07 November 2021

On the death of my maternal grandmother: an anti-obituary

 Al Jazeera English

On October 18, Colin Powell – former United States secretary of state and war criminal – died of coronavirus-related complications.

The following day, as I was busy writing an article for Al Jazeera titled “Stop being polite – Colin Powell was a killer”, my maternal grandmother Anne died of coronavirus in Florida.

And as with Powell, I felt no need for eulogies.

My grandmother, of course, had wielded considerably less power during her time on earth than had the late statesman. She had not helped fuel the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq, or presided over the 1989 pulverisation of the impoverished Panamanian neighbourhood of El Chorillo – to the extent that local ambulance drivers had begun referring to the area as “Little Hiroshima”.

She had, however, managed to inflict significant psychological, as well as bodily, injury on the persons inhabiting her own little world. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.