The Child Madonna - "Postscript"

Statues of the Virgin Mary depict a European woman in her late twenties or thirties, aloof, so pure that some claim she always remained a virgin, some that not only she, but also her mother, was untouched by human procreation. Painted masterpieces down through the ages depict the Madonna as a mature mother, haloed, looking at us in serene satisfaction. To me this is a puzzle. How could such a person have produced one of the greatest revolutionaries of civilisation, someone who rethought and challenged the traditions and perceptions of his culture and founded another?

Why should God have chosen such a woman? Her son was accused of befriending drunks, outcasts and fallen women. He was executed by the Romans as a rebel and criminal in the most humiliating circumstances. Why could not have God used a soiled vessel as mother, whose soul was honest, unprejudiced, open to his will? Surely the founder of Christianity would have inherited some of the genes and character of his biological mother, so where is that gutsy free-thinking life-enhancing energy to be sourced? Is it all one-sided from divine intervention? Surely some must be in the mother’s character as well.

Mary would have been young. Jewish girls in the first century came of age and were marriageable at puberty, set at twelve and a half years. The raw conservative culture of an obscure Galilean village - as opposed to the sophistication of the capital city, or even of Romanised cities in northern Israel, Sepphoris, Tiberius and Caesarea - would have ostracised and made an example of a girl suspected of breaking the taboos of her society, by becoming pregnant outside of wedlock. She would have had a rough time.

Violence was not just prevalent in ancient Jewish society (as it was in most other societies and still is in some) but was a matter of course in the discipline of children. There are many biblical and talmudic references of the need to discipline a child through corporal punishment, lest the child not learn from his or her mistakes and wrongdoing, and this led later to capital penalties such as stoning, burning, decapitation or strangling which were all permitted in ancient Jewish law for such crimes as idolatry, adultery, incest and murder. There are clear references to the situations in which fathers may beat their sons (and by implication, daughters) severely to avoid the disgrace of the child incurring the death penalty later, or even rules about when a father shall not be punished if he actually kills his son in the course of discipline. Mary was a child of this society and culture.

This book then, is my vision of the Madonna. It is my painting, my Madonna and Child. It is as valid as all those statues, old masters. You may not like it, but I am entitled to offer my interpretation too. It may not be true, this is after all presented as a novel, as fiction, but perhaps it holds within it a grain of truth. As her son famously said at his trial by the Roman Governor, ‘what is truth?’

Today in the twenty first century, there are still girls and young women suffering as I depict Mary did. It is still lawful in a few countries, mainly in the Middle East, to condemn children to death and even the United States only banned the use of the death penalty for under eighteen year olds a couple of years ago by a 5-4 margin at the Supreme Court, after years of campaigning by many both in and outside the USA. Still girls are murdered by their brothers, uncles, fathers even, because of some chauvinist tribal tradition that holds a girl in shame and disgrace because she has been raped or tried to escape from some forced or abusive marriage. There are still girls like Rachel in this story, trafficked and sold into the sex trade and then treated as criminals instead of victims. There are still girls and young women condemned to be executed because of the sin of sex outside marriage. If you do not believe me, look at the files held by various human rights organisations.

For example, on 15th August, 2004, Atefeh Rajabi was publicly hanged in Neka, in the northern province of Mazandaran, Iran, for ‘acts incompatible with chastity’ following allegations of a sexual relationship outside marriage. Her identity card gave her age as 16, but the Mazadaran judiciary claimed she was 22. According to press reports, she was mentally ill at the time of the offence and the trial, and she had no access to legal representation. The Observer newspaper on 16th October 2005 interviewed Maryam Namazie, an Iranian woman campaigning for the rights of Iranian women, including the case above, the article quoted her as saying about the obsessiveness of the theocracy there:

“The law in Iran not only allows women to be stoned, but it specifies the size of the stones to be used; they mustn’t be too small in case it takes too long to kill her and the mob gets bored; but mustn’t be too big either, in case she is despatched immediately and the mob is denied the sado-sexual pleasure of seeing her suffer.”

Such abuse is not only prevalent in the Middle East and in countries of the area with common traditions and religion. Abuse of women and girls takes place widely in Central and South America, with the authorities frequently being unwilling to arrest or prosecute the perpetrators of violence against women, or often even admit that violence is a crime, especially if the abuse is by a member of the victim’s family or the police or military. Widespread abuse of women and girls has taken place in parts of Africa, especially in times of civil unrest and conflict. And the so-called developed countries in the West are all too often scarred by extreme violence and neglect suffered by some of its children.

Some of you may find the level of violence perpetrated against Mary in this story intolerable or unacceptable, but I assure you, it is no less than much abuse for similar reasons still abounding in the world today. If you feel angry at the treatment of the heroine of this fictional story, then try to change things, remembering the words of Jesus quoted in Matthew 25, verse 40, following his description of the last judgement when addressing those who have fed the hungry, housed the homeless, clothed the naked, or visited the sick and those in prison:

“I tell you, whenever you did this for one of the least important of these members of my family, you did it for me!”

For me, that challenge was in the eyes of the small streetgirl on Bombay Churchgate station to whom this book is dedicated. I do not know what became of her. Perhaps she too had the potential to fulfil God’s will - but the evils of this world stifled that opportunity before it could ever flourish.