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

  This book is a collection of essays, poetry, monologues, and short stories. In the nonfiction pieces, some names and identifying details have been altered. In the fiction pieces, all incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of well-known public figures, are products of the authors’ imaginations and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life public figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2007 by Eve Ensler and Mollie Doyle

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Villard Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  VILLARD and “V” CIRCLED Design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  V-DAY and UNTIL THE VIOLENCE STOPS are trademarks of V-Day.

  Owing to limitations of space, copyright credits for the contributions to this work can be found on this page–this page.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-49676-8

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  A memory, a monologue, a rant, and a prayer / edited by Eve Ensler and Mollie Doyle.

  p. cm.

  1. Women—Violence against. 2. Girls—Violence against.

  3. Family violence. 4. Women—Violence against—Literary collection.

  5. Girls—Violence against—Literary collection.

  6. Family violence—Literary collection. I. Ensler, Eve.

  II. Doyle, Mollie.

  HV6250.4.W65M437 2007

  362.82′920922—dc22 2007001330

  www.villard.com

  2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1

  FIRST EDITION

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction Eve Ensler

  Memory

  Looking for the Body Music Michael Klein

  7 Variations on Margarita Weinberg Moisés Kaufman

  1600 Elmwood Avenue Monica Szlekovics

  The Closet Howard Zinn

  Darkness Betty Gale Tyson with Jerry Capers

  First Kiss Mollie Doyle

  Groceries Abiola Abrams

  Blueberry Hill Christine House

  My Two Selves Patricia Bosworth

  The Massacre Marie Howe

  My Mother with Her Hands as Knives Dave Eggers

  Dear Ama Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy

  Bitter Coffee Jody Williams

  Untitled Nicholas D. Kristof

  Monologue

  My House Is Wallpapered with Lies Carol Gilligan

  Maurice Kathy Najimy

  (Hey, Did You Happen to See) The Most Beautiful Girl in the World Jyllian Gunther

  Conversations with My Son Susan Miller

  The Perfect Marriage Edward Albee

  None of Us Are Monologists (aka Chill) Anna Deavere Smith

  Darfur Monologue Winter Miller

  I Can Hear My Soul Cracking Slavenka Drakulić

  Celia Edwidge Danticat

  They Took All of Us Susan Minot

  Rant

  Woman Tariq Ali

  I’m Thinking I’ve Closed My Eyes for the Last Time Hanan al-Shaykh (translated by Catherine Cobham)

  I Can’t Wait James Lecesne

  In Memory of Imette Periel Aschenbrand

  Respect Kimberle Crenshaw

  The Aristocrats Kate Clinton

  Connect: A Web of Words Robin Morgan

  Stew Ariel Dorfman

  The Next Fantastic Leap Elizabeth Lesser

  Give It Back Suheir Hammad

  The Destruction Artist Michael Cunningham

  Hands in Protest Erin Cressida Wilson

  Prayer

  The Bra Sharon Olds

  Banana Beer Bath Lynn Nottage

  True Carol Michèle Kaplan

  Club Nicole Burdette

  Conversation Between Heaven and Earth Kathy Engel

  Part Owner Dr. Michael Eric Dyson

  Woman Work Maya Angelou

  Eye to Eye Deena Metzger

  Hail to the Vagina Robert Thurman

  Rescue Mark Matousek

  To Stop the Violence Against Woman Alice Walker

  Fur Is Back Eve Ensler

  Afterword: Reclaiming Our Mojo Jane Fonda

  An Invitation: How to Get Involved

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Writers

  Introduction

  Eve Ensler

  Words. Words. This book is indeed about words. Speaking the unspoken. Speaking the spoken in a new and viable way, speaking the pain, speaking the hunger. Speaking. Speaking about violence against women not because it is the only issue, but because it is an issue that lives smack in the middle of the world and is still not spoken, not seen, not given weight or significance. So that words crack open numbness and denial and disassociation and distance and deception. Speaking so that we are in community, in conscience, in concern.

  Speaking about violence against women because in 2006, young Amish girls are gunned down in their school just because they are girls; women are trafficked like meat sold from poor neighborhoods to men in rich neighborhoods; women are raped in Darfur on their way to get wood for the fire or grass for their donkeys. In 2006 women are burned and mutilated and stoned and dismissed and undone and refused and silenced. Speaking about violence because in early November 2006 the president of Israel stepped down after being accused of rape and harassment, and a cleric in Australia blamed uncovered women for getting raped. Speaking about violence against women because of your mother, your sister, your aunt, your daughter, your girlfriend, your best friend, your wife. Speaking about violence against women because the story of women is the story of life itself. In speaking about it, you cannot avoid speaking about racism and domination, poverty and patriarchy, empire building, war, sexuality, desire, imagination. The mechanism of violence is what destroys women, controls women, diminishes women, and keeps them in their so-called place. Speaking about violence, telling the stories, because in the telling, we legitimize women’s experience. We reveal what is happening in the dark, in the basement, out of sight. In the telling, women take their power back. Their voice. Their remembering. Their future.

  As part of a two-week “Until the Violence Stops” festival held in New York City in the summer of 2006, we asked a group of remarkable writers to contribute memories, monologues, rants, and prayers on the subject of violence against women. We envisioned a pivotal event in which these monologues would be performed by great actors. We thought maybe, maybe, ten or twenty would respond. We were overwhelmed with contributions.

  Each writer brought something so specific, so original, so Edward Albee it could only be Edward Albee, so Alice Walker it could only be Alice Walker, so Erin Cressida Wilson, so Michael Eric Dyson.

  We need writers in these terrible times of deception and manipulation and sound bites and half-investigated truths, in these times when the lust for power has trumped the hunger for justice, in these times of evildoers and saints. We don’t have many real leaders, we don’t have many politicians we can trust. But we can trust writers. Rather than selling us something, they are exploring something; rather than dominating us, they are opening us; rather then winning or having a position, they are inviting us to ask questions.

  We need each and every writer, each and every artist, to tell the truth the way she or he sees it, the way it comes through her
or him. Some of the work in this book is funny, some mysterious, some very difficult, some devastating. All of it is new. The first time it was performed was at the festival before two thousand people. It was thrilling.

  The writers in this book received no payment for this work other than the deep satisfaction that comes from serving the higher good. My proceeds and the writers’ royalties from the sale of A Memory, a Monologue, a Rant, and a Prayer will benefit V-Day. (To find out more about V-Day, see this page; you can also visit www.v-day.org.)

  I thank these great playwrights, poets, journalists, visionaries, for the gift of this book, and I thank you, the reader, for taking this journey.

  Looking for the Body Music

  Michael Klein

  My friend Frank calls it looking for the body music—the music my mother heard.

  At the end of looking for the body music, one stumbles upon a woman’s body

  with the whole world taken out of her—but before that scene, a foreshadow: my mother at the boarding school.

  She’s twelve, child of two alcoholics, vaudevillians, shadows on a stage.

  She’s overweight and sees beyond herself even then, so the girls

  are mean in their pressed dresses and routinely hang my mother out

  the window by her feet for a long time waiting for the exactly right cadence of please before they pull her back into her life.

  That was in 1940-something—the year my mother began

  the book her mind was writing called this is what happened to me—

  the book she read to us—pill-language to cushion the abyss of two marriages—

  one husband beat her up, one husband took her money and broke her off

  with the world until she got written as the failed suicide after hanging by a thread

  by a hair, by her feet, borne of her fierce suspension

  over something called a youth.

  7 Variations on Margarita Weinberg

  Moisés Kaufman

  Dedicated to the memory of Rebeca Clisci Akerman

  1.

  My grandmother was born in the Ukraine but immigrated to Venezuela before the Second World War. She told me this story:

  A young Jewish woman was kidnapped by a group of Cossacks during a pogrom. They brought her into a room and held her down, deciding who would have her first.

  “If you touch me I will put a curse on you,” the woman said. “I am a witch.” The Cossacks laughed. “I can prove it!” she shouted. “I can prove to you that I’m a witch.”

  Their leader smiled and said, “Very well. Prove it, then.”

  “I am immortal,” she said, “and you cannot kill me.” They laughed some more. “You cannot kill me. Not even if you shoot me. Try it.”

  They stopped laughing and looked at her.

  “Here. Try it.” She pointed to her chest. “Shoot me right here. You will see that I’m immortal.” The Cossacks looked at one another but didn’t move.

  “Shoot me in the heart. You will see I won’t die. And then you’ll have your proof that I’m a witch.” The leader thought for a moment, then quickly took out his pistol and shot her in the heart. The young woman fell to the floor bleeding, looked at the man who had shot her, and said, “Thank you, you imbecile.”

  My grandmother liked stories of heroic suicides.

  2.

  My grandmother wanted to be a doctor when she was young. But in the Ukraine in 1935, there were only a few seats at the university allotted to Jews, and all of them went to men. So she became a nurse.

  When she told her family in 1937 that she wanted to go to Venezuela, everyone was against it. They hardly knew where Venezuela was on the map.

  But her fiancé, Boris (my grandfather), had moved here two years earlier to make his fortune, and he wanted her to come join him; business was going well for him and he was worried about rumors of a war in Europe.

  I don’t know if it was the imminent war or the invitation of a lover in the tropics, or both, but she came here. She was twenty-two years old.

  The story goes that when she arrived in Caracas, she was a woman of such delicate beauty, every immigrant wanted to marry her. (I’ve seen pictures, and she was stunning.) And my grandfather said, “Although I brought you here, you have no obligation to marry me. We’ve been apart for two years, and your feelings might have changed. You can have your pick of any man in our community.”

  My grandmother cried, moved by his words, and told him that yes, it was her decision. And her decision was to marry him. (Another version of the story is that their marriage had been arranged by their parents in the Ukraine, and that his asking her to choose to marry him was a testament to his liberal views, so she married him.)

  3.

  When their first child was born, my grandmother named her Margarita, which is the name of Venezuela’s national flower. Margarita Weinberg. (Her Jewish name, Miriam, came from my grandmother’s mother, who had died when my grandmother was two.)

  My grandmother was the storyteller in the family.

  In some arrangement made long before I was born, she had inherited the responsibility of keeping our narratives and our history alive for us.

  “My brother was a Communist who left our village in the Ukraine and went to Paris to join the Resistance fighters against the Nazis,” she said. “He became one of their best spies. A street in Paris is named after him.” Two years after he joined the Resistance, he was surprised on a mission inside a German arsenal in a suburb of Paris. “When the Nazis surrounded the arsenal, he used all the weapons in it to defend himself. He killed many Nazis that day,” she told us. “He saved the last bullet for himself.”

  Heroic suicides …

  I grew up with these narratives.

  4.

  At nineteen my mother, Margarita, met a young man named Simon, who’d arrived in Venezuela after the war, from Romania. He’d survived the war by sewing and selling the yellow Stars of David that the Jews were made to wear. He spent most of the war alternately hiding in a small room and selling Stars of David. He was eleven.

  My mother’s childhood in Venezuela was idyllic. The country was blessed with warm weather and kind inhabitants who were welcoming to the immigrants. The war was an ocean away, and my mother heard about it only when my grandparents would talk in hushed tones about relatives who had stayed behind and were now either in concentration camps or dead.

  Simon was brought to Venezuela by his aunt, who had a successful clock shop in the center of town. She brought him to my grandmother’s house to meet my mother. They went out on a few dates, and then he asked her to marry him.

  She liked him, but her intuition told her she shouldn’t marry him—he came from such a different life. She had never known hunger or war, except in the heroic and suicidal stories of her mother.

  But my grandfather Boris said, “Do you think there’s a line of men waiting for you? We are a small Jewish community here. He’s a good man. You should marry him.”

  My grandmother heard this but said nothing. And my mother married him.

  Her strongest memory of her wedding day is standing under the canopy in the synagogue thinking, “What am I doing here? This feels like suicide.”

  5.

  Their marriage was a disaster. My mother’s intuition about Simon, my father, was absolutely correct. They were from two different worlds.

  My father’s Eastern European upbringing, already stern and strict, had then been further hardened by the war. He loved Spinoza, Schopenhauer, and other severe European philosophers. He was despotic and had little patience for things other than survival. His main interests were making a living, having children, and attending synagogue.

  My mother loved American movies and Venezuelan balladeers and porcelain dolls. He was punctual and Germanic in his daily habits. She had the punctuality of people in the tropics and their laid-back attitude. He perceived her as spoiled and lazy. And his inability to understand her quickly turned to fury.

  For her par
t, she often thought herself superior to him. The war had left deep scars: His manners were lacking or nonexistent; he laughed too loudly, spoke broken Spanish, and ate voraciously. (He told me he had been hungry for so long that he thought one could never have enough food to be satiated.)

  6.

  Every Friday night there would be a Sabbath dinner at our house. My clearest memory of those dinners was my father’s bright red face and the swollen veins in his neck as he yelled accusations. “The Sabbath candles were not lit at the right time! You don’t care about the Sabbath! What kind of a mother are you? This food is terrible! You don’t know how to cook! The children are too loud, what have you taught them?” Each attack was louder than the last: the shouting, the insults.

  And yet every time my mother tried to answer him, my grandfather would say, “Margarita, let it be. Shoin.” (“Enough” in Yiddish.) And he wouldn’t let her respond. If my mother tried again, he would again say “Shoin,” and silence her.

  Perhaps he thought this the best way to diffuse the argument, perhaps he himself was afraid of my father, perhaps he felt pity for him. Whatever the reason, my mother was always the one encouraged to silence. “Let him have his way,” my grandfather would tell her. “Who cares?”

  But the most striking thing to me, even as a young boy, was that my grandmother would watch and listen and never say a word.

  Margarita was being savagely attacked by my father and silenced by my grandfather and my grandmother said nothing—not a word.

  7.

  I thought my grandmother was heroic. She had to be, to cross the Atlantic, to settle in a small Latin American village without knowing the language, to raise three children in this new land, and to bear the responsibility of keeping our narratives alive.

  But what good are narratives if they lead to suicide?