I went because of grassroots Israeli feminists: the opportunity to meet with them in Haifa, Tel Aviv, and Jerusalem; to talk with those organizing against violence against women on all fronts; to learn more about the situation of women in Israel. I planned to stay on—if I had, I also would have spoken at and for the rape crisis center in Jerusalem. In Haifa, where both Phyllis Chesler and I spoke to a packed room (which included Palestinian women and some young Arab men) on child custody and pornography in the United States, women were angry about the establishment conference—its tepid feminist agenda, its exclusion of the poor and of Palestinian feminists. One woman, maybe in her sixties, with an accent from Eastern Europe, maybe Poland, finally stood up and said approximately the following: “Look, it’s just another conference put on by the Amerikans like all the others. They have them like clockwork. They use innocents like these”—pointing to Phyllis and me—“who don’t know any better.” Everyone laughed, especially us. I hadn’t been called an innocent in a long time, or been perceived as one either. But she was right. Israel brought me to my knees. Innocent was right. Here’s what compromised my innocence, such as it was.
I. THE LAW OF RETURN
Jewish women attended the establishment conference from many countries, including Argentina, New Zealand, India, Brazil, Belgium, South Africa, and the United States. Each woman had more right to be there than any Palestinian woman born there, or whose mother was born there, or whose mother’s mother was born there. I found this morally unbearable. My own visceral recognition was simple: I don’t have a right to this right.
The Law of Return says that any Jew entering the country can immediately become a citizen; no Jew can be turned away. This law is the basis for the Jewish state, its basic principle of identity and purpose. Orthodox religious parties, with a hefty share of the vote in recent elections, wanted the definition of “Jewish” narrowed to exclude converts to Judaism not converted by Orthodox rabbis, according to Orthodox precepts. Women at the establishment conference were mobilized to demonstrate against this change in the Law of Return. The logic used to mobilize the women went as follows: “The Right is doing this. The Right is bad. Anything the Right wants is bad for women. Therefore, we, feminists, must oppose this change in the Law of Return.” Fight the Right. In your heart you know the fight is for the sake of women, but don’t tell anyone else: not Shamir, not the Orthodox rabbis, not the press; but especially not the Amerikan Jewish boys who are sponsoring your conference, who are in Israel right then and there to lobby Shamir and to keep an eye on the girls. Fight the Right. Find an issue important to Jewish men and show up as the women’s auxiliary. Make them proud. And don’t offend them or upset them by making them stand with you—if they want you there—for the rights of women.
Protesting the change in the Law of Return was presented at the establishment conference as “taking a first step” against the power of the Orthodox rabbis. Because the power of these men over the lives of Jewish women in Israel is already vast and malignant, “taking a first step” against them—without mentioning any of the ways in which they are already tyrants over women—wasn’t just inadequate; it was shameful. We needed to take a real step. In Israel, Jewish women are basically—in reality, in everyday life—governed by Old Testament law. So much for equality of the sexes. The Orthodox rabbis make most of the legal decisions that have a direct impact on the status of women and the quality of women’s lives. They have the final say on all issues of “personal status,” which feminists will recognize as the famous private sphere in which civilly subordinate women are traditionally imprisoned. The Orthodox rabbis decide questions of marriage, adultery, divorce, birth, death, legitimacy; what rape is; and whether abortion, battery, and rape in marriage are legal or illegal. At the protest, feminists did not mention women. How did Israel get this way—how did these Orthodox rabbis get the power over women that they have? How do we dislodge them, get them off women? Why isn’t there a body of civil law superseding the power of religious law that gives women real, indisputable rights of equality and self-determination in this country that we all helped build? I’m forty-four; Israel is forty-two; how the hell did this happen? What are we going to do about it now? How did Jewish feminists manage not to “take a first step” until the end of 1988—and then not mention women? The first step didn’t amount to a feminist crawl.
II. THE CONDITION OF JEWISH WOMEN IN ISRAEL IS ABJECT
Where I live things aren’t too good for women. It’s not unlike Crystal Night all year long given the rape and battery statistics—which are a pale shadow of the truth—the incest, the pornography, the serial murders, the sheer savagery of the violence against women. But Israel is shattering. Sisters: we have been building a country in which women are dog shit, something you scrape off the bottom of your shoe. We, the “Jewish feminists.” We who only push as far as the Jewish men here will allow. If feminism is serious, it fights sex hierarchy and male power and men don’t get to stand on top of you, singly or in clusters, for forever and a day. And you don’t help them build a country in which women’s status gets lower and lower as the men get bigger and bigger—the men there and the men here. From what I saw and heard and learned, we have helped to build a living hell for women, a nice Jewish hell. Isn’t it the same everywhere? Well, “everywhere” isn’t younger than I am; “everywhere” didn’t start out with the equality of the sexes as a premise. The low status of women in Israel is not unique but we are uniquely responsible for it. I felt disgraced by the way women are treated in Israel, disgraced and dishonored. I remembered my Hebrew school principal, the Holocaust survivor, who said I had to be a Jew first, an Amerikan second, and a citizen of the world, a human being last, or I would have the blood of Jews on my hands. I’ve kept quiet a long time about Israel so as not to have the blood of Jews on my hands. It turns out that I am a woman first, second, and last—they are the same; and I find I do have the blood of Jews on my hands—the blood of Jewish women in Israel.
(…)
I remember the heat of the Jerusalem sun. Hundreds of women dressed in black were massed on the sidewalks of a big public square in Jerusalem. Women in Black began in Jerusalem at the same time as the intifada, with seven women who held a silent vigil to show their resistance to the occupation. Now the hundreds of women who participate each week in three cities are met with sexual derision and sometimes stones. Because the demonstrations are women-only, they are confrontational in two ways: these are Israelis who want peace with Palestinians; these are women who are standing on public ground. Women held signs in Hebrew, Arabic, and English saying: END THE OCCUPATION. An Arab vendor gave some of us, as many as he could reach, gifts of grapes and figs to help us fight the heat. Israeli men went by shouting insults—men called out insults from passing cars—the traffic was bumper to bumper, with the men trying to get home before Sabbath eve, when Jerusalem shuts down. There were also men with signs who screamed that the women were traitors and whores.
Along with most of the demonstrators, I had come from the postconference organized by the grassroots, secular feminists. The post-conference was chaired by Nabila Espanioli, a Palestinian woman who spoke Hebrew, English, and Arabic. Palestinian women came out of the audience to give first-person testimony about what the occupation was doing to them. They especially spoke about the brutality of the Israeli soldiers. They talked about being humiliated, being forcibly detained, being trespassed on, being threatened. They spoke about themselves and about women. For Palestinian women, the occupation is a police state and the Israeli secret police are a constant danger; there is no “safe space.” I already knew that I had Palestinian blood on my hands. What I found out in Israel is that it isn’t any easier to wash off than Jewish blood—and that it is also female.
I had met Nabila my first night in Israel, in Haifa, at the home of an Israeli woman who gave a wonderful welcoming party. It was a warm, fragrant night. The small, beautiful apartment open to the night air was filled with women from Jerusalem, T
el Aviv, Haifa—feminists who fight for women, against violence. It was Sabbath eve and there was a simple feminist ceremony—a breaking of bread, one loaf, everyone together; secular words of peace and hope. And then I found myself talking with this Palestinian woman. She talked a mile a minute about pornography. It was her field of study and she knew it inside out, recognized herself in it, under it, violated by it. She told me it was the focus of her resistance to both rape and sexualized racism. She, too, wanted freedom and it was in her way. I thought: with this between us, who can pull us apart? We see women with the same eyes.
In Israel, there are the occupied and the occupied: Palestinians and women. In the Israel I saw, Palestinians will be freer sooner. I didn’t find any of my trees.
MY SUICIDE
1999
(1)
I was in Paris. I had become old, fifty-two, and I was tired. I had fought the battles of my time: I fought the Vietnam War, the civilian side of it, against the government, and I had won. But the War was about everything—race, war, nuclear war, sex, gender, a word unused even though the fights were more about gender because I was a girl who argued. I haven’t been near my family in three decades except in hospital rooms, where my mother died, where my father now languishes.
I’ve loved my father my whole life. He’s the best person I’ve ever known. Soon he will die. His father, Morris, lived to be 105. In his last twenty years I never saw my grandfather; I liked him but I never saw him, which brings up what my mother had said when his wife, my Grandma Rose, died: you cry when they die but when they’re alive you don’t want to be around them. I was nine then and I’ve never forgotten her charge, nor the others she made against me over a lifetime. When I got too tired of it I stopped loving my mother, one of the great accomplishments of my life. To stop loving your mother creates a cold place in your heart and you write from there. I wish I could be cold all the way through.
Vicious but the truth was vicious: I didn’t want to be around my family; they were all worse than strangers to me. I despised their houses and their rules. I disliked their lack of courtesy. I hated the family gatherings. I hated the mass think of them all. I would go on long walks alone to places that were new to me, I would have poetic melancholy spiked with Salinger, I would make friends with the juvenile delinquent boys, I was tough but no one knew. Girls couldn’t be tough but I was. I kept it hidden.
I am a fierce enemy of death. Its inevitability is cruel and wrong. One friend says that death is a form of violence and that it must be ended and we can end it and will end it. Even I didn’t buy that, and I’m still a sixties child in my heart. I pretty much can be sold anything, which is how both Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton got to be president. I mean, not me, I didn’t vote for Reagan. I did vote for Clinton the first time. They really got me with his anti-war stuff. But the second time, no. He had thrown women off of welfare and how were they going to live? All they talked about was pregnant teenagers and how they were sowing seeds of destruction. Did all these men use contraception every single time they fucked? If they didn’t they should shut up because they could have become pregnant if they were women. Fuck and lie is the name of the game. Fuck and lie.
I like Paris because I can moon about Robespierre and Danton. To drink a coffee where Rimbaud was, that’s thrilling. There’s talk he had been gang-raped and that was what turned him wild and dissolute and ultimately empty. I believe that. It’s the gang-rape that screams out in the poems, the force behind every word, the punch in the face he delivers. I can go to a movie house called Danton or go to where Rodin and Delacroix lived. I can see Picassos but I hate Picasso. He won’t last. He was so awful and his paintings are so ugly. You can’t be proud to do nothing during the Nazi occupation, just paint, just watch your own ass. What kind of an artist didn’t get in trouble with the Nazis? Maybe they looked at his women and thought they were Jews.
I thought art would save me, Van Gogh, Camus. I thought that I could stand anything if there was music playing. I was naïve. Each better day was supposed to come. I could walk down the street and believe that each man was someone I could love with sex, each one, the perfect us, the real we. I’d look at the dirty and think so what, or the maimed, or the mean. It’s pride. The Christians say pride’s a sin and I think so. Why do I think it’s my job to love these loveless men? Because I think I can suffer and it will make me better. I think I can love where there is no love. I think I can’t be defeated if I can only accept enough suffering. I can take it. This is the belief of my people, Jews and women. Women have this kind of pride, to think I can take any pain and still love, I don’t matter, as if it’s selfless rather than prideful. It’s the worst kind of pride, the way girls and women do it, the way I did it. I didn’t stop them from hurting me. I’ve wanted to do good and to be good and not to be afraid. I wasn’t until I found pure terror each time one took me from myself. I’m sick with pain, a kind of grief, for all the times I’ve died without dying. I am crushed under the responsibilities of survival. I need to know everything about terror. I need to see every exploitation and trace the map of it with my own fingers. As I once said to a friend, why couldn’t I be an expert on Shakespeare like you? Why am I an expert on debasement and filth?
I have really bad pheromones. This is true, I have a friend who’s seen it more than once: huge roaches on New York sidewalks run towards me, I change direction and they do too and keep rushing towards me. The bad men and the bad bugs, or I was a monster in my last life and I’m paying now. I don’t want any more lives or any afterlife.
I used to think that at the moment you died God would answer all your questions, everything you had ever wondered about, from how the universe was made to is there life on other planets to what ever happened to the lover I really loved or so-and-so who I never saw again. I could see in that split second of first nonexistence that I’d be rising up away from the planet and God would raise me up by the shoulders and in his touch would be all the answers and then nothing, a million years of nothing.
I think God is a really ruthless artist and earth is an early draft. This draft was bad, overloaded with gratuitous cruelty. Love doesn’t work. Pride is a sin. Nothing we do is right. Each person is like a deep lake under which there is slime and mud and ooze. You go near the person and the lake’s so beautiful, so calm, and then you go in and the water pulls you down into the slime. You die there, at the nadir of this person.
(2)
I hate each day. I see the sun coming and I’m ready to end. Story over. Leave me be. I have trouble putting one foot in front of another. My body is a curse to me. How could it so betray me?
It’s very clear in my mind. I’m in bed. My bed. I take a big butcher knife and I plunge it into my heart, break through the ribs. I’m not sure I can do it. Maybe I’m not strong enough, physically, upper-body strength. There would be so much blood. I’d close my cats out, of course, but they would smell the blood, and my desertion would hurt them. I’d make sure Paul was away for long enough so I could bleed to death. There are smarter things to do but the meaning of this would be plain. I would get to live truthfully at the end. I should cut veins or jugular but it wouldn’t be big enough. I need a complete end, all the blood gone.
To live would be even more wrong. I would be ashamed always. It is likely I would never talk to anyone again. I can’t talk now. I can’t say the words. How do you say I was raped without slaying the person you’re talking to, making them responsible for knowing, and if they want to make it better they can’t. There’s nothing they can do. No heart-to-heart will help. The minute after you’re alone, back alone, and there’s nothing but the grief.
I met this woman. She said, I was in Paris. I was fifty-two. I was reading a book in a Zen garden in a hotel. French Literary Fascism. I was having a kir royale. I had two. The second one didn’t taste right. I felt a little sick or jetlagged or something. I can remember standing in front of the elevator and thinking, please, God, let me get to my room, please let me get there. I
ordered dinner from room service. Next there was a boy in my room. He had a pass key. I tried to rise up. I did but barely and then I fell against the opposite wall. Then I signed the room service check. I was barely able to balance myself. Then I went back to the bed. I didn’t lock the door. I came to about four or five hours later. I didn’t know where I was. I had internal pain. I was hurting bad. I went to the toilet and found blood on my hand, fresh, bright red, not menstrual blood, not clotted blood. I’m past bleeding. I looked for where the blood was coming. My hand got covered in it again. I found huge, deep scratches on my right leg. I couldn’t stop the bleeding of it so I tried to keep it clean. A few hours later I took a shower. I had a big and strange bruise on my left breast, right next to the aureole, not a regular bruise, more like a sucking bruise, huge black and blue with solid white skin in the center, as if someone had sucked it up and chewed it. She said she didn’t feel good the next day or the day after that. She said she had been drugged and raped. She said she thought that the bartender had done it, because he had made the drinks and he was on the phone at room service and he flirted grandly with her saying it would be his great privilege to make her dinner that evening. She thought the boy was supposed to report that she had passed out. She thought the bartender had raped her. She didn’t know if the boy had been there or not but she thought yes. She couldn’t remember but she thought they had pulled her down on the bed so that her vagina was at the bottom’s edge. She thought that the deep, bleeding scratches, right leg, and the big bruise, left breast, were the span of a man on top of her. She had been wearing sweat pants that just fell right down. She had been wearing an undershirt. Usually she covered herself but she had felt too sick to manage it before the boy came in with the dinner. She said that she didn’t have intercourse normally in her own life. She said that she had gotten an internal infection in the aftermath. She said it was horrible not knowing. She said there was literally no memory of what the man and the boy had done. She said that it was like being operated on. She speculated that her body must have been completely relaxed, no muscles straining, no physical resistance or even tension. She said the hours were gone, missing. She said that her mind had gone over and over it for weeks and weeks turning into months and months. She said she couldn’t find it because it wasn’t there, in her brain. She said that she had lost all hope. She said that she couldn’t have defended herself. She said that she had long before decided no one would ever rape her again and either she or he would die. She said that they had wanted to fuck a dead woman. She said that it was like being in a coma. She said being forced and being conscious was better because then you knew, even if no one ever believed you, you knew. She said she hated every day and to see the sun rise and she couldn’t put one foot in front of the other and she wanted to put a butcher knife into her heart behind her ribs. She said she was consumed by grief and sorrow. She said that she could resist now by not dying but that might be too hard. She said that her body was a curse and had betrayed her. She said she couldn’t figure out why they would want to do this to her—why they would want to do this and why to her. She said she had always had an appetite for life but now she hated it. There’s never a day that she doesn’t hate, she said. There isn’t a minute or an hour that she doesn’t hate, she said.
Last Days at Hot Slit Page 29