Rage, Rage Against the Dying of the Slight

On the 16th of December last year, at a few minutes before 10 a.m. local time, many of the more than 1,000 students and staff of the Army Public School in the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar were celebrating a school event in the main auditorium. An hour later, 132 schoolchildren were dead, mercilessly gunned down by seven gunmen affiliated with the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) who had invaded the school by climbing over a fence. Photographs from the aftermath show a computer lab awash in children’s blood, a small, empty, blood-spattered shoe, and a young boy, still in his prim green school uniform, gripping his bleeding stomach as a tear of pain clings to his cheek. That morning, hundreds of parents in Peshawar, like millions across the globe, had kissed their children goodbye and wished them a productive day at school. That evening, scores of parents were forced to come to terms with the fact that their children had been violently and forever ripped from their lives. Even the parents of the survivors had little to rejoice, trying to explain to their shocked children why their classmates had to die so violently and why they had been forced to watch several of their teachers and their principal, Tahira Kazi, being burned alive in front of them.