weak and allow these men to call themselves political prisoners, a name she thought incorrect.
    Sometimes Pearl asked herself, Did Bobby Sands die for an issue of language? And if so, what did that mean about language’s power? And the power of his ideas, which frightened her: peace at the end of a gun? The words didn’t make sense to her. But she knew they must be made to make sense because someone died for them. It was the first time the thought came to her: the strength of offering up your life.
     
    Pearl couldn’t get enough of Bobby Sands, but that was true of many people, in and out of Ireland. She took herself to the Sinn Féin bookstore to buy everything they had about him: posters and books and CDs of songs recorded by his fellow prisoners, songs about him, songs that yearned for the hills and the trees and the birds, songs about monsters of imperialism, one about the British occupiers called “Strangers, Devils, and Thieves.” She was drawn most not to the image of the smiling boy with the rebellious, playful, counterculture hair but to the bearded figure, whom she would not have thought of the way natives of Catholic Ireland would have: as a figure of the suffering Savior, Christ on the road to Calvary beneath his cross.
     
    Bobby Sands pictures, tapes, bumper stickers, T-shirts, key chains, ashtrays, scarves. The artifacts of veneration. It didn’t occur to Pearl, but if Joseph had seen the Sinn Féin bookstore he would have understood that they were both in the same