A Memory, a Monologue, a Rant, and a Prayer

by Eve Ensler

  She was not finished. She walked with us. She began to walk next to my sisters and me. She said nothing; she only walked while holding our hands, becoming part of our group. She walked for an hour before the men realized she was still with us. One of them turned and saw her. Then they all began to talk loudly to one another and then to her. My mother spoke some Arabic and she told them that she would continue to walk wherever we went. She held on to the rope that bound us all and said that she was part of the rope now. She said she would walk as we walked, and would always be with us, unless they killed her.

  One of the men went for his sword but he was restrained. One man, who looked like the youngest, got off his horse and cut the rope. We were the last five on the rope. He cut it and kicked my mother in the stomach. He got on his horse and spit in our direction and then the group walked on without us. They were finished with us. “Fuck them!” they all said and rode off.

  We ran in the other direction. My mother led us, running with her knife hands. We got off the road and ran through the grass and we slept in holes as we traveled back to the South. We ran for two more days until we saw our village again. The day we returned, it rained heavier than I have seen in many years and this was God crying with joy. He cried and cried for us, for a full day he cried while my mother danced and sang and ran around the village like she was possessed.

  Dear Ama

  Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy

  Dear Ama [Mother],

  I sat there wearing this red and gold wedding scarf you stitched for me. Sewing up your happiness, not mine. You told me that he was tall and fair. That he was young and healthy. You promised me I would be happy. Then he arrived with his family. He wasn’t my age. He was older. Much older. His beady eyes leered at my breasts. Did you not see the scars on his face? I wanted to scream, but I couldn’t, for my father’s dignity and my father’s pride.

  Bright lights. The music. Everything made me dizzy. You made me sit there and smile.

  You clapped and laughed as the musicians played their drums. You didn’t feel my anguish, did you? You offered food to the guests. You smiled for the photographer, and you even embraced your future son-in-law. I watched the clock as it slowly ticked away. Ticked away my freedom. No longer a daughter, just a bride.

  Run! my heart said. Run. But my legs didn’t have the strength. Where would I go? Village women don’t run away … we have nowhere to hide. In any case, Bhai [brother] would find me. The village would shame me.

  I don’t want what happened to Naheed in the neighboring village to happen to me. I don’t want the village council to decide my punishment. I don’t want to be gang-raped by ten men in a hut. I can still hear Naheed’s screams. “Save me!” “Please, anyone … help me!”

  I was playing with my doll, Gudi. She was red, like the clay in our village. I loved dressing her in gold wedding outfits. That’s when you signed my life away. How could anyone decide the fate of a five-year-old? Seven men, seven village elders, decided what I was to do for the rest of my life. My uncle committed the murder, and I would pay by marrying the victim’s uncle. Seven men decided the fate of a five-year-old girl … me.

  You promised your only daughter in marriage to the enemy. He is fifty-five years old, Mother.

  I know how to read and write, yet I have no control over my life. I am his property now. He owns me. I will be his servant-mistress. He has waited eleven long years to take revenge, and revenge he will take. He has the right to beat me, to lock me within the four walls of his house. Even to kill me. My pleas and my wails will go unheard.

  Your laughter still haunts me. Your izzat [honor] is more important to you than your daughter.

  As I repeated after the village mullah [priest] “I have made myself your wife,” I heard his voice: “I have accepted the marriage.” And I quietly prayed for my death.

  You told me that Islam gave me the right to choose my own husband, and then you took that right away from me. What rights do I have when I’m bundled off to my new owner like the cows in our fields? You lied.

  They are waiting, Mother. They are waiting to take the bride to the groom’s house. They are asking, “Where is the bride?”

  This bride no longer wears red on her head. This bride wears white.

  This procession, these drums, will take me not to the house down the street but to the graveyard by the river.

  I chose freedom, Mother.

  Yours

  Beti [Daughter]

  Bitter Coffee

  Jody Williams

  THIS HAPPENED AT THE END OF THE 1980s. MY WRITING OF IT, THEN MY READING IT BEFORE TWO THOUSAND PEOPLE IN NEW YORK CITY AT EVE ENSLER’S “UNTIL THE VIOLENCE STOPS: NYC” EVENT, WAS MY FIRST PUBLIC STATEMENT ABOUT THIS INCIDENT.

  El Salvador. Once I come out of my burnout after eleven years of trying to participate in their fight, the word will probably again send shivers down my spine—it’s a word that still conjures up visions of vulture spirals over garbage dumps full of mutilated bodies. Or men and women suspended by body parts not meant for suspension in the not so secret torture chambers of the security forces. Or priests and nuns sacrificed on the altars of death-squad savagery to feed the rabid need of the country’s elites to maintain their own version of a divine right of kings to run their little backwater country as they see fit to ensure their ability to send their families shopping at will in New York or Paris or New Orleans at the expense of others who can barely feed their own—if you can call salt and tortillas and bitter coffee a meal.

  I, too, drank of a bitter coffee. This blond-haired, blue-eyed gringa infused with a mission to stop the killing: not another Vietnam; not in my name. Fresh from white-bread country, white-snow country, eating rice and beans and pupusas. Walking with the poor to liberate them from years—no, centuries—no, millennia of oppression. Intellectually engaged, analyzing the situation, there in body if not truly in spirit. How could theirs really ever be mine?

  Flying north, home with the family, who willfully ignore my realities because it’s just too scary to think of me there. Why won’t she just get a “real” job and stay home where she belongs, for God’s sake? Off to L.A. to find support for this righteous cause. Now south again—semipermanent jet lag and a mildly schizophrenic haze, trying to remember which person to be in which locale.

  Back in Salvador, in a little apartment-hotel, sitting by its little pool. My escape through reading broken suddenly by three young men canonballing their entrance into the pool. Now trying to ignore their press of questions of what I do, why I do it, why am I here, in Salvador, now? Best not to answer those kinds of questions asked by those kinds of young men in that kind of place—pretty clear they don’t walk with any poor. But what’s the harm in joking around a bit? Can’t I escape for a while from the boredom of a Sunday when not much work can be done ’cause everyone in Salvador seems to be at church?

  Okay, okay. I’ll go to dinner. Just this once. You seem nice enough—sort of. And of course it is you of the three who invites me to dinner—you so clearly in charge in that pool. We dine and you talk. Amazing how much people will talk about themselves if you ask them those little one-word questions that somehow miraculously keep people spinning out more and more of their story and make it possible not to have to tell much of one’s own.

  You talk about yourself and what you do. Or did. You say “did.” Not “do.” Not anymore. Too much stress in the job. Too difficult keeping all those guns under your bed. In your bed. Always worrying if they’d come to get you in the night. It got so you sweated and trembled through the night, worrying that all those guns wouldn’t be enough to protect you from the enemy. “They’re everywhere, you know,” you tell me, your now half-crazed eyes a blazing red. Enemies? Everywhere? Are yours the same as mine? I wonder—knowing without wanting to know that they most certainly are not.

  Somehow I manage to keep it together, enduring your diatribe through that dinner from hell while I try like hell to will it to an end. You don’t seem to feel or sme
ll my fear as you drive me back to my apartment-hotel where the security guard opens the locked gates and I slip in, escaping from you to the safety of my inner room as deep inside that little hotel as an inner room could possibly be.

  Take refuge in your reading, Jody. That didn’t really happen. You didn’t really just have dinner with the death squad. One of their own. One from those notorious death squads—they who assassinated the Archbishop, raped and murdered the four American churchwomen, to say nothing of the tens of thousands of nameless dead they’ve slaughtered in their frenzy of savagery. What the hell were you thinking, going to dinner with a man like that! You knew he wasn’t on our side. Where in the hell did you put your political judgment, to make that stupid fucking decision, born of your boredom and your incipient burnout!

  Tap, tap, tap.

  Tap, tap, tap? Who could possibly be at my door? No one can come in here once those gates are locked. I didn’t call the desk to let anyone in. Who the hell is bugging me now? I wonder as I open the door to you and those blazing red eyes. Your menace fills my room as you back me to the edge of the bed—the only place in the sparse room to sit and chat—and we “chat” as you tell me you noticed I never spoke about me and what I do here.

  You spit out the words that people like me are not welcome here. And do I know I’d better be careful here? Your hot breath and hotter words sear my brain as your death-squad hands start to touch me, and the bile rises in my throat at the vile certainty of what will come next. No love in those death-squad hands. No lust in those death-squad hands, unless you count the bloodlust of threat and violence.

  Do I scream out loud, or do I “just” scream inside? What difference would either scream make—except perhaps the choice of the loud scream that most likely would make your eyes blaze even more and remind you of those guns and those dead nuns. So I continue my now-practiced endurance, as I did at dinner. No refuge there, even in a roomful of people. What refuge here, alone in the room of the hotel I now know to be owned by your uncle.

  Your hate penetrates me and I endure, waiting for you to exit me and leave this room in your uncle’s hotel. And when you finally do, I cannot tell if it has been a minute or an eternity, but I do note that there is no smirk of the sexual conqueror on your death-squad face as you snarl your parting shot: “Watch out. I know who you are.”

  The door closes softly, and I force myself to pick up my book. “Read!” I command myself, forcing my eyes to move across a page I cannot really see. Keep your breathing as shallow as possible until the noxious vapors of death dissipate. That didn’t really just happen. If you never talk about it, it will never be real. If you never talk about it, no one can question your political judgment. If you never talk about it, no one can ever say, “What the hell were you thinking when you made that stupid fucking decision …”

  Untitled

  Nicholas D. Kristof

  It is a languid afternoon in the red-light district of Phnom Penh, Cambodia. With a male interpreter, I walk inside one brothel and sit down and begin to interview a girl named Sriy.

  Sriy is thirteen and looks about eleven. She laughs like a little child one moment, teasing me for not speaking Khmer. But then she chokes up as she points to the charred remains of a brothel two doors away, where two girls were burned to death because they had been permanently chained to their beds.

  Sriy breaks down when I ask her how she came to be here. Bitterly, she tells how her father died, how her mother remarried a terrible man who beat her, and how the couple became overwhelmed with medical bills and decided to sell Sriy to raise money.

  Most of the venom is heaped on her stepfather, but Sriy admits that her own mother acquiesced in the sale. I ask her if she hates her mother. She fights tears as she says no. “Mom was sick and needed money,” she says, adding, “I don’t hate her.” But she begins to play with a piece of brittle plastic on the table, breaking it with her slender fingers, violently crushing it into smaller and smaller pieces.

  Sriy introduces me to her best friend, another girl in the brothel, who is fifteen. She tells me how the friend was kidnapped and sold to this brothel, but the mother searched all around Cambodia for her. Finally, a week before my visit, the mother came to this brothel and found her daughter. They had a joyful reunion, but the brothel owner refused to release the girl, for whom she had paid good money. And so the mother had to leave empty-handed.

  The brothel owner, a stout middle-aged woman, is impatient with me. She trots over and urges me to take the girls to a room in back. She pulls the girls’ shirts down to reveal their breasts—or, in the case of Sriy, the nipple of what will eventually become a breast if she lives long enough. “You like?” she asks in broken English.

  I put the brothel owner off and order more drinks from her. She overcharges for them, so she grumbles and retreats.

  In my heart, I want to buy Sriy and her friend and set them free. But journalists aren’t supposed to get involved. I push the thought back deep in my mind. At dusk, I walk out of the brothel, leaving the two girls behind. I know that I have emerged with a good story that will end up on the New York Times front page, that I have profited from these girls, and that they will stay behind and die of AIDS. I’m just one more man who has come into the brothel and exploited Sriy, getting what he wanted and leaving her behind.

  That was ten years ago this spring. Sriy and her friend are almost certainly dead by now, though they haunt me still. I failed them.

  My House Is Wallpapered with Lies

  Carol Gilligan

  THIS PIECE WAS INSPIRED BY YEARS OF CONVERSATIONS WITH ELEVEN- AND TWELVE-YEAR-OLD GIRLS, MANY DURING THE COURSE OF AFTER-SCHOOL WRITING AND THEATER WORKSHOPS. THE TITLE IS A DIRECT QUOTE FROM AN ELEVEN-YEAR-OLD FIFTH GRADER IN THE CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS, PUBLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM.

  The girl is played by three girls, eleven or twelve years old. They should be physically different from one another, but should all look like girls, not teenagers. When they speak, they speak directly to the audience. They do not interact with one another; they represent different versions of one girl. When the lights come up, they will be standing separately on the stage, each girl in her own spot, S at stage center, A at stage right, Z at stage left.

  (Stage dark)

  ALL: Mommy …

  (Silence)

  (She shouts)

  A: Mom-mee!

  Z: Mom-mee!

  S: Mom-mee!

  (The lights come up on three girls standing separately on the stage)

  A: I’m in my room.

  (Pause)

  Z: No, you come here.

  (Pause)

  S: I did ask nicely.

  (Pause)

  A: She’s not going to come.

  S: Maybe because she’s mad at me. About that dress with the polka dots. She said—

  Z: “Well, what do you think of it?”

  S: And I said, “I don’t like it,” and she got really mad. She put it back, but then she forgets about what happens when I really give her my opinion. She says—

  A: “Tell me what you really think about it.”

  S: And I say, “Well, you don’t really want to know, because you scream at me when I say it.”

  A: Still, last night I told her, “Mom, I’m angry at you because whenever you and Daddy fight, you always give in.”

  Z: It was like there was a blizzard in her face. Then she said—

  S: “Maggie, you’re a child, you don’t understand.”

  A: I hate it when grown-ups say that, because I do understand.

  Z: It’s mostly my brother he hits. Hearing him crying is worse than being actually hit myself. In the house we lived in until I was nine, we used to run into the woods and hide.

  A: But here there’s no place to hide. They call it spanking—

  S: But he uses his belt.

  A: That’s not spanking—

  S: It’s beating.

  (Pause)

  Z: Mommy—I need you to come here now.

  (Pa
use)

  A: There’s something I need to tell you.

  (Pause)

  S: She said if I want to talk to her, I should come into her bedroom. But I can’t. She wants me to see it her way.

  Z: Last night—

  A: He hit her. I saw it.

  S: They were arguing, and it was so loud I couldn’t go to sleep.

  A: I crept out of my bed and sat on the stairs.

  Z: She said something to him, and he just hit her, flat on the cheek.

  S: Then this voice burst out of me.

  ALL: “Stop it.”

  A: They froze.

  S: They didn’t know I was watching.

  Z: I started crying.

  A: I felt like I was going to throw up.

  S: “She didn’t do anything,” I said. And he said—

  Z: “Don’t ever call your mother ‘she.’ ”

  S: In school, we were talking about religion. Mrs. Rhys explained about the Church and Galileo, how he discovered that the earth moves by looking through his telescope and watching the moons of Jupiter.

  A: We have a telescope, but all we can see is our moon.

  Z: Then it was so funny. Mrs. Rhys was reading us the story about Noah’s ark, and Matt, this boy in our class, said—

  A: “Wouldn’t there have been a lot of animal stuff on Noah’s ark after forty days?”

  Z: Everyone laughed, even Mrs. Rhys. Then I said—

  S: “If we’re all God’s children and God loves all His children, why does God make floods and war? Why does God make people violent?”

  Z: People didn’t appreciate these questions. There were a bunch of them who just sat there like stones.