My Name is Rachel Corrie
Page 4
and said
you are never going to eat at Dairy Queen again
I swear it on my mother's grave.
and we drove on
in silence.
Hey
they said
since
you are obviously cracking and made an atrocious breach of
professionalism
do you think
today can be
Mexico day?
and I said
what?
and they said
what?
and I said
what did you just ask me?
and they all stared at me in the rearview mirror
and that's when I realized
nobody
said
anything
at all
but April winked
before I flicked my eyes back to the road
and Kelly said
we've got the car
and I said
yeah.
I got the gas card too.
And Jim said
Sorry your mom's dead
And I said
that's okay Jim
we all deal with loss throughout our lives
and
he said
don't push it
and we sang a lot of Beatles songs
in Oregon
and Good-bye Ruby Tuesday
728 times in California
and The Dead
on the border
and all the voices joined in
on the harmony
for Bobby and Phil.
I look at things the wrong way. I know I do. I know how it feels not to be normal, though. I don't know how it feels to have voices or to sleep in those beds with the white knitted blankets. But yeah, those times when you just know the whole world is out there, patting their stomachs and saying, ‘God bless us, every one.’ And you're inside with the box of blue plastic gloves for cooking and the no-self-harm contracts and the antibacterial hand-cleanser.
How you survive in a nonexistent place.
Make a list:
God
breakfast cereal
the prophet Mohammed
play bus
weapons of mass destruction
corner grocery
tawdry affair
Mel Gibson
sandstorm
venereal disease
malnutrition
proxy government
water contamination
Choices:
1. Go back to Olympia.
Finish school. Talk or presentations about Gaza. Clean out my stuff from Sarah's garage.
2. Go to Egypt or Dubai for a year.
Earn money, learn Arabic. Come back to Palestine.
3. Go to Sweden for one month.
Potentially horrible. Go broke.
4. Try to stay in Rafah.
Money? Productivity?
5. Travel elsewhere.
I think my soul is nomadic. I've always turned my head a little to listen out of one ear to the people speaking in Spanish behind me on the bus. I've always stared upward at airplanes cutting white paths through the sky and wondered where they're going. I've always been jealous of migratory birds.
In a year or two, or maybe next winter, I'll go to South America.
I will smile across the water at the Olympics. When I leave, I'll ride up over the rises and dips of that road that I've been riding over all my life, through the cedars and past the barn. I'll lean out the window when I pass my old high school and scream, ‘Ha Ha Ha! Fuck You! Fuck You!’ just for old times’ sake. I'll get on Highway 101 and when it reaches I-5, I'll either go north towards the airport or south towards Mexico.
When I leave, I'll leave laughing. I'll come back to see my mother and my college friends and to swim naked in Puget Sound at night. And I won't be afraid to come back, like I've always been afraid before. I'll cry, but I'll be smiling, and I'll hug my mom.
She goes to the computer.
March 9th.
Today's Demo.
At least ten greenhouses destroyed. Cucumbers, peas, olives, tomatoes.
Quiet area. 300 people dependent on farms to live.
150-200 men arrested.
Shot around them. Beat them. Six people in hospital.
They don't understand what has happened.
March 13th, 9pm.
Intensive care unit – 12-year-old girl shot from tower in school near Nasser hospital.
11pm – shooting behind West Camp.
Came from settlement into main market – two or three Apaches.
Evacuated apartment building – eight families.
Shot inside hospital – three injured – nurses.
6am – houses demolished.
41 injured.
Mom.
I have bad nightmares about tanks and bulldozers outside our house, and you and me inside. Sometimes the adrenaline acts as an anesthetic for weeks – and then at night it just hits me again a little bit of the reality of the situation. I am really scared for the people here. Yesterday I watched a father lead his two tiny children holding his hand out into the sight of tanks and a sniper tower and bulldozers because he thought his house was going to be exploded.
It was our mistake in translation that made him think this, although I'm sure it is only a matter of time. In fact, the Israeli army was in the process of detonating an explosive in the ground nearby. This is in the area where Sunday about 150 men were rounded up outside the settlement with gunfire over their heads, while tanks and bulldozers destroyed twenty-five greenhouses – the livelihoods of three hundred people. To think that this man felt it was less of a risk to walk out in view of the tanks with his kids than to stay in his house. I was really scared that they were all going to be shot, and I tried to stand between them and the tank. This happens every day, but this father walking out with his two little kids just looking very sad, happened to get my attention more at this particular moment, probably because I felt like it was our translation problems that made him leave.
I thought a lot about what you said about Palestinian violence not helping the situation. 60,000 people from Rafah worked in Israel two years ago. Now only 600 can go there for jobs. Of these 600, many have moved, because the three checkpoints make a 40-minute drive into a 12-hour or impassable journey.
Sources of economic growth are all completely destroyed – the airport (runways demolished, totally closed); the border for trade with Egypt (now with a sniper tower in the middle of the crossing); access to the ocean (completely cut off in the last two years).
There used to be a middle class here – recently. We get reports that in the past, Gazan flower shipments to Europe were delayed for two weeks for security inspections. You can imagine the value of two-week-old cut flowers, so that market dried up. And then the bulldozers come and take out vegetable farms and gardens. What is left for people? Tell me if you can think of anything. I can't.
So when someone says that any act of Palestinian violence justifies Israel's actions not only do I question that logic in light of international law and the right of people to legitimate armed struggle in defence of their land and their families; not only do I question that logic in light of the fourth Geneva Convention which prohibits collective punishment, prohibits the transfer of an occupying country's population into an occupied area, prohibits the expropriation of water resources and the destruction of civilian infrastructure such as farms; not only do I question that logic in light of the notion that fifty-year-old Russian guns and homemade explosives can have any impact on the activities of one of the world's largest militaries, backed by the world's only superpower, I also question that logic on the basis of common sense.
If any of us had our lives and welfare completely strangled and lived with children in a shrinking place where we knew that soldiers and tanks and bulldozers could come for us at any moment, with no means of economic survival and our houses demolished; if they came and
destroyed all the greenhouses that we'd been cultivating for the last however long do you not think, in a similar situation, most people would defend themselves as best they could?
You asked me about non-violent resistance, and I mentioned the first intifada. The vast majority of Palestinians right now, as far as I can tell, are engaging in Gandhian non-violent resistance. Who do you think I'm staying with, in houses that are going to be demolished amid gunfire? Who do you think are staffing the human-rights centers? What do you think this Palestinian-led movement is that I joined that engages in nonviolent direct action? Who do you think these families are that I tell you about, who won't take any money from us even though they are very, very poor, and who say to us: ‘We are not a hotel. We help you because we think maybe you will go and tell people in your country that you lived with Muslims. We think they will know that we are good people. We are quiet people. We just want peace’? Do you think I'm hanging out with Hamas fighters? These people are being shot at every day and they continue to go about their business as best they can in the sights of machine guns and rocket launchers. Isn't that basically the epitome of non-violent resistance?
When that explosive detonated yesterday it broke all the windows in the family's house. I was in the process of being served tea and playing with the two small babies.
I'm having a hard time right now. Just feel sick to my stomach from being doted on very sweetly, by people who are facing doom. I know that from the United States it all sounds like hyperbole. A lot of the time the kindness of the people here, coupled with the willful destruction of their lives, makes it seem unreal to me. I can't believe that something like this can happen in the world without a bigger outcry. It hurts me, again, like it has hurt me in the past, to witness how awful we can allow the world to be.
For a long time I've been operating from a certain core assumption that we are all essentially the same inside, and that our differences are by and large situational. That goes for everybody – Bush, Bin Laden, Tony Blair, me, you, Sarah, Chris, Dad, Gram, Palestinians, everybody of any particular religion. I know there is a good chance that this assumption actually is false. But it's convenient, because it always leads to questions about the way privilege shelters people from the consequences of their actions. It's also convenient because it leads to some level of forgiveness, whether justified or not.
It is my own selfishness and will to optimism that wants to believe that even people with a great deal of privilege don't just idly sit by and watch. What we are paying for here is truly evil. Maybe the general growing class imbalance in the world and consequent devastation of working people's lives is a bigger evil. Being here should make me more aware of what it means to be a farmer in Colombia, for example. Anyway, I'm rambling. Just want to tell my mom that I'm really scared, and questioning my fundamental belief in the goodness of human nature. This has to stop. I think it is a good idea for us all to drop everything and devote our lives to making this stop. I don't think it's an extremist thing to do any more. I still really want to dance around to Pat Benatar and have boyfriends and make comics for my co-workers. But I also want this to stop. Disbelief and horror is what I feel. Disappointment. I am disappointed that this is the base reality of our world and that we, in fact, participate in it. This is not at all what I asked for when I came into this world. This is not at all what the people here asked for when they came into this world. This is not what they are asking for now. This is not the world you and Dad wanted me to come into when you decided to have me. This is not what I meant when I was two and looked at Capitol Lake and said, ‘This is the wide world and I'm coming to it.’
When I come back from Palestine I probably will have nightmares and constantly feel guilty for not being here, but I can channel that into more work. Coming here is one of the better things I've ever done.
I love you and Dad. Sorry for the diatribe.
A door opens.
Okay, some strange men are offering me some peas, so I need to eat and thank them.
She leaves.
From the TV set, a recording of the transcript of an eyewitness account by Tom Dale.
Rachel walked to place herself in between the home and the bulldozer. As the bulldozer turned towards them, it had about 20 metres or 10 seconds clear time directly with her in its view to see where she was. It continued toward her at some pace with a mound of earth building up in front of it. And as the mound of earth reached Rachel she obviously felt that in order to keep her balance, to keep her footing she had to climb on to this mound of earth to prevent being overwhelmed by it. When she did this it put her head and shoulders clearly above the top of the bulldozer blade and therefore clearly in the view of the bulldozer driver, so he knew absolutely that she was there.
She falls down the mound of earth and out of sight of the driver; so he has essentially pushed her forward down the mound of earth. And then she starts to slide and then you see one then both of her feet disappear and he simply continued until she was, or the place where she had been, was directly beneath the cockpit of the bulldozer. They waited a few seconds then withdrew leaving his scoop on the ground. Only later when it was much clear of her body did it raise its scoop.
I ran for an ambulance, she was gasping and her face was covered in blood from a gash cutting her face from lip to cheek. She was showing signs of brain haemorrhaging. She died in the ambulance a few minutes later.
Rachel Corrie
was killed on March 16th, 2003.
A video of Rachel Corrie, aged ten, appears on the screen.
This was recorded at her school's Fifth Grade Press
Conference on World Hunger
‘I'm here for other children.
I'm here because I care.
I'm here because children everywhere are suffering and
because forty thousand people die each day from hunger.
I'm here because those people are mostly children.
We have got to understand that the poor are all around us and we are ignoring them.
We have got to understand that these deaths are preventable.
We have got to understand that people in Third World
countries think and care and smile and cry just like us.
We have got to understand that they dream our dreams and we dream theirs.
We have got to understand that they are us. We are them.
My dream is to stop hunger by the year 2000.
My dream is to give the poor a chance.
My dream is to save the forty thousand people who die each day.
My dream can and will come true if we all look into the future and see the light that shines there.
If we ignore hunger, that light will go out.
If we all help and work together, it will grow and burn free with the potential of tomorrow.’
A Nick Hern Book
My Name is Rachel Corrie first published in Great Britain as a paperback original in 2005 by Nick Hern Books Limited, The Glasshouse, 49a Goldhawk Road, London W12 8QP, in association with the Royal Court Theatre
This revised edition published in 2005
This ebook edition first published in 2014
My Name is Rachel Corrie copyright © 2005 The Estate of Rachel Corrie
Cover image: Rachel Corrie at Mima Mounds, Washington, courtesy of the Corrie family
Typeset by Country Setting, Kingsdown, Kent CT14 8ES
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78001 246 9 (ebook edition)
ISBN 978 1 85459 946 9 (print edition)
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