[영어글-speech]The vagina monologues-V-day Seoul 2007

[서진선]

홈피 정리하다가 지난 3월에 썼던 자료가 있어서 올립니다.

버자이너 모놀로그 아시죠? 그 연극 마지막에 2007년 선언문으로 읽은 것인데... 그때를 생각하면 아직도 얼굴이 화끈거리네요.

여러분들도 보면 좋을 듯 해서, 나름 영어공부도 되니까(쉽더라도..) 올립니다.^^
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We make decisions all the time. Decisions about Them. Them is always different than us. Them has no face. Them is a little bit deserving of all the bad that happens to them. Them is used to violence – it’s in their blood.


There are rules about them. We keep them over there, out of sight, conceptual. We do not get close enough to touch or smell or know them. We do not want to see how easily we could become them – how quickly violence arrives, how swiftly people turn, embracing racist hate. We do not want to know or touch the parts of ourselves that are capable of behaving like them.


Sometimes, if we are lucky, an image, a poem, an invitation to a foreign place pierces our perception. We suddenly stare down at a photograph on the cover of Newsday – six young Bosnian girls just returned from a rape camp. Their faces are beautiful and young and destroyed. We see their utter incomprehension and terror. We feel their shame.


We are compelled. We go and meet these women-young, old, Muslim, Croatian, Serbian, Haitian, Rwandan, Afghan, Chechen, and Lebanese. We sit in dusty barracks, makeshift refugee camps, peeling centers. We hold the strong earthbound hands of the farm women longing for their land, we walk through beet fields with the woman with strawberry stains as she describes the execution of their parents, we sit in a hot room in a crowed refugee hotel with a mother and six children – one of her sons lies suspended in a bed, mute from three months in a concentration camp. We watch woman after woman shake, pace, smoke, choke, weep as they describe the gang rapes, the public rapes, the rapes of mothers, sisters, and grandmothers. We see how they have lost their homes and identities. That they do not eat or can’t stop eating. We hear how they did not expect this want this. Our secure usness, our little usness begins to unravel. It is dangerous.


When we think of war, we think of it as something that happens to men in fields or jungles. We think of hand grenades and scud missiles. We think of the moment of violence – the blast, the explosion. But war is really a consequence – the effects of which are not known or felt for months, years, generations. And because consequences are usually not televised – bye then the war is no longer sexy because the ratings are gong – the consequences remain invisible. As long as they are bombing Iraq for example, it is seen 24 hours a day on television. It is the bombing, the explosions in the dark that keep us watching. As long as there are snipers outside of Sarajevo, Sarajevo exists.


But after the bombing, after the sniper, that’s when the real war begins.


It is found in the broken down fabric of community, in the death of trust, in the destruction of the every day patterns of living. In trauma and depression, poverty and homelessness and starvation. In the emasculation and rage of the victim. In the new violence: the traumatized soldier beating his wife, the teenage boys already plotting revenge, the ongoing panic of the children.

When we think of war, we do not think of women. Because the work of survival, of restoration, is not glamorous work. Like most women’s work, it is undervalued, underpaid and impossible. After was, men are often shattered, unable to function. Women not only work, but they create peace networks, find ways to bring about healing. They teach in home schools when the school buildings are destroyed. Build gardens in the middle of abandoned railroad tracks. They pick up the pieces although they usually haven’t fired a gun.


How do you make war matter? How do you make destruction matter? How do you make people’s suffering thousands of miles away matter? How do you make this world, this life, in all its mystery and injustice, matter?


This is where theater comes in. theater insists that we inhabit the present tense – not the virtual tense or the politically correct tense. Theater demands that we truly be where we are. By being there together, we are able to confront the seemingly impossible, we are able to feel that which we fear might destroy us – and we are educated and transformed by that act.


This year V-Day is focusing on women in conflict zones. We are focusing on women in the midst of war or in the aftermath of it. We are drawing the connection between family violence and state violence. We are exposing the fact that if a government supports the use of force, weapons, violence as a method of control and dominance, this gives license to the same kind of behavior at home.


This year we are Reclaiming Peace. We are taking back the worl, the concept, the possibility. We are saying that making Peace must be the first option. Communication, respect, dialogue, compassion, kindness, generosity are the hard work of Peace - the nessary work and the priority. We are asking you to join in this discourse. To ask what happened to Peace. To ask what Peace is.

There is a new way, a way that is not forced or exploded open with bombs and guns and machetes. Instead it is melted open. It is invited in through strategy, wisdom, care and a deep regard for the future of life. We stand with our sisters from Beirut to Baghdad, Kandahar to Darfur. We know their suffering is our suffering.


We know that if the human species is to survive, the time of war must end.


We ask you to be bolder this year and kinder, more careful - to bring the energy of peace to every aspect of your life. We ask you to speak out, stand up for an end to violence!

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굳이.. 광고하는 것은 아니지만 여기까지 읽은 분들이 있다면...

이 공연은 2008년에도 할 예정이고, 아마 2009년에도 하게 될 것 같습니다^^
2008년에 합격하고~ 2009년에는 다 같이 보러가요~*

[beetle]

저는 2004년이든가, 서주희씨가 공연한 버자이너 모놀로그 봤었어요. 그때 참 인상깊었었는데, 이 글을 읽으니 그때 기억이 새록 다시 떠오르네요.

[서진선]

훗.... 또 보러가죠^^ 이건 그때랑 또 색다른 느낌이거든요. 그럼... 2009년~ 음하하