Advocacy

Manila Pages - Part 4

EVE ENSLER

New York, NY

The Memory of Her Face

Islamabad

They all knew something terrible

Was going to happen

Each time he came home

The things he used

First time 

He grabbed the closest thing 

He grabbed a pot

He smashed her head

He smashed her right eye hard

The next time

He thought about it a little

And paused

Took off his belt

She had gashes inside her thighs

The third time he needed to be more

Involved in hurting her

So he beat her with his fists

He broke her nose

They heard her screams

They heard her beg

They didn't, wouldn't intervene

She was his

Unwritten law

Don't ask what she had done

It was just her face that pissed him off

Just her needy face waiting for more

The last time he

Had enough of her

He planned it out

He got the acid in advance

He poured it in a jar

She said she needed money for food for them

She looked like that.

Like that. Like that. Like that.

Her face is gone

Totally melted off

Just eyes that all you see

That's all

Just eyes encased in gooey flesh

I tell you this because

She's there inside this mess 

Inside this monstrous mask

Inside the death of her esteem

Inside his wish to make her none

She's there, I swear

I heard her wheeze

I heard her sigh

I heard her babble something

With what was once her mouth

I heard her. I swear

She lives in there.

Baghdad

When she woke up

Her face was on fire

Bombs had fallen from the sky

And her face was in flames

She couldn't scream

The burning encircled her throat

Like a falling tower

Just as the flames were entering her eyes

She pressed her torn blanket 

And it put out the flames

but stuck to the melted skin

when she pulled it off

she lost most of her cheeks,

most of her forehead and chin.

This was not a dream

There was nowhere to go

There was nothing to say

As they wandered the streets

Of Baghdad

Looking for a hospital

Or a doctor who knew

What to do when a face burns off

Her father

Unable to look at his only daughter

Oozing through

The bandages he made of white rags

Hated her looking like that

Hated whoever she had become

No longer a relative

No longer someone he knew

No longer a woman he could marry off

But still something he was responsible for

He hated the planes that dropped

Fire from the sky

Who promised

Freedom and instead destroyed

He hated those planes

But right now he hated his bandaged melted 

needy daughter more.

Juarez

We look at the photographs in Esther's book.

Each woman is dark, particular, young.

Each woman has brown eyes. Each woman is gone.

There is one girl missing for 10 months.

She was 17 when they took her away

She worked in the Maquilladora

She stamped thousands of coupons of products

She would never afford

Four dollars a day

They paid her and bused her to the desert

to sleep in freezing shit

It must have been on the way to the bus

They took her

It must have been dark outside

It must have lasted until morning

What ever they did to her

It went on and on

You can tell from the others

who showed up without hands or nipples

It must have gone on and on. 

When she finally reappeared

She was bone

Bone bone

No cute mole above her right eye,

No naughty smile, no wavy black hair.

Bone she came back as bone.

She and the others in Esther's book

All beautiful

All beginning

All coupons

All faces

All gone

300 faces gone

300 noses

300 chins

300 dark penetrating eyes

300 smiles

300 Mulatto colored cheeks

300 hungry mouths about

to speak

about to tell

about to scream

gone now bone.

I saw all of this with these eyes

I swallowed the ashes of their sorrow with this mouth

I choked on the ugliness of their melted beings

with this throat.

I smelled their burning screaming flesh

I tried to turn away

When she lifted her chador

In the restaurant

When she took off the bandages

To proof to the soldiers how bad it was

When they raised the plastic cloth that concealed

the bone out line of her head in the morgue  

I tried to turn away.

Eve Ensler 

5000 women have been acid burned by their families  in Islamambad, Pakistan.  90 per cent of them have died.  Not one person has been prosecuted.

----------women were burned or killed in the Iraqi war.  The United States government calls it collateral damage and will not be prosecuted.

300 women have disappeared in Juarez, Mexico. 90 have turned up dead in ditches, most were mutilated and raped.  Not one man has been prosecuted.

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