The Girl in a Bowl

I didn’t believe it when I heard there was a person with only a head, who lived in a bowl. It reminded me of my favorite publication from many years ago, a parody of the National Enquirer that featured a “human Interest” story about a head that lived on a velvet pillow. In the tradition of such stories, the head, a little boy, was brave and spunky and loved sports. He was the ball, obviously.

Anyway, I learned about Rahma Haruna, a Nigerian teenager who lived in a plastic bowl. A photo of her went viral, and someone bought her family a wheelchair to transport the bowl around. Before that, she was carried into the village every day by her younger brother, to beg for alms.

The Girl in a Bowl story is so loaded with meaning and resonance that I hardly know where to begin but here we go.

Last night, a friend came over and we discussed our antidepressants, a first-world problem if ever there was one but nevertheless we struggle. My antidepressant has stopped working and the friend is on a new one, Lexipro. It provides a feeling of numbness, which is good, but it’s fucking with their ability to be creative, and has muted their sense of humor.

In my effort to be helpful, I said, “No, not true! You thought the girl in a bowl was funny and you laughed!” Further, I pointed out, not everyone would respond by laughing. It bespeaks a particular dark and perverse sense of humor, the kind that is natural to people like us, the kind we need to survive.

So my friend agreed. I didn’t go on to quote whoever it was who said that suicide is the failure of the sense of humor. I believe this to be true. It’s not always beneficial to blurt out, though.

Moving along, the Girl in a Bowl Story is an example of courage that is beyond our imagination. Not only that, but Rahma Haruna hoped to one day own a grocery store.

Just think about this. With all my limbs, I know I couldn’t run a grocery store. I can’t even put the groceries away efficiently. I never thought of myself as an entrepreneur, lazy and stupid as I am. I have only dreamed of doing nothing.

Self-worth, courage, dignity, stoicism, hope, faith, perseverance, what else does it take to live in a bowl? In pictures of Rahma, who died in 2016, she wears eye-shadow and sometimes a radiant smile. God bless this girl and her beautiful spirit, even though if there were a god, he’d owe her a huge apology.

I usually hate those quadriplegic people who want to climb Mt. Everest, and I blame them for trying to make the rest of us look bad. But this is not that. This is kind of sui generis, I feel. And it raises the question, can you find humor in tragedy without being a mean person? Is laughing antithetical to compassion? Can you mock something while being humbled by it?

I’m going to say yes, and not just to defend myself and my friend. It doesn’t quite fit here but nonetheless I will quote Oscar Wilde on Dickens. “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.”

He was talking about sentimentality but I think this applies to the horror of existence, to bearing up under difficult circumstances. You need to find the humor. For many of us, it is absolutely essential. I hope to suffer like Samuel Beckett and Oscar Wilde, rather than Sylvia Plath, who had no idea how funny she would look with her legs sticking out of the oven.