Deciphering Rachel Corrie

When I read My Name is Rachel Corrie for the first time as homework for my Script Analysis class, it was very late at night, and not all of it made sense. But the underlying message came through, and that was enough to put me on this track toward making it my senior project.

I have, of course, read it several more times by this point, but not until now, as I am working through it piece by piece, have I really begun to decipher and understand what she meant in certain passages.

She was most definitely a writer. And she thought very abstractly. She created metaphors to understand things (whether or not they make sense to anyone else), and that was how she interpreted the world.

So when she writes things like

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.

it takes reading through it a couple of times before I really start to grasp the depth of what she's talking about.

Or,

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.

Rachel's description of an ideal world doesn't sound much like I imagine anyone else's would, but her vision of an ideal world fits exactly who she was. When I imagine and try to create in my mind the person who wrote these words, I understand that the same person couldn't be content to do activist work from the sidelines. She needed to go.

Every time I figure out what she's talking about and what she's trying to say, it's like a little victory for me, and I feel like I understand a little bit more who she was. So today, I had a victory. In this section, she's just been invited to go to Gaza to work with the International Solidarity Movement, and she's talking about what led her to this point. She says she never intended to get involved with activism--she's scared of people and her original intent was more along the lines of gathering trivia. But something happened along the way. She creates this metaphor:

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 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, 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.

When I first read this paragraph I couldn't figure out where in the world the owls came from. What made Rachel talk about all these different, weird things? Not eight paragraphs later, she starts talking about how salmon talked her into a lifestyle change (still working on deciphering that one completely). But how does this stuff relate at all to anything she's talking about?

Then I started to memorize it, and somehow it dawned on me. And now that I understand it, I'm like, how could I not understand it? Duh.

The woman in the woods was just hired on to do the job, the spotted owl survey. She probably never intended to become so immersed in it. She certainly didn't plan on becoming "part owl." But, along the way, after years of doing the job, it began to change her. It became more than just a job she did. She was changed because of it. And Rachel is saying the same thing about herself. She never intended to be much more than a curious participant, standing off to the side and learning some things about the world and human rights and activism. And then it began to change her, and now she has to go.

The funny thing is, I think the same thing is happening to me that happened to Rachel and to the owl woman at Mount Rainier. Though, perhaps I did choose this project with a little more in mind than curious bystanding. But I'm beginning to get this inescapable feeling that my tongue is changing shape.