March.21.2010

They Came To My Village Today| Leighton Gilling

First-ever honorary male voice on My Voice is Strong. At MVIS, we take pride that we’re a women-centric site, but we also recognize when men are able to speak our voices better than ourselves. Gilling graduates this spring with a Master’s in Counseling from Georgia State University. He is an Eve Ensler fan, and recently accompanied My Voice is Strong to the Havana Club showing of The Vagina Monologues (March.27.2010).

Last week in my Women In Modern Society class, we watched a video on female genitalia mutilation(FGM), and I’ve had the sounds running through my head ever since. I went to see The Vagina Monologues last night, and I decided that NEED to write this or else I’d eat myself up. So this is basically me writing as a nine year old African girl (though her language isn’t that of a nine year old) who goes through the “procedure.”

They came to my village today,
A group of women 4 feet deep,
And 10 inches wide
Strangely enough those were my own measurements,
I was tall for my nine years of life they said.
All of the girls in the village were gathered into Papa’s yard,
And the women began.
I had heard stories about this before,
But I didn’t know what to expect
Suddenly here it was happening to me!
They began by saying we had come to that age,
What age they meant I did not know,
But it could not be good because they said it had come time for us to choose.
I got to choose something!
They said every girl wanted to have it done,
It was the right thing for us to do,
They even brought along two girls who were only a year older than me,
And they seemed to like it so I thought I should do it too.
Besides,
They told me if I didn’t,
No man would want to marry me, and I wouldn’t be sold easily if at all,
So that’s when I knew I had to do it.
She asked us, a group of eight, which ones wanted to do it,
And we all raised our hands, and they smiled back at us.

We all scattered,
And I went into the house to wait my turn.
About ten minutes went by,
Then I saw one of the ladies come into the house,
And my heart started to pound like a drum being beaten by a mad man
DUHDUM DUHDUM DUHDUM
Faster and faster it ran,
Telling me to do the same, run as fast as I could from there,
But I was stuck –  glued to the chair as I watched my sister walk over to the lady.
She had spread out a yellow bed sheet on the floor,
And I heard metal clinks coming from where she had her back to me.
She told my sister to lay down without looking back,
And so Nazra did as she was told.
Then the woman,
Dressed in a bright red dress tattered and dirty hanging from her shoulders,
The woman who had been so nice and encouraging to us before,
She turned around.
She had in her right hand a razor, and two aspirin in her left.
She knelt by Nazra’s closed legs and told her to spread them,
But Nazra was by now shaking.
She had tears in her eyes,
But more than anything she had fear in her eyes,
She knew now that she had made the wrong decision,
But it was too late.
Papa was standing beside me,
Smiling from crusty check to crusty cheek,
Beaming with the excitement his daughters were finally going to get cut.
Nazra’s legs didn’t open, so the lady pushed them apart,
And Nazra let out a small squirmy yowl.
The lady told her to stay still,
She said it wouldn’t hurt and she didn’t understand why Nazra was acting childish,
She once again forced apart Nazra’s closing legs,
And reached in.
I turned away,
But it didn’t help what I heard.
At first it was just a loud yell,
Of surprise
Then from the sudden silence came a growl,
A growl from somewhere deep inside Nazra,
A growl filled with the most horrifying pain I have ever heard
It made my ears perk and the hair on my whole body stand and shiver
The growls got louder and deeper, then they began to come in between screams for Mama
But Mama wasn’t here,
She had been taken away a few months before,
It was only Papa and me and Nezra.
But Nezra didn’t care,
She kept screaming “Mama! Mama! Mama!?”
Over and over and over and over!
And Papa did nothing but stand by my side.
The lady moved from between my sister’s legs and handed her the two aspirins,
She motioned me over to her,
And I obeyed her.

As I walked by Nezra,
I could smell the scent of tears and blood
And my heart almost burst through my stomach,
It was now screaming at me to run,
“DON’T STOP Lina, DON?T STOP!?” it screamed,
But I couldn’t obey,
Because I must do it.
The lady looked at me without an expression and told me to lay back,
As I did so I smelled the must of Nezra’s sweat even more,
And I felt something cold and sticky all over my feet and legs.
The lady told me to spread my legs like she told Nezra,
But like Nezra’s, my legs refused to obey.
She forced them open,
But they closed by themselves.
I saw the blood on the razor she held in her right hand,
As she once again parted my trembling legs,
And this time she pushed her own body between them so they would remain open.
I started to whimper,
And I felt my body jerk backward, I could smell the fear coming from my own body
And I know I had the same look of panic in my eyes as Nezra had.
Then I felt it,
Something sharp and dull at once pulling at the flesh between my legs,
And I bawled out.
I now knew from where those sounds came,
They come from the pit of your stomach,
They come from the gut of your soul,
Those sounds are bubbles floating to the surface of boiling water,
Popping and letting out the feeling of pure fear and hurt
The most raw and unseasoned kind,
The kind that people only let out once if ever in their entire life.
I could hear myself scream,
Calling for the same Mama I knew would not come to rescue me,
But I shouted her name anyway,
Hoping she would at least hear my shrieks and come running,
MAMA! MAMA! MAMA!
But no one came,
Nothing came except for the pain,
The slicing feeling as I felt my own blood trickle down my legs and across my bottom,
I felt the lady’s hands pushing down on my flailing limbs trying to keep them steady,
The room began to grow unfocused,
And then the slicing was gone,
But the pain only seemed to increase.
The lady moved away for a second and returned with needle and some thread,
Like she had done with Nezra.
And once again I felt a sharp prick in and out of my little bleeding pure place,
And I knew this was it.
I had done what it is I was supposed to and I would be rewarded someday
A rich man would come to the village soon and want me as his wife,
Or maybe I would be sold to a merchant who traveled the seas.
One way or another,
As the woman handed me two aspirins,
I knew I would be rewarded.

March.7.2010

When it comes to books, I am a staunch conservative.  I will not touch any “Kindle” type reading machine gadget with a ten foot pole.  It’s a mutual relationship.  Those things revolt me.  I revile them.

“Why do you hate me?” the Kindle asks. “I save trees!”  Like a fresh college graduate, it’s the type that really thinks its world saving superpowers are vastly underrated.

“Well, Kindle,” I retort (from a safe eleven foot distance), “I hate you because you are fake. You will never be a book, you will always be just another a fallible representation of human innovation. I’m sure that in 4 or 5 years, you will be rendered obsolete by even more advanced technology.  You will end up at the bottom of a Boy Scout electronics recycling bin.”

“Furthermore, you don’t smell good.” (And everyone knows that smell is an essential component of attraction). “You lack the delectable new paper and ink smell that I relish, and what’s worse, you will never gain the even more desirable old paper and ink smell that is coveted by book lovers all the world over.”

“You offer a story, sure, a quick thrill- but you are lacking any real body (or soul for that matter).  Where books have pages, crisp or smooth, heavy or delicately tissue-like, and covers that we try painstakingly to keep smooth and glossy, corners unbent, you are just another glaring screen in the world.  Unlike a book.”

“Oh,” Kindle says in a tiny voice, retreating under the nearest pile of to-do lists.

That’s right.  Because what do you say to a verbal smack down like that?

–Mandy Robbins Taylor, aspiring teen fiction author

February.18.2010

Print is dead. If you’re tearing up a bit, screaming inside your head no it’s not! or having some nostalgic thought about the value of touching a magazine or flipping through the pages of your fave book, rest assured I totally agree. Unfortunately, our feelings about ink printed on a bleached-white or glossy page don’t really play a role in the shifting technologies of communication, though.

In the history of humanity, print is actually a fairly new technology (only 500yrs old). Other popular forms of communication technology have been pictographs on cave and pyramid walls and the oral tradition. During the Old English period, just as print was over the last few centuries, the most popular use of the oral tradition was the ballad (ballad: think villagers sitting around a campfire listening to a poet recite 1000s of lines of memorized poetry). Our Germanic ancestors (Germanic: the family language through which all English speakers inherited theirlanguage, not actual German culture) were huge fans of the ballad, and I have a sneaking suspicion that they got all up in arms when the ballad “died.” Er, ceased to exist as a popular form of communication. They probably had the Elizabethan equivalent of forums, Facebook groups, iPhone apps, and hash tags for the irate oral-tradition supporters (#oral tradition 4eva!)

But the only people who give a hoot about the oral tradition today are Lit profs who argue that there’s value to memorizing long bouts of speech. They say it improves our memory or something.

The ballad got thrown out with the bath water, just as print is about to be chopped up and spread all over the digital medium. But the conceptual foundation of communication, the story, or storytelling, isn’t going anywhere. In fact, this form of communication hasn’t changed since cavemen began scratching love notes on walls to their girlfriends.
If you take a closer look at the story form, you’ll find it all boils down to one fundamental ingredient: the analogy. (If you’re thinking, what the heck is an analogy? think of it as something that represents something else. Like pictographs.) Pictographs represent either a single or collective concept, just like words. Ex: a picture of something brown, with leaf-like structures represents a tree, just as the word tree represents all things brownish that have leaves and undergo photosynthesis.

In communication, we use words to represent single or collective concepts and string them together in sentences, paragraphs, essays, blog posts, tweets, or status updates. (Some rhetoric scholars say that the analogy is the fundamental piece by which we understand reality. Unlike print or the oral tradition, we will enjoy the ability to perceive reality, in some form or another, for a very long time.) Even though print-the-technology is pushing daisies, the fundamental ingredient, the analogy, and its partner in crime, the story, is not.

Will the technology by which we transmit story change? Yep, and it will make as many waves as print did. The birth of print welcomed (more) equal opportunity access to a wealth of knowledge (some elite theologians and scholars got pretty upset about this), reading became a daily activity, and they had a way more organized system for keeping permanent records.

Was print met with opposition in the 16th century? For sure. But the benefits of print far out-weighed its former competitor, the oral tradition. Just as the benefits of digital medium outweigh print. For ex: increased connectivity to friends and family, various audio and visual elements that improve neural connections and brain mapping,and access to an ever growing number of cached sites (cached: the internet stores a copy of every site so you can view it even if the site’s server goes down).

Sure, it’s sad that print is picking turnups with a step ladder, but this hopeful rhetor can’t help but categorize this as a necessary step in the progress of humanity. Er, at least the progress of rhetorical theory.