Stop the Next War Now (6 page)

The concept of empire, the concept of corporations determining reality, and the concept of invasion, occupation, domination are central to those in power today. But millions of us know in our bodies, in our minds, in our spirits and that another paradigm is desperate to emerge on this planet. I believe we can feel it in every fiber of our beings. And with a little courage, with a lot of unity, and with faith that paradigm is going to emerge.

I believe that women and vagina-friendly men will be at the center of this new paradigm. They will be the carriers of it, the provokers of it, and the healers and the heart of it. Not because all women are kind and just and incapable of cruelty. We have seen women become easily absorbed into the patriarchal, capitalist structure and become heartless and devastating. But there are many if not millions of women on this planet who hold this new paradigm in their bodies, in their beings. And because we have been so far outside the current power structure, this paradigm has been allowed to grow in us.

What does the paradigm look like? How does it taste? What is its shape? Well, let’s begin by saying that you cannot bomb people into trust and democracy and hope. This paradigm knows that terrorists are made, not born. It knows that violence and humiliation take many forms—the occupation of people’s homelands, putting your troops in people’s holy lands, stripping people naked in prison and forcing them to masturbate, or allowing millions of the world to starve while you eat steak. And shame, as we know, becomes violence. This is not to justify terrorism, state or individual. It is more a desire to look at the reasons. Why are there terrorists? Why are people flying planes through buildings? In the new paradigm, the why of things will be more crucial than vengeance.

The new paradigm will not be about conquering people, but about collaborating with people. It will not be invading people, it will be inviting people. Not occupying, but offering, inspiring, and serving people. In the new paradigm, there will be time to feel, to heal, to grieve. Unexpressed grief often becomes violence. Experienced grief becomes wisdom. As a nation, instead of grieving over September 11, we retaliated. We bombed.

We bombed Afghanistan, killing innocent people. And the Taliban? From everything I understand from the women there, I think it is still running wild throughout the country. We did not free the Afghan people. We did not invite their trust. We did not form alliances with them. On a recent trip there I discovered among the Afghan people an incredible sense of having been used and then abandoned. I believe if we had had our grief, if we had taken time to feel the center of the pain, what we felt for the loss of the people in those buildings, for the horror that people would be driven to such mind-numbing rage that they would fly planes through buildings, would have been expressed as compassion and an understanding that to drop more bombs would cure nothing.

Real power is about generosity. Real power is about being bigger than revenge. And it requires every part of our being to say, I’m not going to hit you back. I’m going to take a breath and find what within me is larger and has the power to enlighten.

Over the last six years I’ve had the great privilege of traveling all around the world. I’ve seen this country from the perspective of many other countries. But what I’ve also seen around the world is the emerging of this paradigm. I have seen amazing women and vagina-friendly men all over this planet. We have come to call them vagina warriors.

Drake’s Beach, Marin County, California, December 29, 2002: Baring Witness uses the power of beauty and nakedness to awaken the public and heighten the awareness of human vulnerability. See www.baringwitness.org for more information.

© Jan Watson

Vagina warriors are men or women who have witnessed violence, experienced violence, and responded not by reaching for AK-47s, weapons of mass destruction, or machetes. Instead they hold the violence in their bodies, they grieve over the violence, they experience the violence, and they transform the violence into social justice. They devote their lives to making sure that what happened to them doesn’t happen to anybody else.

Yanar Mohammed is a vagina warrior. She and her colleagues are building safe houses all over Iraq to protect the women, who are being killed and raped. She is organizing women, calling public demonstrations. She has round-the-clock bodyguards, as there have been many threats to her life.

Medea Benjamin is a vagina warrior. Medea Benjamin saw the war beginning in Iraq and she said, “I’m going to put my life and my heart and my spirit on the line, and I’m going to form codepink.” And with Jodie Evans she went out and started to transform that rage and that sorrow to make the world better.

Arundhati Roy is a vagina warrior. She wrote a gorgeous novel and became well known throughout the world. And instead of taking her money and her fame and disappearing, she stood up against empire, she stood up for workers, she stood up to stop the desecration of the planet.

Charmaine Means is a vagina warrior. She was a major in the U.S. Army stationed in Iraq in the town of Mosul. And when she was told by her superior to shut down the local TV station and muzzle the press, she said, “No, I didn’t join the U.S. Army to shut down freedom of speech.”

Malalai Joya is a twenty-five-year-old social worker in Afghanistan. You may have heard of her, but you probably haven’t, because the media rarely report on vagina warriors. Malalai Joya was at the Loya Jirga, the body writing Afghanistan’s new constitution. But the Loya Jirga was essentially populated by warlords and members of the Taliban. So Malalai Joya, at twenty-five years of age, stood up and said: “All or most of the people in power here are warlords. We can’t continue with them in power. They need to be held accountable for their actions. There needs to be justice.” Subsequently, there have been three assassination attempts on her life. And you know what? She is still speaking out. That’s a vagina warrior.

Every single person working for peace is a vagina warrior. We don’t need any more violence on this planet. The possibility of violence as a solution to anything is no longer tolerable, permissible, or sane. Women hold the key in our bodies, in our hearts, in our spirits. Every single one of us knows what needs to be done. We need to see what we see, we need to know what we know, and we need to stand up and talk about it everywhere we go and not be afraid anymore.

I dedicate this to vagina warriors throughout the world:

T

HIS

W

ILL

B

E

O

UR

R

EVOLUTION

When I think how long it has taken

to remember,

to allow myself to remember.

When I think how hard it is

to believe what I remember,

to remember what I remember,

to make what I remember matter,

to not hurt my family with what I remember

When I think how hard it is to not go underground again,

to keep remembering that what happened,

did happen.

When I think that what I remember makes

Everyone uneasy

And that being a person who remembers

makes me a person

many people would like to forget.

But I already remember too much

There is no going back

The memories

break through like bleeding

and one memory leads to all memories,

all arteries,

one violence to all violence.

It did happen

my father whipped me with belts

and bloodied my nose in restaurants

with white linen.

Homeless woman on Fourteenth and Seventh

eating the cold and bug-infested remains of pizza.

She has cigarette burns on her inner thighs.

She doesn’t remember the burning.

Woman in prison

who woke up one day

learned she had stabbed her John twenty-two times.

She only remembered the

first three.

This happened because she had stopped

remembering everything

after she was raped

and raped before she was nine.

You are forgetting as I am speaking

You are wiping off the blood,

spraying air fresheners

to cover the smell of rotting corpses

They are holding invisible unidentified people

in filthy pens

in Guantánamo Bay

You don’t remember them

or why they are there

or the leash around the naked crawling

hooded Iraqi man’s neck

or the Iraqi boy lying on a cot

with no sheets, no arms, no legs

and these are the images of what was only

momentarily remembered.

The images of the rest—

melted children

screaming fathers

abducted daughters

collapsing grandmothers

sodomized little boys.

There was a war on Iraq

There was a war on Iraq

Thousands are dead,

the rest are drugged

or wrestling in their beds.

It doesn’t matter if you remember it,

it remembers you.

You who can no longer look her in the eyes

or get wet between your legs

You who are listless

who can’t remember how you got there

or why you bought the gun

or where these babies came from

or how you made yourself bleed.

It haunts you

It remembers you

We all knew it would happen like this.

We tried to remember

the terrible stupid wars

that had come before

with our bodies

in the streets of the world

but the ones in power had

forgotten us a long time ago.

Eventually we will forget each other

That’s how the memory works

It must erase all paths that lead back

and so we will be here

but we will not be here

for each other.

I want to remember

with you.

This will be our revolution

Retrieving

Who we were

What we desired

What we knew

Before it happened

Before we were broken

Censored and bruised.

I want to remember

We can do this together

Slowly at first,

Lying down with each other

Then biting and licking

Remembering

Refusing

Refusing

Remembering

I’ll do that

I will

With you.

“Democracy and Freedom cannot be force fed

at the point of an occupier’s gun.”

—U.S. senator Robert Byrd

COLOMBIAN WOMEN CREATE

A PATH TO PEACE

Excerpted from
Building from the Inside Out: Peace Initiatives in War-Torn Colombia
, produced by the American Friends Service Committee and the Fellowship of Reconciliation.