The Parade of Horribles

Here are the facts that I found on the internet:

An Indian surgeon used infected instruments to sterilize 83 women in about six hours, according to a local medical official, leaving 10 of them dead and another 69 hospitalized in the central state of Chhattisgarh.

-Bloomburg

India sterilized over 4 million people last year, about 97% of whom were women.

-Time Magazine

R.K. Gupta, 59, operated on 83 women in five hours on Saturday, according to the BBC. Dr RK Gupta and his assistant carried out tubectomies on 130 women at two separate camps on Saturday and Monday.

-BBC

The women, who were each paid $10 to undergo the operation, were sent home Saturday evening.

-USA Today

Now, here's the advantage of being an artist; I don't have to stick to the facts. I get to tell you a story.

Wednesday morning, I wake at 5am, when the alarm goes off. My husband set it, so he could get up early and edit a paper for our daughter, a junior in college. Normally, we wake at 5:30 to the Bob and Tom show (don't judge; it has sentimental value to us from when we were dating). At 5am, the radio reports the news. In my half-wake state, I listen to a broadcast about doctors rushing to India where 11 women have died and 63 are hospitalized after undergoing voluntary sterilization, for which they were paid approximately $10, or 600 rupees.

I get out of bed, after about 20 minutes buried beneath the covers on the first truly cold morning this season, went downstairs to make breakfast and feed the dog. I make egg sandwiches, but I break the yolk on the first egg and give it to the dog. My husband offers (read: is coerced to leave a little early so I don't have to go out in the cold) to take the kids to school.

13 is on the bus by 8:15.

In the 2 hours between shifts, I decide to fold the mountain of laundry at the foot of my bed. I turn on the news (yes, we have a tv in our bedroom. Again, don't judge; if you had seven kids and wanted to watch an episode of Parenthood without being interrupted to braid someone's hair or go pick up posterboard for a project due the next day, you would too.). I want to hear more about the women in India who have died.

By the time the laundry is finished and put away, I have heard the results of Robin Williams' autopsy, seen the Rockettes preview their new holiday show, and watched an interview with Jon Stewart. I see numerous accounts of an early snow storm. Not one newscaster mentions the deaths in India. Later I troll the internet to find more information. I try to find the value of 600 rupees to a young Indian mother. The only thing I find are tourist sites with details on how eat a good meal in India for less than $10. I want to know how $10 can change a young woman's life so much that she is willing to offer up her body for her country. In the United States, you can get $25 for donating plasma. $25 could take my entire family to lunch buffet at the local Indian restaurant.

I do find a photo of young mother, recovering in a hospital bed while she breastfeeding a toddler who lies beside her. Beds line one long white wall of the sterilization camp. The mother wears brightly colored clothing and gold bangles and wraps herself and her child in a red blanket.

I am angry at a government that sterilizes young married women but leaves their husband virile, while a young woman, who went to the police station in June to beg for her husband's release, is allegedly gang raped by four police officers when she refuses to pay a bribe (How much is the bribe I wonder? The value of 600 rupees comes to mind.)

And I am angry at a male doctor, who when I was 25 and had an irregular Pap smear, put his hand on my knee, bare below the hem of my paper gown, and told me to let him worry about whether it is anything to be concerned about.

And at the young doctor in Anna Karenina, who insists on examining Kitty naked. She is suffering from depression; she has turned away the man she loves for someone who she thought would be exciting and thrilling to spend her life with. And this young doctor cannot understand why anyone would question his hands on her body. In fact, she should consider herself lucky to be examined by him.

And at a pediatrician who tells me I should start my 11-year-old daughter on the HPV vaccine in case anything ever happens to her.

And at a husband who goes to bed at night while his wife stays up for hours copying his manuscript.

 

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Finding my Inner Child

Friday morning, I found myself sitting at a table with three women I did not know, in a room full of women. There were less than five men scattered around, and when I asked at the front sign-in table, the woman who was volunteering told me that of the 53 at the earlier seating of Breakfast for the Babies, seven were men. While waiting in the buffet line, I heard a woman introduce herself as a State Senator. As I walked back to my table with a plate of food, I heard another woman say she was a freelance artist, another a retired high school teacher. At my table, the woman to my left talked about returning from a trip, and making plans to babyproof her house for grandchildren that would be visiting over the holidays.

"We haven't been home for Christmas in years. We always go on a trip. So now I have to drag out the decorations, and I need at least two pack-n-plays."

I sat, sipping tea, staring into my book, occasionally staring out the window at the 360 degree view of Indianapolis, wondering what I was doing here. Then the executive director of Project Home Indy stood up to speak.

"Stories. (Pause, smiling at the audience). We all have stories."

And I knew why I was there: to tell their story.

Project Home Indy provides a safe residence for homeless pregnant teens and teen mothers. They help the mothers stay in school, make sure moms and babies get good medical care, and provide counseling. PHI is not a mansion. There is space only for 5 girls and their babies at any given time. And that may not seem like much, especially in a world where high numbers mean higher value.

"100 percent of our moms have experienced trauma. How else do you end up fifteen and pregnant?"

If all of the moms have experienced trauma, we can only guess at their stories. And despite the work of Project Home Indy, I never heard Laksmi talk about replacing those traumatic stories. You can't. The bad parts of life can't be censored out. I did hear her voice catch when she mentioned that some of us have bad stories. I saw her make a joke at her own expense, and pretend to wipe away the pain. I saw myself, remembered the therapist who suggested that it could be helpful to go back and talk to my inner child, tell her that it would be okay. This felt like a lie to me. No one, not even the stronger, somewhat healed adult version of the little girl I was, can tell me that it will be okay. Nothing we do will make it better for her.

Project Home Indy helps mothers heal, so their children have better stories.

I don't know how Sophie fared after her husband died, or how she took care of her family. I will never know how things turn out for Anna Karenina's children. How will they heal? How many of the 200 kidnapped Nigerian girls are already pregnant? Somehow, we have to break the cycle, change young girl's stories, rework them, write different endings, make things right for the next ones. It is the stories that have not yet been told that can change women's lives. They are our inner children, waiting for their lives to unfold.

http://www.projecthomeindy.org

Project Home Indy
P.O. Box 683
Indianapolis, Indiana 46206

 

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Revising Tolstoy

Chapter 32 opens with this line: "The first person to meet Anna at home was her son."

How clever, I thought, for Tolstoy to give Anna a son instead of a daughter. How different the story, even Anna, would be if her child was a daughter, instead of another male character to whom Anna is drawn. And for those of you who know the story, the child who comes later adds another dimension of possibility to the story. I had a writing teacher once who told me that one way to get through my writer's block was to change the protaganist from a male to a female. And how easy it was, on my computer, to replace one name with another, to order up new pronouns. Fiction writers, unlike the rest of us, have this luxury.

I had lunch last week with a friend who is a minister. We were discussing the impact of gender-based language in religious texts. She told me that her father, who was also a minister, preached that man meant all humankind, until his daughter becamed ordained, and the use of he and she became very personal. She told me, and this is where the limits of my knowledge reveal themselves, that one of her favorite scriptures involves Jesus recognizing that he is limited, by his phyical form, to being a man. His maleness limits him.

Not true for Tolstoy and other fiction writers who are do not tell the "truth," as we call the facts of a story that has happened in real life. We fiction writers can turn everything on its head, making Abraham Lincoln, rather convincingly if you ask me, into a Vampire Hunter as Seth Grahame-Smith does. We can even take already written stories, and by changing less than one-fourth of the original text, turn a classic into Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. I personally love these new versions of the classics. I believe that if we gave Literature teachers the freedom to use them in class, their students would enjoy the reading and still have an understanding of the original story. On the bookshelves in my home, you will find Alice in Zombieland, Huckleberry Finn and Zombie Jim (a curious case that allows us to talk about language that dehumanizes without using the words from the plantation era that are offensive), and of course, my favorite, Android Karenina.

These new versions embrace something that many writers fear: Revision.

What we fear, writers and perhaps all of us, is change. We don't want to give up that which we hold dear. We allow ourselves to believe that the way it is, the way it has always been, is the best and right and maybe even the only way. What if Willingness to change is the only way to stay alive? In the case of literature, allowing these stories to change and transform keeps them alive in the imagination of a new generation of readers.

We live in a time when books have been abundant and readily available to the masses. When Beatrix Potter was publishing Peter Rabbit, she did the unthinkable, as a respectable lady, and went into the factory to demand that her book be printed on smaller pages and with fewer ink colors to make it less expensive, and thereby more accessible to readers. And in the novel Seabiscuit, the young jockey carries a burlap bag of books with him for most of his life, a small stack that he reads and rereads. And as I am writing the words of Anna Karenina, I wonder what new discoveries Sophia made on subsequent passes through the novel. What did she glean that we miss when we read it once, as young college students, never to return to it again. What would we gain if instead of having a constant stream of new books at our disposal, we had only four or five books to read again and again for the whole of our lives? When a book becomes ours, when we read it again and again, could we be allowing ourselves to reimagine the world of the story in a way that the orginal author never did?

 

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