V-Day

A few years ago I read a wonderful piece in Marie Claire about V-Day (the global movement founded by Eve Ensler to stop violence against women and girls). I don’t know who wrote it. After stumbling across a copy of it in my desk drawer today, I thought I’d share it:

I live in the land of violence.

I have lived here all my life. I cannot even determine all the ways I have been shaped by this country and the ways of this country, as it is the only country or place I have ever known.

Trying to imagine another place, another way of being, another culture, becomes impossible, because the culture of violence is now rooted in my cells, in my DNA. It has actually impacted my ability to imagine, because violence has a deadly and distorting effect on the imagination. It creates hard, impenetrable walls where there should be doorways; it creates despair where there could be great possibility.

I say this, of course, as a person who has never lived in another country, a person who has never actually seen another country anywhere in the world that is not a land of violence. I say this as a person—as a woman—who was shaped by violence from the moment of consciousness. As a daughter whose father was an emotional terrorist, who threatened my existence through his fist or hand or whip or voice or money for most of the developing years of my life.

I say this as a woman who did not stop tiptoeing around my own apartment until late in my 30s for fear of waking the sleeping monster, who might then beat me arbitrarily or lock me up.

I say this as a woman who lost the ability to say no, and so for the first half of my life was a witness as my own body was taken many times against my deepest wishes. I say this as a woman who has struggled for most of my life not to lose my mind, not to self-destruct, as the violence has now become part of my own interior mental and spiritual landscape, working overtime against my own being.

I say this as a woman who’s witnessed the consequences of violence in every part of the world—in small villages and massive cities. I see how women, like poisoned trees, have grown with crooked trunks and missing limbs.

So what can allow for the possibility of imagining a world without violence, of conjuring V-world, of being so grandiose, so naïve, so ridiculous, to think such a world could come to me?

Maybe it is the extremity, the terrain of extremity that violence creates, that would allow, or even demand, such a leap. Maybe it is the sense of urgency and madness that pulses through everything, every muscle each time the veil of denial I lifted and one is confronted again with the possibility of mass rape, domestic battery, honor killings, sexual slavery, or genital mutilation.

Maybe it is the ravings of a mind permanently shattered by too much violence, so much so that now it simply clings like a mute child to a blind, idealistic place in order to survive. Maybe it is the desire to break out of the familiar prison that violence has created, to actually confront my own fear of intimacy, goodness, love.

Whatever it is, I believe that a world without violence is possible. I am not talking about a world where there is no anger, or passion, or intensity, or conflict, or pain. I am talking about a world where there is no murder, no rape, no brutality. I am talking about being willing to enter V-world, where we separate from the known and comfortable and trust we will survive the vastness and mystery of the new. I am talking about putting down the guns, knives, loud voices, threats, and weapons of mass destruction, and living, all of us in the wild vulnerability.

I believe V-world is possible because I see signs of it again and again in what has leaked through the violence, in what has miraculously, outrageously, survived. I have seen how, in spite of the poisoning of women’s bodies, they manage to keep producing edible fruit and holding up their branches.

V-world is in the center of us. It is longing, and it is remembering. V-world is what it smells like when they let you go, when you’re not waiting to be hit, when you perspire from the sun instead of from worry.

V-world is the 20-year-old female suicide bomber who turns back. It is the video camera the Afghan woman in the stadium hides under her burqa to document the execution of a woman accused of flirting.

V-world is the utter gentleness I see on the aged faces of those who had been “comfort women” during World War II, when they were forced into sexual slavery and raped repeatedly by Japanese soldiers. It’s the one egg the starving Bosnian woman gives me as a present as I am leaving.

It’s the lives our mothers never got to live.

V-world is unfolding between your legs. It is urgent and slow. It’s the joke the woman tells the soldier that makes him laugh and lower the gun he was pointing at her face. It’s the dresses the young girls from Srebrenica wear, and the way they fix their hair to go to hear about their men, even though they know they have all been murdered.

V-world is the lipstick a woman wears during the shelling of Sarajevo, the high heels she refuses to take off even though the snipers are firing on her city from above. V-world is the empty breasts she keeps offering the baby who sucks and sucks, knee-deep in mud in the Afghan refugee camp.

V-world is a state of mind. It is the place you could never touch in me, no matter how many times you banged my head or whipped my legs. V-world is the garden where the missing girls appear, their mothers and fathers waiting for them. V-world is the clitoral cut that doesn’t happen.

V-world is what lives after the pain has left, and we sit in the utter emptiness, and we stop creeping around the hole but fall into it—and it is not what we thought. It is the opposite.

V-world is borderless and groundless. It is the armor we finally take off. There is nothing to defend.

song heard most recently before posting: The Village Awaits the New Moon—Varttina