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Next Saturday, March 16th, will mark the tenth anniversary of the death in Gaza, of Rachel Corrie. Rachel, then a senior at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, had gone to Gaza at the beginning of 2003, to fulfill aspects of her senior thesis. While there, she became active in efforts by the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), to protect Palestinians from outrages of the Israeli occupation forces.
She was killed by an Israeli Army D-9 armored bulldozer, with two people aboard in the cockpit, one there to drive, the other, to observe. During the same time period, Israeli forces in Gaza shot and mortally wounded Tom Hurndall, a British photographer, also working with the ISM (April 11th), and mutilated Brian Avery (April 5th), another American ISM activist, in Jenin in the West Bank. This time period coincided with the American invasion of Iraq – March 19th to May 1st.
A notable aspect of Rachel Corrie’s legacy is the sheer volume of art her life and sacrifice evoked. Between March 19th 2003 and April 24th 2004, I collected over 160 poems written in the young woman’s honor, and posted on the web, in the English language. I used two of them in my 2003-2004 cantata, The Skies Are Weeping. California composer, Paul Crabtree composed another cantata about Corrie, American Persephone.
Corrie’s journals and emails from Gaza became the basis of the most widely viewed and highly regarded work of art about Corrie, My Name is Rachel Corrie. Written by Katharine Viner and Alan Rickman, the play premiered in London on April 5, 2005, in a highly evocative solo performance by actress Megan Dodds. Premiered in a very small theatre, it was revived in the 2005 fall London theatre season in a larger venue, and proceeded to win many awards.
The first attempt to produce My Name is Rachel Corrie in the USA, at the New York Theatre Workshop resulted in a cancellation, when the NYTW caved to threats from militant Zionist expansionists. (Incidentally – the article about the cancellation in The Nation, by writer Philip Weiss, and the pushback that writer got in the publishing world for having written so sympathetically about Corrie, and critically about the NYTW, was one of the epiphanies Weiss underwent that led him into new directions, now expressed most fully at his web site, Mondoweiss).
The play has gone on to be performed on every continent save Antarctica, in many languages.
The play was derived from Corrie’s written material with cooperation of the slain activist’s family. Some of Corrie’s writings had been posted on the web soon after her death. Some soon became the basis of poems or lyrics. For instance, the concluding lyric in The Skies are Weeping is my editing (with the Corrie family’s approval) of one of her last emails home:
Feel sick to my stomach a lot
from being doted on all the time,
very sweetly,
by people who are facing doom.You can always hear the tanks and bulldozers
passing by.
I have bad nightmares about tanks and bulldozers
outside our house
and you and me inside.
Tanks and bulldozers destroyed 25 greenhouses
the livelihoods for 300 people.
Then the bulldozers come and take out
people’s vegetable farms and gardens.This happens every day.
I think that I should at least mention that
I am also discovering a degree of strength
and of basic ability for humans to remain human
in the direst of circumstances.I think the word is dignity.
I wish you could meet these people.
Maybe, hopefully, someday
you will
Here, American author and poet Alice Walker, reads from Corrie’s writing in such a way as to bring out the poetry in it:
Here is the concluding monologue from My Name is Rachel Corrie, in a 2008 performance of the work in Mississauga, Ontario. The actress is Alexandra Bell:
And here is Rachel Corrie, herself, expressing her hope, in an elementary school oral presentation:
Now might be a good time to find out more about the Rachel Corrie Foundation for Peace and Justice. You might consider donating to them, as I have.
12 Comments
Thanks for this.
Thanks, Ruth. Means a lot, coming from you.
The bulldozing of the gardens Rachel mentions — that’s one of the many things one can hear about if one gets one’s news from any major nation but the US.
Here’s an interview with Alice Walker published just today in the Guardian.
‘I feel dedicated to the whole of humanity’
Yes, Rachel Corrie should never be forgotten
Thanks for this, ET. We are daily reminded of the scum-buckets who are destroying our democracy and messing with the world in general, and it is good to be reminded of those rare individuals who stand up for peace and righteousness….. even when the result is the end of their brightness. I would not wish the Israelis to be wiped off the map; I do not wish to see the Palestinians wiped off the map, either.
This is beautiful. Thank you.
Thank you, Edward. Amazingly, 10 years have passed!
I hadn’t realized about that about the origins of Phil and Mondoweiss.
@Dearie, I hope we in the U.S. can help persuade Israel that the way forward is equal rights for everyone living there so no one will get “wiped off the map.” Since our Congress people have been suborned, it’ll have to be direct diplomacy, using the boycott, divestment and sanction route that helped South Africa change course.
Alice Walker has a striking sense of priorities. More than 4 million people have died in the Democratic Republic of Congo, including a blinding number of women and children. Rape is a key component in this atrocity.
I have never seen her make a public trip to Congo, speak at a college or anything else.
And yes, the US has a major role in this situation.
If Ms. Walker went to Saudi Arabia, she would not be permitted to drive. If she expressed affection to a partner anywhere in the Middle East (except Israel)
she would risk jail or worse.
None of those human rights violations animate her in the slightest.
The situation in Israel is disturbing and deserves protest and criticism.
But her using every opportunity to raise this issue and ignore far worse violations elsewhere suggests cheap opportunism.
Rachel Corrie’s death is a tragedy. But apparently one white American death is more important to Ms. Walker than the death of millions of Africans.
Wow, d12345! Talking about opportunism. Here is a response to your canard accusation of “singling out Israel.” It is from the above-mentioned blog, Mondoweiss. In part,
“There’s not a whole lot the U.S. government – or ordinary American citizens – can say or do to improve the human rights situation in Zimbabwe or Syria (both subject to U.S. sanctions since 2003), in Myanmar (subject to sanctions since 1988), in Iran (subject to sanctions since 1979), or in North Korea (whose government the U.S. has never even formally recognized). Trumpeting the misdeeds of these regimes might be psychologically and ethically satisfying, but is politically meaningless, not to say, redundant. It’s sort of like ranting at East Germany perfidy, c.1960.
But Israel? Not only has America withheld substantive criticism of its policies, but the U.S. government and U.S. citizens are, and have long been, the most important global enablers of such policies. Indeed, if the U.S. has historically “singled out” Israel, it has been for special protection, assistance, and cover for its daily crimes against the Palestinians. Whether we look at U.S. military assistance to Israel (amounting to $8.2 million a day in fiscal year 2011, more than 18% of the entire Israeli defense budget),or at private American tax-deductible gifts to illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem (including to some of the most violent, fascistic and dangerous crackpots in the region), America and Americans have played the role of Israel’s pre-eminent arsenal, financier, diplomatic supporter, and propagandist. To suggest, under such circumstances, that Israel is being “singled out” by its American critics can only be considered a sick joke.”
To read more about this ploy to defend the indefensible, go here: http://mondoweiss.net/2012/08/why-israel-is-singled-out.html
And you seem obtuse or willingly ignorant about why Ms. Walker is concerned. I’ll help:
1. We don’t send hundreds of billions of American tax dollars to the North Koreans so that they can drop or shoot white phosphorus onto schools and hospitals, where kids have to end up dead or maimed for life.
2. We don’t write tax policies that enable the Han Chinese to invest in housing projects that eject Tibetans from their homes in Lhasa.
3. We don’t have a State Department chief spokesperson whose husband developed an expansionist policy paper for the Congolese government.
4. We don’t cater to lobbyists from Saudi Arabia who constantly encourage us to go to all-out war against a neighboring country that hasn’t initiated an attack upon one of their neighbors in generations.
5. We don’t have a Pentagon whose offices are stuffed with people with dual Somali-American citizenship, who manufacture false premises to march us into a series of wars in the heart of Africa.
6. We aren’t experiencing a time when a small group of ruthless Burmese generals and politicians have hijacked Buddhism, turning it into a militant version of what had once been a great religion, and branding anyone who doesn’t believe in a Myanmar expansion version of Buddhism as anti-Burmese or anti-Buddhist.
7. Additionally, no North Korean, Chinese, Sudanese, Burmese or Somali general, politician, general or warlord is openly bragging that the United States is fighting two wars and threatening to start a third one, on their behalf.
8. The Prime Ministers of Egypt, Syria, Tunisia or Libya have not appeared in American political ads in the most recently run national election, advocating openly against the incumbent president.
9. Also, and importantly, there is no large body of American people who openly believe that we need to foster violence in North Korea, Tibet, China, Somalia, Venezuela, Cuba, Sudan the Congo, Mali or Burma, so that we may enable the second coming of Jesus Christ, and implement a new age. And there is no cynical tie-in between Columbian politicians who hope to bring money to their country because of some apocalyptic religious myth, and American fundamentalist sects who total in the tens of millions of misguided believers.
That is an unfortunate canard. I have heard Ms. Walker denounce ill treatment and worse of women all around the world.
As I wrote, his experiences writing about Corrie and the NYTW cancellation were part of a series of events that shook him to the core, made him stronger.