Rachel's
Bed
by Eve Ensler
After
two months among Bosnian Refugees, an
American observer finds her defenses melting
into love.
"They
took my 60-year-old mother and 68-year
old father outside. These Chetniks, these
boy soldiers who grew up with us, who
went to primary school with us. They made
my father stand in the center of our lawn,
and they held guns to his head. Then they
began to throw stones at him, pelting
him in his head, his neck, his groin as
he stood helpless and confused before
me, my mother, our relatives. He was bruised
and bleeding and exposed and they wouldn't
stop."
I
am sitting in a metal chair in a circle
of women, all of whom are smoking and
drinking thick black coffee. We are in
a makeshift doctor's office in a refugee
camp outside of Zagreb, Croatia, listening
to a 30-year-old woman "doctress" (as
my translator calls her) describe her
recent experiences in Bosnia. It is the
summer of 1994, and I have come here,
and later to Pakistan, for two months
to interview Bosnian refugees. Outraged
by reports of atrocities committed towards
women, I have come as a playwright and
screenwriter to write a film script.
"Then
they took my mother and poured gasoline
around her feet. For three hours they
lit matches and held them as close to
the gasoline as they could. My mother
turned white - it was very cold outside.
For three hours they tortured her. Then
she started screaming. She ripped her
skirt open and screamed, "Go ahead, you
Chetniks. Kill me. I am not afraid of
you, not afraid to die. Kill me."
The
other Bosnian women seem to have stopped
breathing as they listen. I hear myself
asking questions, through my translator,
in a strange reporter-like voice that
implies I have seen all of this before,
that it is just another war story. I ask,
"How do you explain your neighbors turning
against you like that?" and "Did you ever
worry about being a Muslim before the
war?" I ask these questions from behind
my professional persona, as if it were
a secret shield, a place of safety.
"After
I had finally escaped and gotten here,"
the doctress continues, "I heard our village
was safe again. The United Nations forces
raided the concentration camp, and my
father was released I began to get a glimmer
of hope. Then the Chetniks invaded my
village. They butchered every member of
my family with machetes. My mother and
father were found, their limbs spread
over our lawn."
I
listen to their words and feel something
caving in. Logic. Safety. Order. Ground.
I don't want to cry. Professionals don't
cry. Playwrights see people as characters.
She is a doctor character. She is a strong,
resilient, traumatized woman character.
I bear down on the parts of my body where
shakes are escaping.
For
my first 10 ten days in Zagreb, I slept
on a couch in the Center for Women War
Victims. The center was created three
years ago to serve Serbian, Muslim, and
Croatian women refugees who had been raped
in the war. It now serves over 500 women
who not only have been raped but have
been made homeless by the war. Most of
the women who work here are refugees themselves.
They run support groups and provide emergency
aid - food, toiletries, medication, children's
toys. They help women to find employment,
access to medical treatment, schools for
their children.
In
those first days, I spent five to eight
hours a day interviewing women in city
centers, desolate refugee camps, and local
cafes. I met a country of women dressed
in black - black silk, black cotton, black
Lycra. In all the interviews, I either
was filled with an overwhelming desire
to rescue the women - which rendered me
powerless and sometimes resentful - or
tried to maintain my playwright position.
I was hearing their stories as potential
dramas, measuring their words in terms
of beats and momentum. This approach made
me feel cold, impervious, superior.
Thousands
of journalists had already passed through
these women's lives. The women felt invaded,
robbed, ripped off. It was an honor and
a privilege that the refugee workers had
brought me into these camps, even at times
had focused the groups around my being
there. I realized I was not honoring my
end of the contract. My ways of relationship
were hierarchical, one-sided, based on
a perception of myself as a healer, a
problem solver - which in turn was based
on a desperate, hidden need to control:
control chaos and and protect myself from
too much loss, cruelty, and insanity.
My need to analyze, interpret, even create
art out of these war atrocities stemmed
from my inability to be with people, to
be with their suffering, to listen, to
feel, to be lost in the mess.
On
the 10th day in Zagreb, a woman named
Rachel, who worked in the center, offered
me her apartment for the weekend. I was
terrified. It was the first time I'd been
alone since my arrival in Croatia, the
first time I'd been able to process the
experience, to find out where I really
was. It was nighttime when I got there,
and the lights in the hallway kept going
off, leaving me in utter panic and darkness.
In all my years as an activist - working
in homeless women's shelters, tying myself
to fences in protest of nuclear war, sleeping
in outdoor peace camps amid rain and rats,
camping on the windy Nevada Nuclear Test
site in radiation dust - I had never felt
so lonely. I called the States. I paced
the apartment. I tried to read but was
unable to concentrate. Finally, I lay
down on Rachel's bed, with its splendid
red comforter, and listened to a tape
of Jane Siberry's beautiful song, "Calling
All Angels".
From
my journal that night:
My heart, breaking from the inside like
an organism giving birth to itself, to
the stories of itself, the cruelty: the
lit cigarettes almost put through the
soldier's wife's eyeballs, the decapitated
heads of her old parents, the 15-year-old
girl whom her soldier husband and his
friends raped in the car, the pistol the
soldiers put into her three-month-old
baby's hand as a joke, the food they didn't
serve the Muslim girl's mother who had
decided to give birth to the baby of the
Serb that raped her, the Canadian uncle
who attempted to molest his 14-year-old
niece from Sarajevo who had fled to him
for safety, the dirty, stained clothes
that arrive in boxes of humanitarian aid
that the refugee women are supposed to
be grateful for.
It
wasn't the cruelty, the primitive horror,
that broke my heart. What hurt was how
I defended myself against my love for
the refugees. The woman who made sweet
pastry in what was now her kitchen, bedroom,
living room, bathroom all in one - made
pastry for me, a stranger. The one who
kept smiling with missing teeth, who gave
strength to the woman next to her who
smoked cigarettes, smoothed her skirt,
apologized for her messy hair. My heart
broke into love. Tears broke out of my
eyes like glass cutting flesh, breaking
me, making me no one, no longer concrete,
broke through my craving for definition,
authority, fame, broke all that into tiny
pieces that would not hold, becoming liquid,
then nothing I could identify, nothing
that resembled me or the matter of me.
There was just pulp. Masses of beating,
bloody pulp. There was just melting.
After
my night in Rachel's bed, my journey was
transformed. I began to see my interviews
as sacred social contracts. I could not
simply take stories, events, feelings
from my subjects. There had to be an interaction.
I had to be present with them. I had to
be vulnerable. I had to love. I could
no longer protect myself, stand outside
the stories I was hearing. War was not
natural. I would never be comfortable
with atrocity and cruelty. I found myself
crying often during the interviews. I
felt little, helpless. Old defenses, identities,
approaches died away.
At
the end of my stay in Croatia, I changed
continents and changed clothes. I went
from a village on the Adriatic to the
hot, dusty landscape of Pakistan, where
I was covered in purple cotton from head
to toe, the traditional shalwar quamiz.
I
was there with Julie Mertus, a lawyer
from Human Rights Watch. We essentially
lived with a group of Bosnian refugees
eight hours a day in dreadful circumstances.
This group of Muslim men and women had
been living in a refugee hotel in Croatia
and were offered the choice of being moved
to a dangerous and overcrowded camp close
to the Serbian border or to a new life
in Pakistan with "bungalows, swimming
pools, and jobs." So about 500 of them
had come to Pakistan, where the weather
was 120 degrees and up, with monsoons
and rainstorms. The living conditions
were difficult at first, 13 to a room,
and malaria was rampant. The majority
of these Bosnians, European in orientation,
had never really identified as Muslim,
and here they were in an Islamic country.
Their Pakistani hosts were offering them
more than they even offered their own
citizens, so the Bosnians felt bad that
they weren't more grateful. They spent
their days waiting - - waiting for the
heat to cool off, waiting to get out of
Pakistan (some were waiting for entry
into America; they had been waiting the
longest), waiting for news of their hometowns,
waiting for the nightmare to pass, waiting.
Each
day, Julie and I would gather with the
refugees in a sauna-like room and listen
to their stories. Everyone was sick in
some way, deeply traumatized by the events
they had suffered in the war. And yet
there was great humor, generosity, and
community.
During
my last days there, I became ill with
some kind of flu. The Bosnians overwhelmed
me with kindness, offering homemade remedies
and soups. There was a particular bottle
of nose drops that had clearly passed
through the entire community; when they
offered it to me, I felt like I was undergoing
a rite of passage. I was infected with
Pakistan, with refugee illness, with a
tiny bit of their suffering. I felt as
if all of my protection had been washed
away, and that didn't even matter. I sat
on a mattress in my drenched shalwar
quamiz while a woman with a movie-star
face told her story.
"A
group of them came into our neighborhood.
They took my best friend into the street.
There were 15 soldiers. In front of her
husband and children and neighbors they
raped her, one after the other. They did
it to teach us a lesson. They raped many
women - 72,000. The women did not lose
their dignity, though. What they lost
was their minds.
"Please
tell people in America what happened here.
We do not understand why they have abandoned
us."
It was the end of two months of stories,
and I could no longer contain myself.
Something inside me was released. I was
unable to stop my eyes from crying, my
nose from running, my sweat from pouring
out of me. I realized that I was, in fact,
melting. Melting away the cold defenses
of control, melting into this common,
salty bath, melting into love.
I
looked around and saw a lot of us crying,
and in that moment I loved these Bosnians
completely. I loved their stove-made bread
and their meat filled peppers that they
cooked for us each day in the heat. I
loved that they had survived and that
their hearts were intact and that their
kindness was so deeply present even now.
I
returned to the States on a plane that
nearly crashed over the Atlantic. Flight
attendants had concussions. Passengers
had spiritual experiences they shared
with strangers. For a long time after
returning home, I was suspended, filled
with a wild sense of grace and gratitude
for being alive and a painful guilt that
I had so much in America when other people
suffered so profoundly only hours away.
Eventually
I came back to earth. I am no longer suspended,
but I am changed. Mainly it is my desire
that has changed. It changed that night
in Rachel's bed.
Melt me. Let me dissolve. Let me release
my hard identity. Let me be swallowed
by the circle. Let me not matter. Let
me be homeless, homesick. Let me be disappointed
so I can break more. Let me be anonymous
so I can be invisible. Let me be a refugee.
Send me out into the forest without anything
-- no house, no clothes, no memories,
no photos. Please break me. Please make
me a toothless, laughing woman. Not worrying
about my turn, my message, my serving,
my creation, my moment. Please make me
ready to sit in the circle.
Eve
Ensler is a playwright, screenwriter,
and activist. She is currently writing
a feature film for Hollywood Pictures
(Disney) based on her experience with
Bosnian Refugees.
Note: This article originally appeared
in Common Boundary.
For more information, please contact the
Center for Women War Victims, Zagreb,
Croatia 011-385-1-434-189 Fax 011-385-1-433-416.
Ask for Rada Boric.
For
more about Eve Ensler and her work,
visit the V-Day
web site.
