There’s a moment in Joseph Conrad’s classic short novel Heart of Darkness where his detached, urbane narrator Marlowe, who would later travel deep into the Belgian Congo to witness the most pitiable victims of European imperialism, looks out over the city of Brussels and decides that it reminds him of a “whited sepulcher”, a bleached tomb of hypocrisy covering up the bones and the decayed corpses lying underneath. A century later, if you paid attention to the way Hezbollah’s spokespeople would always counter charges that their weapons were given to them by Iran by saying that “those Israeli bombs falling on Beirut were all made in Seattle”, you could reasonably conclude that very little has changed. Seattle, for all of its tolerance, well-off unionized blue-collar workforce, and vaunted liberalism is at heart a company town for the United States military industrial complex. Look out over Lake Union from downtown Seattle at the sparkling, wealthy neighborhood of Queen Anne Hill and see the same whited sepulcher Joseph Conrad saw 100 years earlier in Brussels.
My name is Rachel Corrie opens, quite literally, inside of an imaginary tomb. Megan Dodds, the brilliant actress who brings Corrie back to life in her virtuoso one-woman performance at the Minetta Lane Theater in the West Village, is lying face down underneath a huge pile of blankets and comforters. She springs up to notice that her bedroom on the campus of Evergreen State College in Olympia Washington, which in turn is surrounded by a stark forbidding pile of rocks and twisted metal meant to represent a war zone, is painted red “like carnage”. What once seemed like the clever bohemian affectation of a young, would be artist or writer now threatens to devour her. Corrie, who was no detached witness, no Conrad or Marlowe, but a passionate, engaged spokeswoman for the Palestinian refugees locked up inside of the Gaza Strip, has already glimpsed a hint of her fate, that she would be killed underneath a gigantic, weaponized D-9 bulldozer only days before the United States invaded Iraq.
“I get off guard for a minute and my eyes roll up towards the sky and I’m fucked now – I’m fucked—cause there is no sky. There’s that ceiling up there and it has me now – ‘cause I’m looking at it and it’s going to rip me to pieces.”
What Corrie might have glimpsed but didn’t for the same reason she died, too much confidence in her “international white person’s privilege”, was that, for a brief time, she would share the fate of so many unnamed victims of American imperialism. Not only would she be killed by the Israeli Army in the spring of 2003, but, like the victims of the El Mozate massacre in 1981 or the Qana massacre in 2006, she would be killed a second time by the propaganda machine of the Israeli and American right. While the mainstream media briefly picked up the story then dropped it, and while the American government refused to pressure the Israelis for a more thorough investigation than the IDF whitewash which, predictably, vindicated itself of any wrongdoing, while the liberal Democratic blogosphere wouldn’t touch the story with a ten foot pole for fear of being labeled anti-Semitic and of hurting the Democrats chances of retaking the White House in 2004, and while even leftist magazines like Mother Jones distorted the story beyond all recognition, conservative publications like the Wall Street Journal and the Jerusalem Post jumped on it with glee. The extreme right, especially the extreme right on the internet, couldn’t get enough of Rachel Corrie, gloating over the gruesome circumstances of her death, posting and reposting a photo of her ripping up a paper American flag at a demonstration in the Gaza Strip, even going so far as to raise money to send pizzas to the IDF to reward them for killing her (yeah they actually did that). The speed with which one of “us” can become one of “them” in the post- 9/11- world should give any of us pause.
But Corrie, in addition to being a political activist, was also a prolific diarist and letter writer and she left plenty of material for anybody who wanted to play Ezra Pound to her TS Elliot. Pound came in the form of British actor Alan Rickman and Guardian writer Katherine Viner who took hundreds of pages of unfinished and half finished writing, of a young adult’s self-indulgent ramblings mixed in with an astute understanding of the workings of American imperialism, reread them in the light of Corrie’s own appalling story and produced a slim manuscript that would later become the basis for a hit play in London’s Royal Court Theater.
Bringing the play to New York City would present difficulties not encountered in London. Last April, James Nicola decided to stage the play at the New York Theater Workshop, apparently without having familiarized himself with the explosive nature of the subject matter. He backed down at the first sign of trouble and cancelled the production. At this point, the liberal and progressive community in New York City and in the country as a whole, who had been strangely silent about Corrie’s death two years earlier, decided to take notice and a grassroots movement began staging the parts of the play in town squares and on college campuses across the country. It culminated in a massive rally at Riverside Cathedral presided over by Amy Goodman and what seemed to be the collective presence of New York City’s radical left. Finally, in October, Rickman and Katherine Viner were able to stage My Name is Rachel Corrie at the tiny Minetta Lane Theater in the West Village, and Rachel Corrie’s ghostly presence rises from the grave and speaks.
Rachel Corrie’s ghost is not a vindictive or malevolent spirit who wants to punish us for our failure to prevent our government from killing 600,000 people in Iraq or for funding the Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip. She has little or no bitterness against the Israeli people. But she does, in a sense, want to drag us all down into the tomb with her, not only to speak for the Palestinians who are incarcerated inside of the massive concentration camps of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, but to allow them to speak for themselves. Like Heart of Darkness’s Kurtz she has traveled to the deepest darkest secrets of the empire only to meet her doom but unlike Kurtz she doesn’t want us “to exterminate the brutes” and unlike Conrad’s Marlowe, she doesn’t remain detached and contemplative. While it would be absurd to compare “My Name is Rachel Corrie” in terms of its literary value to even the worst thing Conrad wrote, it’s also worth noting that even if Corrie had not met such a grotesque end in the Spring of 2003, there’s a pretty good chance we still would have heard her name because, in spite of what her detractors argue, Corrie was no fool. The writing inside My Name is Rachel Corrie is often surprisingly good, self-aware, awake to absurdity and contradiction, willing to follow an idea all the way through to its logical conclusion.
And Viner and Rickman make good use of it. Corrie herself says “if you are concerned with the logic and sequence of things and the crescendo of suspense up to a good shocker of an ending, you would best be getting back to your video games and your amassing wealth. Leave the meaningless details to the poets and the photographers. And they’re all meaningless details.” But you realize that no, they’re not. In one sequence, as the play builds towards its tragic ending, after Megan Dodds has taken us through the whole sequence of events from Corrie’s privileged childhood in Washington State to her brief stay in the Gaza Strip and her outraged realization of how most of the world’s poor live, we find ourselves back in Olympia in the middle of what seems a random, comic monologue about Corrie’s time as “drop ins coordinator” at “Behavioral Health Resources”. Describing a trip to Dairy Queen with several of her clients, we see Corrie, a very young woman trying to maintain some kind of authority over mentally ill adults, and constantly failing. In spite of her good intentions, her clients don’t want to be guided by this young woman and they rebel. Don’t speak for us, they say. Don’t try to control us.
“Please desist from using the word we as a transparent and superficial attempt to transcend the client/counselor relationship and persuade us to trust your bony ass,” Corrie describes them as saying, mixing in her own educated middle-class skepticism of the passive aggressive quality of the language of therapeutic psychobabble with her clients’ direct, coarse vulgarity. “And I said what’s that like for you and they said shut it – okay hippy? Our voices are telling us you suck ass and really need to get laid.”
As Joseph Conrad expressed so eloquently, a white European or American back at home inside the whited sepulcher is often powerless, another bony assed hippie mental health volunteer being mocked by her would be clients, but, once outside at the margins of the empire, things change, and the temptation to exploit the unequal relationship between yourself an the empire’s victims can often be overwhelming. Like Kurtz, who decides to set himself in the middle of the Belgian Congo as a God or the American marine who tosses candy to Iraqi children in Ramadi or Fallujah, Corrie is aware of the power her “international white person’s privilege” brings. She has money to buy water and food. She has access to the Internet. She has a passport and can go back to Seattle if she wants. She’s young, blond and attractive and can bluff her way through Israeli customs in a few minutes where a dark skinned Arab would most likely be held up for hours. “Very little problem at the airport. My tight jeans and bunny hair sweater seem to have made all the difference.” The people in the Gaza Strip, thrilled that this young, beautiful American would care about them at all, put her up on a pedestal. But unlike Kurtz, unlike that Marine in Baghdad, Corrie doesn’t wish to set herself above the people she’s living with anymore than she wants to set herself up above her clients back in Olympia.
Indeed, the later passages of this play show that far from being the grandstanding radical or attention whore that her detractors try to paint her as being, Corrie was a well brought up, polite young woman who spoke to and described with respect those Palestinians she was living with. She doesn’t just throw candy from the turret of a tank and drive off. She listens to what they have to say, tries to learn bits of Arabic from the children, has a sense of humor when they laugh at her squeamishness, speaks to older Arab woman no differently from the way she would speak to her own mother, but, above all, wants to tell their story as much as she wants to tell her own. In one of the very last scenes of the play, Corrie is writing an e-mail to her well-intentioned but ultimately clueless liberal parents back home, who make the usual statements about the cycle of violence and about being trying to be “even handed” between both sides.
Who do you these families are that I tell you about, who won’t take any money from us even though they are very, very poor, and who say to us: “We are not a hotel. We help you because we think that maybe you will go and tell people in your country that you lived with Muslims. We think they will know that we are good people. We are quiet people. We just want peace. Do you think I’m hanging out with Hamas fighters? These people are being shot at every day and they continue to go about their business as best they can in the sights of machine guns and rocket launchers. Isn’t that basically the epitome of non-violent resistance?
It’s easy enough to dismiss this as propaganda, and to some extent it is propaganda of the crudest variety. We help you because we think that maybe you will go and tell people in your country that you lived with Muslims. We are quiet people. We just want peace. But it’s also important to notice that Corrie sees it as propaganda. Unlike the majority of us, who will find some excuse not to see the world through the eyes of the world’s poor because knowing what they know would be more than we could bear, Corrie makes the conscious choice to enter into their world and to make an attempt to speak in their voice. This indeed is propaganda, but it’s not only propaganda worth repeating, it’s propaganda that’s woefully inadequate to the horrific reality in which the Palestinians and most of the world’s poor live.
The way Dodds reads this passage is remarkable. While up until the final parts of the play, she has been speaking in an affected, self-conscious, self-dramatizing tone of voice which ranges from insolent bohemian to daddy’s girl trying to get her father’s attention, here she drops into a way of speaking that’s completely unselfconscious, almost transparent. She loses herself and allows the people of the Gaza Strip to speak through her and they, in turn, give her the authority to speak to her father as an equal. The power relationship has been reversed. She’s no longer pleading the case of the Palestinians to her mother and father (and to that collective body of progressives and liberals who came to the rally against the censorship of My Name is Rachel Corrie at Riverside), she’s instructing her parents in the reality of how the world works. She’s challenging us all to “come see these people” and to “make this stop”. Rachel Corrie was a very young woman when she died (only 23) but she had already found herself in a way most of us will never even imagine, and, just perhaps, for all the talk we here about “heroes” after 9/11, Corrie might just be the only genuinely heroic figure who’s come out of these awful five years. As young as she was when she died, Corrie is speaking as someone who’s made the conscious choice to step outside of the comfortable whited sepulcher, to “fight her monsters”, to see the world in its naked reality. Compared to her and compared to the voice in this play, the rest of us are still children hiding in our dollhouses.
My name is Rachel Corrie opens, quite literally, inside of an imaginary tomb. Megan Dodds, the brilliant actress who brings Corrie back to life in her virtuoso one-woman performance at the Minetta Lane Theater in the West Village, is lying face down underneath a huge pile of blankets and comforters. She springs up to notice that her bedroom on the campus of Evergreen State College in Olympia Washington, which in turn is surrounded by a stark forbidding pile of rocks and twisted metal meant to represent a war zone, is painted red “like carnage”. What once seemed like the clever bohemian affectation of a young, would be artist or writer now threatens to devour her. Corrie, who was no detached witness, no Conrad or Marlowe, but a passionate, engaged spokeswoman for the Palestinian refugees locked up inside of the Gaza Strip, has already glimpsed a hint of her fate, that she would be killed underneath a gigantic, weaponized D-9 bulldozer only days before the United States invaded Iraq.
“I get off guard for a minute and my eyes roll up towards the sky and I’m fucked now – I’m fucked—cause there is no sky. There’s that ceiling up there and it has me now – ‘cause I’m looking at it and it’s going to rip me to pieces.”
What Corrie might have glimpsed but didn’t for the same reason she died, too much confidence in her “international white person’s privilege”, was that, for a brief time, she would share the fate of so many unnamed victims of American imperialism. Not only would she be killed by the Israeli Army in the spring of 2003, but, like the victims of the El Mozate massacre in 1981 or the Qana massacre in 2006, she would be killed a second time by the propaganda machine of the Israeli and American right. While the mainstream media briefly picked up the story then dropped it, and while the American government refused to pressure the Israelis for a more thorough investigation than the IDF whitewash which, predictably, vindicated itself of any wrongdoing, while the liberal Democratic blogosphere wouldn’t touch the story with a ten foot pole for fear of being labeled anti-Semitic and of hurting the Democrats chances of retaking the White House in 2004, and while even leftist magazines like Mother Jones distorted the story beyond all recognition, conservative publications like the Wall Street Journal and the Jerusalem Post jumped on it with glee. The extreme right, especially the extreme right on the internet, couldn’t get enough of Rachel Corrie, gloating over the gruesome circumstances of her death, posting and reposting a photo of her ripping up a paper American flag at a demonstration in the Gaza Strip, even going so far as to raise money to send pizzas to the IDF to reward them for killing her (yeah they actually did that). The speed with which one of “us” can become one of “them” in the post- 9/11- world should give any of us pause.
But Corrie, in addition to being a political activist, was also a prolific diarist and letter writer and she left plenty of material for anybody who wanted to play Ezra Pound to her TS Elliot. Pound came in the form of British actor Alan Rickman and Guardian writer Katherine Viner who took hundreds of pages of unfinished and half finished writing, of a young adult’s self-indulgent ramblings mixed in with an astute understanding of the workings of American imperialism, reread them in the light of Corrie’s own appalling story and produced a slim manuscript that would later become the basis for a hit play in London’s Royal Court Theater.
Bringing the play to New York City would present difficulties not encountered in London. Last April, James Nicola decided to stage the play at the New York Theater Workshop, apparently without having familiarized himself with the explosive nature of the subject matter. He backed down at the first sign of trouble and cancelled the production. At this point, the liberal and progressive community in New York City and in the country as a whole, who had been strangely silent about Corrie’s death two years earlier, decided to take notice and a grassroots movement began staging the parts of the play in town squares and on college campuses across the country. It culminated in a massive rally at Riverside Cathedral presided over by Amy Goodman and what seemed to be the collective presence of New York City’s radical left. Finally, in October, Rickman and Katherine Viner were able to stage My Name is Rachel Corrie at the tiny Minetta Lane Theater in the West Village, and Rachel Corrie’s ghostly presence rises from the grave and speaks.
Rachel Corrie’s ghost is not a vindictive or malevolent spirit who wants to punish us for our failure to prevent our government from killing 600,000 people in Iraq or for funding the Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip. She has little or no bitterness against the Israeli people. But she does, in a sense, want to drag us all down into the tomb with her, not only to speak for the Palestinians who are incarcerated inside of the massive concentration camps of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, but to allow them to speak for themselves. Like Heart of Darkness’s Kurtz she has traveled to the deepest darkest secrets of the empire only to meet her doom but unlike Kurtz she doesn’t want us “to exterminate the brutes” and unlike Conrad’s Marlowe, she doesn’t remain detached and contemplative. While it would be absurd to compare “My Name is Rachel Corrie” in terms of its literary value to even the worst thing Conrad wrote, it’s also worth noting that even if Corrie had not met such a grotesque end in the Spring of 2003, there’s a pretty good chance we still would have heard her name because, in spite of what her detractors argue, Corrie was no fool. The writing inside My Name is Rachel Corrie is often surprisingly good, self-aware, awake to absurdity and contradiction, willing to follow an idea all the way through to its logical conclusion.
And Viner and Rickman make good use of it. Corrie herself says “if you are concerned with the logic and sequence of things and the crescendo of suspense up to a good shocker of an ending, you would best be getting back to your video games and your amassing wealth. Leave the meaningless details to the poets and the photographers. And they’re all meaningless details.” But you realize that no, they’re not. In one sequence, as the play builds towards its tragic ending, after Megan Dodds has taken us through the whole sequence of events from Corrie’s privileged childhood in Washington State to her brief stay in the Gaza Strip and her outraged realization of how most of the world’s poor live, we find ourselves back in Olympia in the middle of what seems a random, comic monologue about Corrie’s time as “drop ins coordinator” at “Behavioral Health Resources”. Describing a trip to Dairy Queen with several of her clients, we see Corrie, a very young woman trying to maintain some kind of authority over mentally ill adults, and constantly failing. In spite of her good intentions, her clients don’t want to be guided by this young woman and they rebel. Don’t speak for us, they say. Don’t try to control us.
“Please desist from using the word we as a transparent and superficial attempt to transcend the client/counselor relationship and persuade us to trust your bony ass,” Corrie describes them as saying, mixing in her own educated middle-class skepticism of the passive aggressive quality of the language of therapeutic psychobabble with her clients’ direct, coarse vulgarity. “And I said what’s that like for you and they said shut it – okay hippy? Our voices are telling us you suck ass and really need to get laid.”
As Joseph Conrad expressed so eloquently, a white European or American back at home inside the whited sepulcher is often powerless, another bony assed hippie mental health volunteer being mocked by her would be clients, but, once outside at the margins of the empire, things change, and the temptation to exploit the unequal relationship between yourself an the empire’s victims can often be overwhelming. Like Kurtz, who decides to set himself in the middle of the Belgian Congo as a God or the American marine who tosses candy to Iraqi children in Ramadi or Fallujah, Corrie is aware of the power her “international white person’s privilege” brings. She has money to buy water and food. She has access to the Internet. She has a passport and can go back to Seattle if she wants. She’s young, blond and attractive and can bluff her way through Israeli customs in a few minutes where a dark skinned Arab would most likely be held up for hours. “Very little problem at the airport. My tight jeans and bunny hair sweater seem to have made all the difference.” The people in the Gaza Strip, thrilled that this young, beautiful American would care about them at all, put her up on a pedestal. But unlike Kurtz, unlike that Marine in Baghdad, Corrie doesn’t wish to set herself above the people she’s living with anymore than she wants to set herself up above her clients back in Olympia.
Indeed, the later passages of this play show that far from being the grandstanding radical or attention whore that her detractors try to paint her as being, Corrie was a well brought up, polite young woman who spoke to and described with respect those Palestinians she was living with. She doesn’t just throw candy from the turret of a tank and drive off. She listens to what they have to say, tries to learn bits of Arabic from the children, has a sense of humor when they laugh at her squeamishness, speaks to older Arab woman no differently from the way she would speak to her own mother, but, above all, wants to tell their story as much as she wants to tell her own. In one of the very last scenes of the play, Corrie is writing an e-mail to her well-intentioned but ultimately clueless liberal parents back home, who make the usual statements about the cycle of violence and about being trying to be “even handed” between both sides.
Who do you these families are that I tell you about, who won’t take any money from us even though they are very, very poor, and who say to us: “We are not a hotel. We help you because we think that maybe you will go and tell people in your country that you lived with Muslims. We think they will know that we are good people. We are quiet people. We just want peace. Do you think I’m hanging out with Hamas fighters? These people are being shot at every day and they continue to go about their business as best they can in the sights of machine guns and rocket launchers. Isn’t that basically the epitome of non-violent resistance?
It’s easy enough to dismiss this as propaganda, and to some extent it is propaganda of the crudest variety. We help you because we think that maybe you will go and tell people in your country that you lived with Muslims. We are quiet people. We just want peace. But it’s also important to notice that Corrie sees it as propaganda. Unlike the majority of us, who will find some excuse not to see the world through the eyes of the world’s poor because knowing what they know would be more than we could bear, Corrie makes the conscious choice to enter into their world and to make an attempt to speak in their voice. This indeed is propaganda, but it’s not only propaganda worth repeating, it’s propaganda that’s woefully inadequate to the horrific reality in which the Palestinians and most of the world’s poor live.
The way Dodds reads this passage is remarkable. While up until the final parts of the play, she has been speaking in an affected, self-conscious, self-dramatizing tone of voice which ranges from insolent bohemian to daddy’s girl trying to get her father’s attention, here she drops into a way of speaking that’s completely unselfconscious, almost transparent. She loses herself and allows the people of the Gaza Strip to speak through her and they, in turn, give her the authority to speak to her father as an equal. The power relationship has been reversed. She’s no longer pleading the case of the Palestinians to her mother and father (and to that collective body of progressives and liberals who came to the rally against the censorship of My Name is Rachel Corrie at Riverside), she’s instructing her parents in the reality of how the world works. She’s challenging us all to “come see these people” and to “make this stop”. Rachel Corrie was a very young woman when she died (only 23) but she had already found herself in a way most of us will never even imagine, and, just perhaps, for all the talk we here about “heroes” after 9/11, Corrie might just be the only genuinely heroic figure who’s come out of these awful five years. As young as she was when she died, Corrie is speaking as someone who’s made the conscious choice to step outside of the comfortable whited sepulcher, to “fight her monsters”, to see the world in its naked reality. Compared to her and compared to the voice in this play, the rest of us are still children hiding in our dollhouses.
Add your comments