Thursday, June 7, 2007

The night belongs to the animals.
Monkeys wrestle, termites swarm around light posts buzzing in harmony with the humming mosquitoes. Dogs howl, a rooster crows every hour like a grandfather clock, frogs croak, and a hyena laughs in the distance, or is it a woman?
I lay on my foam mattress, cocooned in hot pink mosquito netting, and I sweat.
When I sleep it is deep and fast, like falling into a black hole, and I startle awake as the nuns clang pots together because it is time for Mass.

The day belongs to the people. Motorcycles compete with cars who compete with trucks to pass down the one lane dirt road. Dust flies through the air and sticks to sweaty skin. Now animals hang from poles, dead, ready to be sold in the market. Chickens, fish, goat, and cow. Lots for sale, produce, cloth, plastic, cell phones.

People. This is a community that has never not known conflict and war. The trauma is palpable. Physically, there are scars and missing limbs, eyeballs, faces. There is HIV and the yellow eyes of hep b, malaria and parasite.
But beyond the skin, beyond the blood and the viruses that bubble through veins, there is a sense of unrest, something I can feel but cannot know.

It is easy to want to romanticize a place that is different from where one came. Even easier here, where amidst fear and struggle, daily life remains simple and sweet. Rising with the sun, praying together, living together.
I ate a live termite last night. One of the girls caught it, pulled off the wings and offered it to me. They were all feasting and made them look pretty good. I will try anything once. This was definitely a one time thing. The taste of chlorine and bile still makes me want to gag. Some things are an acquired taste.

The hospital is bare. Women labor in the hall and then come into a room where they give birth in rows on beds. I can help, lend a pair of hands to catch some babies, but I see the work as layered. The way that trauma manifests in the body is so clear in laboring women. Sexual abuse, physical violence, and fear of bringing new life into conflict position women into hunched over, physically closed bodies as they birth. Labors become unnecessarily complicated with no supplies to aid those complications.

I have spent the last year studying narrative. I am interested in the way that speaking a story and being heard or conversely, not being heard, affect the physical body. I think this is the place to start. As a listener and a vessel for stories and voices. The alchemical dance can journey through my body, through this keyboard, and into you. Can you feel it? Where does it live? What does it feel like? Keep these questions in mind as I return with stories.

4 comments:

debra Zaslow said...

wow! Beautiful writing, Rachel. Can't wait to read more.

Unknown said...

Not only can I feel It, I am It...and I am You, and You are Me...
and We Beautiful Girl in my world, most definitely are "Them"...
anything less than that, is separate from The Truth...

So "Learn Your Lessons Well"...
and those Gifts you came bearing...use them without hesitation.

Where does it live/what does it feel like...
I'm sure you'll help to reveal that, in blogs to come...

Oh Sweet GR, just think...
I actually thought I would miss you.

Question said...

Thanks Mamas.

Anonymous said...

i can hear the winged ones and almost taste them (you hella adventurous woman!)

thank you for letting us venture with you to the singingwomen place. you speak so vividly of the closed down part of the women in labor as they open up, new life coming into this beautiful mess.

keep giving us the gift of looking to see where does this live in us, what does it feel like.

i don't think you know me, rachel. i'm one of the havuruah boosters, sometime singing buddy of yer dad and always happy to dance with or eat with or just see yer mom.

they completely shimmer when they talk about you. you are loved by many...even those of us who haven't really met you yet.

thanks again for giving us the gift of sharing your stories, their stories...helping us talk out own stories.

barb