My Name is Rachel Corrie Read online

  MY NAME IS

  RACHEL CORRIE

  Taken from the writings of Rachel Corrie

  Edited by Alan Rickman and Katharine Viner

  Produced with the kind permission of

  Rachel Corrie's family

  NICK HERN BOOKS

  London

  www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

  Contents

  Title Page

  Original Production

  My Name is Rachel Corrie

  Copyright and Performing Rights Information

  My Name is Rachel Corrie was first performed at the Royal Court Jerwood Theatre Upstairs on 7 April 2005 with the following cast:

  RACHEL CORRIE

  Megan Dodds

  Director

  Alan Rickman

  Designer

  Hildegard Bechtler

  Lighting Designer

  Johanna Town

  Sound and Video Designer

  Emma Laxton

  The production transferred to the Royal Court Jerwood Theatre Downstairs on 11 October 2005 and to the Playhouse Theatre in London's West End on 28 March 2006.

  Rachel Corrie

  was born in Olympia, Washington, USA, on April 10th, 1979.

  Before completing her studies at The Evergreen State College in Olympia she joined other foreign nationals working for the International Solidarity Movement in Gaza on January 25th, 2003.

  This text has been edited from her journals and e-mails.

  Olympia, Washington. A bedroom. Clothes, books everywhere. RACHEL lies on top of it all.

  Every morning I wake up in my red bedroom that seemed like genius when I painted it, but looks more and more like carnage these days. I blink for a minute. I get ready to write down some dreams or a page in my diary or draw some very important maps. And then the ceiling tries to devour me.

  I wriggle around under my comforter trying to find a ball point, a Crayola, anything fast. I can hear the ceiling spit and gnash above me. Waiting for me to look, because if I look, it can eat me.

  And I struggle for some socks and some boxers so I can make a run for it – but I haven't done laundry in a month and the other girl who lives in my room when I'm not here – the bad one who tends the garden of dirty cups and throws all the clothes around and tips over the ashtrays – the bad other girl hid all my pens while I was sleeping.

  And I try. I try to look at my fingers. I try to look at the floor with all the fashion magazines left by the bad other girl, to find one pen – just one pen. But I can't imagine where any pens might be, and trying to imagine, 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.

  She sits and faces us.

  I am a creator of intricately decorated bedrooms. Each time I move, I spend weeks painting, gluing things to my walls, choosing the precise pictures of goddesses and art postcards. This is a labour of love, and I become completely immersed in it.

  I wonder why I didn't notice the awfulness of my room before.

  I am inside a terrifying mirror.

  I glued things to the wall. My God, I glued things to my wall.

  Touching the pictures, picking up books.

  The question is always where to start the story. That's the first question. Trying to find a beginning, trying to impose order on the great psychotic fast-forward merry-go-round, and trying to impose order is the first step toward ending up in a park somewhere, painted blue, singing ‘Row, row, row your boat’ to an audience of saggy-lipped junkies and business people munching oat-bran muffins.

  And that's how this story ends, good buddy, so 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 best be getting back to your video game and your amassing wealth. Leave the meaningless details to the poets and the photographers.

  And they're all meaningless details, my friend.

  She finds a journal and turns the pages.

  1991.

  My name is Rachel Corrie. I am twelve years old. I was born on April 10th, 1979 in Olympia, Washington, to my mother and father, Craig and Cindy Corrie, a brother, Chris, a sister, Sarah, and a really old cat named Phoebe.

  I grew. I learned to spell cat, to read little books. When I was five I discovered boys, which made my life a little more difficult. Just a little, and a lot more interesting.

  In second grade there were classroom rules hanging from the ceiling. The only one I can remember now seems like it would be a good rule for life. ‘Everyone must feel safe.’ Safe to be themselves, physically safe, safe to say what they think, just safe. That's the best rule I can think of.

  Now I'm in middle school. I guess I've grown up a little, it's all relative anyway, nine years is as long as forty years depending on how long you've lived. I stole that from my dad.

  Sometimes I think my dad is the wisest person in the world.

  You understand none of this is really true, because what I wrote today is true, but you'll read it by tomorrow, or the next day, and my whole life will be different. Is that how life is, a new draft for every day, a new view for each hour?

  When I graduated fifth grade we had a list of questions for our yearbook. One of them was ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ Everyone wrote something like ‘doctor’ or ‘astronaut’ or ‘Spiderman,’ and then you turned the page and there was my five-paragraph manifesto on the million things I wanted to be, from wandering poet to first woman president. That was real cute in fifth grade but when it's ten years later, I'm a junior in college, and I still don't have the conviction to cross ‘Spiderman’ off my list – well, you can imagine it gets a little nerve-wracking.

  My mother used to walk with me to the bottom of the hill to wait for the car pool – I was nervous that I would do it wrong. I remember, or maybe I invent, that occasionally we decided on the way, I wasn't going to school. We stole time that way. She took me to lunch. We went to bookstores in Seattle. She bought me books on love and delinquency, and although she never said it straight out, I'm sure she was hoping I'd become a bank robber. My mother would never admit it, but she wanted me exactly how I turned out – scattered and deviant and too loud.

  She changes her clothes.

  I'm building the world myself and putting new hats on everybody one by one, before I go out, so wrinkled, I have to grab the great big flaccid flaps of my eyebrows and lift them off my cheekbones in order to see. Before I go out I'm gonna have people in tutus, cops wearing sombreros, stockbrokers with Viking hats, priests with panties on their heads. In the world I'm building, everybody shouts hello to everybody else from their car windows. People have speakers attached to their chests that pour out music so you can tell from a distance what mood they're in, and they won't be too chicken to get naked when the rain comes. And first ladies carry handcuffs and bull whips and presidents wear metal collars. Big metal collars with tight leashes.

  She emerges. Barefoot.

  Okay. I'm Rachel. Sometimes I wear ripped blue jeans. Sometimes I wear polyester. Sometimes I take off all my clothes and swim naked at the beach. I don't believe in fate but my astrological sign is Aries, the ram, and my sign on the Chinese zodiac is the sheep, and the name Rachel means sheep but I've got a fire in my belly. It used to be such a big loud blazing fire that I couldn't hear anybody else over it. So I talked a lot and I didn't listen too much. Then I went to middle school where you gotta be cool and you gotta be strong and tough, and I tried real hard to be cool. But luckily, luckily I happened to get a free trip to Russia and I saw another country for the first time.

  In the street
s and the alleys it was an obstacle course of garbage and mud and graffiti. There was coal dust on the snow, everything was dirty. And they always said to us, ‘How do you like our dirty city?’ Oh, but it was so pretty with the little lights in the windows and the red dusk-light on the buildings. It was flawed, dirty, broken and gorgeous.

  I looked backwards across the Pacific Ocean and from that distance some things back here in Olympia, Washington, USA seemed a little weird and disconcerting. But I was awake in Russia. I was awake for the first time with bug-eyes and a grin.

  On the flight home from Anchorage to Seattle everything was dark. Then the sun began to rise, the water was shining, and I realized we were flying over Puget Sound. Soon we could see islands in that water, evergreen trees on those islands.

  And I began to sob. I sobbed in all that radiance, in the midst of the most glorious sunrise I'd ever seen, because it wasn't enough. It wasn't enough to make me glad to be home.

  Maybe it was finally the trees who told me to stay. Or maybe going to school in my hometown was just the path of least resistance. Maybe going to Evergreen State College was just the best way to be different from my Economics-major-high achiever-khaki-and-high-heels-Yalie-corporate sister and brother. I don't know why I stayed. But one day I knew I had to. It was the same day I decided to be an artist and a writer and I didn't give a shit if I was mediocre and I didn't give a shit if I starved to death and I didn't give a shit if my whole damn high school turned and pointed and laughed in my face.

  I was finally awake, forever and ever.

  Picking up a print-out.

  Yesterday I heard from Chris in Gaza. I am being invited there. I need to go.

  I've been organizing in Olympia for a little over a year on antiwar/global justice issues. And it started to feel like this work is missing a connection to the people who are impacted by US foreign policy. I just think we all have the right to be critical of government policies . . . any government policies, particularly policies which we're funding. I feel pretty isolated from the world because of living in Olympia my whole life and my activism at this point has been extremely tied to Olympia. But I've had this underlying need to go to a place and meet people who are on the other end of the tax money that goes to fund the US military. Trying to be local and be respectful of the local is a big part of my ethic, I guess.

  What I need to do.

  She writes in her notebook.

  Send Tuesday's minutes out over the internet.

  Write an article for Monday's staff newsletter.

  Call Tom again.

  Make a list of things hanging over my head.

  I am given to making very important lists.

  Reading from her notebook.

  Five People I Wish I'd Met Who Are Dead:

  Salvador Dali

  Karl Jung

  MLK

  JFK

  Josephine.

  Five People To Hang Out With In Eternity:

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Jesus

  ee cummings

  Gertrude Stein

  Zelda Fitzgerald

  Six – Charlie Chaplin.

  She starts to pack a bag.

  I didn't intend to become so deeply involved in activism this year. I'm not sure what compelled me to sign up for the Local Knowledge class – there's such a big degree of community involvement. I'm phobic of community. I'm scared of people, particularly people in the greater Olympia area.

  I've been here my whole life. Almost everyone I know and have known in Olympia came from somewhere else.

  This is another place where progressive white people escaped a few decades ago – a place where hippie kids come after touring with jam bands.

  I don't think my intention was to be of any particular use to the communities we studied. I was looking for curious facts to flesh out an authentic setting. Trivia.

  Like – when I worked at Mount Rainier we followed a woman into the woods. She had become part owl. Her job was to entice them out. Our job was to carry the live mice. Somehow, after years of doing spotted owl survey, this woman's larynx changed. She croaked in a language that was articulated somewhere deeper than tonsils. Her tongue must have changed shape. We followed her through the woods on the northwest side of the mountain all day and we saw no owls. And no owls croaked back at her.

  I think about how many of us doing any kind of progressive work in this region swim beneath the surface combing for what was here before, and taking inventory of what is now. There's the chance that you will be changed by what you're looking for. Your tongue could change shape like the woman at Rainier.

  Studying the history of this area roots me. We've certainly waded in the same water and wandered on the same beaches as very brave people. It makes bravery seem more possible.

  We can look at that history and then choose which side we want to be on now, and how willing we are to fight. We are not outside.

  Over a thousand people are still, as far as I can tell, being held somewhere in the United States, and it's unclear why. They arrest the ‘dirty-bomber,’ someone apparently ‘in the very early stages’ of planning an attack on the US, and this is big news. What does this say about the other thousand people held somewhere? That they weren't in the early stages of planning anything.

  Looking for where I fit into all this forced me out into the community.

  You come to take for granted where you belong in a town. If you have an overactive fantasy life you just start making things up. You can remember just enough unrelated pieces of trivia to hold up coffee-table conversation and never have to think about anything disturbing or demanding of action.

  I'm still pretty shell-shocked by this semester. I spoke to a room of about forty international students. I've helped in the planning of two conferences, facilitated meetings, danced down the street with forty people from the ages of seven to seventy, dressed as doves. I spent a lot of time with the homeless group. I went with them to the city council. I went to the community conversation. I slept out overnight on Mayday.

  Who is this person? How did I get here?

  I will not leave the house if it's to turn in my own work or complete some other act of self-preservation. I will never leave my bed.

  The salmon talked me into a lifestyle change. There's a hole, a pipe, in the bulkhead at the East Bay Marina. Every year salmon swim into that hole, trying to get back home. Salmon have to make it all the way up Plum Street in that hole. That hole is Moxlie Creek.

  Once you know that there are salmon down there it's hard to forget. You imagine their moony eyes while you walk home from the bar in your slutty boots. It's hard to be extraordinarily vacuous when you always have the salmon in the back of your mind: in that pipe down there – on their way to daylight at Watershed Park. Salmon are the history that isn't trivia. They are what was here before.

  I look at this place now and I just want to do right by it. The salmon beneath downtown and the creeks and the inlets and the people who were here first and my elementary school teachers and my mom.

  Leaving a phone message.

  Hey Mom, could you e-mail to me with anyone you know who it would be good to contact if I get in trouble – though I'm not planning on it – friends or family who would call their Congress people, etc. – also, friends who might be interested in getting info or at least knowing that I'm going?

  I'm going to give The Olympian your number. Please think about your language when you talk to them. I think it was smart that you're wary of using the word ‘terrorism’, and if you talk about the cycle of violence, or ‘an eye for an eye’, you could be perpetuating the idea that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a balanced conflict, instead of a largely unarmed people against the fourth most powerful military in the world. These are the kind of things it's important to think about before talking to reporters.

  I'll call you tonight.

  We have a very involved mother . . . overly involved sometimes. This means we have to claw our way toward autonomy �
� kick and scream and yell to get some space to grow in. It also means we let her take care of things we are capable of doing ourselves.

  I think of my mom as being extremely moralistic. Not in a bad way. Just there were things that none of us did. Lying, teasing, taking things, just being rude to people. Sometimes she wondered if we would be healthier, better children if she had taken us to church. This may have been a scare tactic of hers.

  I know a woman who's pregnant and she's decided not to assign a gender to her baby until it chooses its own. I think that's a little nuts. Anyway, I think maybe my mom had a similar attitude toward my spirituality. She was determined I would define it for myself.

  I could write a history of my family according to discoveries I've made over the years in cupboards and drawers. Unfinished baby books. Duplicate containers of oregano from houses I lived in and moved out of, taking the seasoning with me. Placemats that defeated cranberry juice and oyster stew and candle wax.

  I am heartbroken when I search in my mother's drawers. I am heartbroken by the way she arranges jewelery. I know she returns her earrings to their little boxes when she finishes with them. I am heartbroken at the thought of her, standing in her big bra and her pantyhose stretched over her underwear, dabbing on lipstick, moving pink powder across the bones of her cheeks, rubbing it into her pores until it hangs on. My mother ages and puts on make-up – slides bracelets across her wrists – where the skin is loose.

  Sometimes my mother is up there, bobbing in the sky like Macy's Parade balloons. Sometimes my mother is so big she looms over everything.

  Finding a photograph of Cindy, her mother.

  I know I scare you, Mom.

  I'm sorry I scare you. But I want to write and I want to see.

  And what would I write about if I only stayed within the doll's house, the flower-world I grew up in?