Blog 39-Healing

It was way too early for any Fiesta but Taina was up. There was no Escuelita today. Julia tucked the sleeping girl beside me and left almost at dawn for El Comedor for a double early morning shift to prepare plantain and yuca fritters for the party. I dropped Taina off with Julia at El Comedor and made myself work at La Fabrica. I made entries from this morning's journal into my webpage. I wanted to write down what I remembered of last night's vigil, the swarm of the young men in black, the “triunfo de la huelga." But I kept thinking I needed to find Franz again. Now that the strike was done we had to go for Ori, get him into that underground railroad Franz talked about. I wrote as long as I could bear it, but the more I thought about going for Ori and how I might do that, the more restless I became.
Without actually deciding to I packed up my laptop and jumped up from my usual chair in La Fabrica. I startled my carablanca friend perched over me. She almost dropped her baby coconut. She scurried into the palm fronds. When I got to the Comedor I saw Patria balanced high up on a tall ladder. She was hanging a green and red flag from the high beams, as wide as the room. It reached just above the heads of the women who were pushing the tables to the side to clear the center of the dining room. I studied it and did my childhood mantra to tell the flags apart, green sides, red center Karaya; red sides, green center, Ventura. Of course it was the Karaya flag.
Food in platters was already set out on the serving table. Tanama played her guitar and sang a fierce song. Her dark brown face shone with the intensity of her song against the deep turquoise of her embroidered blouse and the jet black of her crown of braids. I stopped to listen to the lyrics, “El susurro del pueblo, se vuelve nuestro Grito, el susurro de las olas, se vuelve huracan, ay, ay, ay...El Grito de Karaya, ay ay ay...” Patria and Julia sat eating at the long table closest to the kitchen. Through the back door I saw Taina and her friends from La Escuelita arranged in a circle, holding hands, singing, "A la rueda rueda de pan y canela dame un besito y vete pa la escuela si no quieres ir acuéstate a dormir," and throwing themselves on the ground.
I'd been having lunch with las Señoras de los Frijoles almost every day, unless I went to Coral and had lunch at Migajas. But Elba Luz' Celebración de la Vigilia Victoriosa was a special day. She came from the kitchen with a huge sheet cake frosted white, the word VICTORIA written in the center in green and red letters. She set it down by the platters of rice, red beans, and fried fish, came to me and hugged me hard.
I sat with them and watched the room fill with women who came up to congratulate Elba, kiss all of us, get food, and settle down to eat at the tables that had been arranged along the walls. Tanama had stopped singing and was playing sweet Karayan danzas on her guitar. Two women playing drums joined her, one of them Franz' novia Beatricita in a bright green dress, and the other Tanama's close friend, Inaru, her brown hair braided into an imagination of a Taino crown of braids. We had to pull our chairs together and bring our heads close in order to hear each other.
I walked to the serving table, watched Taina and her friends spinning and dropping to the ground in the yard, filled a bowl with enough slices of mango, pineapple, and mamey for our table, and sat back down, shaking my head, laughing. Julia reached for a wedge of mango. “What's funny?” I sat beside her and chose a deep pink slice of mamey. “Just one of those moments when it gets to me, how weird my life has become. A moment of the absurd. After my first try living in Karaya I never imagined I'd come back, let alone imagine I would live a la intemperie by the Playa de Coral. I came to Karaya with Ori when we were first together, for a Congreso del Partido, and with Ori and Machi when he was six years old. This is where Machi nearly drowned. And I came here with the unnameable cad.” I paused, saw that the women were listening and went on. “The cad brought me here, to dump me.” Julia slid closer so that we could hear her over the drums. “I remember. I cornered you outside the bodega just after you'd gotten back from Karaya. I'd just heard you'd left Ori and screamed at you, told you you were insane, with a good marriage and taking up with a married man.' And you said, 'Eso ya es historia.'” I nodded. “You were right. What was I thinking? I barely remember what I longed for.” I looked down, ashamed. Patria took my hand. "You barely remember it because you probably longed for what you lacked as a very little girl, ancient , frozen longings for Papi y Mami." I looked at Julia, then at her. Patria smiled. “It's good all these things get said. ”
Tanama, Beatricita and Inaru's music became louder and faster. Some of the women at the tables stopped eating and began to dance. Taina and three other little girls took the center of the dance floor and continued their rueda rueda game, going round and round, and dropping each time they screamed acuéstate a dormir.
We brought our chairs and faces still closer. Elba Luz said, “So the unnameable cad was married?” I looked up from the wedge of mamey from which I was carefully, slowly spooning sweet pink pulp to savor. “I liked to pretend he was as good as separated. He told me he was. But it turned out he was married, very married.” She looked down and when she spoke I had to bring my face right up to hers to make myself heard. She yelled back so her voice carried over the music.“What did you think of that? Of being with a married man?” That very moment Tanama and the drummers stopped playing. Elba Luz' shouted question filled the room.
A hand came from behind me so quickly I thought for a second I was back in my childhood and my mother was about to slap me, but the hand reached past me and struck Elba.
“Mucha revolución pero siempre hablando de maridos y queridas. Stay away from my man.”
I often saw this woman jogging early in the morning on the beach when I sat writing. She had very short black hair, sun tanned skin, lean strong arms and legs. She sometimes stopped and sat on the edges of the tidal pool doing stretches, then rose and did complicated series of yoga vinyasas with triangles and side planks and moon poses and warrior poses, always ending with arm balances and a long headstand facing the sea. I'd waved to her a few times but she never waved back. She had Elba Luz on her back within seconds. Elba blocked and rolled and struck back. Patria reached them and knelt beside them, began to pry them apart. “Parece mentira, Raquel.”
The wronged wife moved to strike Patria but Patria blocked the blow with her forearm. “Ya era hora de confrontarla. La guerra es la paz del futuro. It's you who should be ashamed. Posing as revolutionaries while you prey on other women's men. Or welcome them with open legs when they prey on you. You talk about solidarity but for everyone except us wives. I have no use for any of you or your revolutions. I have no use for him, for that matter, not unless he takes responsibility for himself, for our marriage. But as long as women like you are there willing to give them a back door, they never have to face who they hurt.”
Elba stared at her, silent.
I asked Julia in a whisper who the woman was. “Raquel. La mujer del Capitan Jodido.”
Patria waved to them and Tanama, Beatricita and Inaru started up the music. They led us out of the Comedor to El Tabernaculos. Once there, almost in unison, the women and the little girls waved their arms, stomped their feet, turned, leapt. I saw Patria say to Raquel, “No te vas.” She and another woman I'd seen a few times in La Fabrica, who must be Raquel's friend, drew her into the circle of drum fueled movement.
I saw Elba Luz standing motionless, guessed she must be terrified, signaled to Julia. We each took one of her hands and joined the dance. The drums reverberated through our bones, my bones. I let myself move, jump, spin, holding hands with the big circle or paired with Elba, Patria or Julia, or alone. I danced entranced until I felt clean.
The drummers stopped and Patria gave us each a sheet of paper. “Write something in your life story that you want to heal, want to change. Find a time when you were the oppressor, when you caused the hurt. We are in Karaya to claim ourselves as the heroines of our own story, las famosas de nuestra pelicula.”
I sat in a circle of women gathered in the deepest center of La Fabrica's Tabernáculo, to keep away from the thunderstorm downpour, wind and rain all around us, that the drumming and dancing must have conjured, for what Patria called a life story circle to heal the rift between Elba Luz and Raquel. I welcomed being asked to write, something familiar to do. She had us place our folded pieces of paper on a pyre in the center of La Fabrica. She motioned to Elba Luz and Raquel to join her by the pyre. These women had all done this before and knew the steps Patria was choosing not to explain.
“You are in the center of the healing circle,” Patria said and took Elba's hand.
“This can't be allowed to be.” Elba Luz said. “I want some of you thinking about me. Not just Raquel, because she is the wronged one, or thinks she is.”
Raquel interrupted, “Take some responsibility, why don't you?”
Patria, who stood between them said, “Follow the structure, Raquel, let's keep this safe. It's Elba Luz' turn right now.”
Elba Luz repeated the words, “I want somebody, some of you, all of you really, thinking about me.” Her words brought tears to my eyes. Isn't that what I had always wanted but had no words for? Somebody to think about me? To think well about me. Care about me.
“It is wrong to love another woman's husband, yes. Is it wrong to love? Carlitos is my childhood friend. I've known him since before Raquel came to Coral, since before he married Raquel and I married Ismael. We played guerrilla games Hillside, and he taught me to surf at Arrecife.”
Elba Luz sobbed, and Patria held her.
“And yet I understand what Raquelita said, as long as Carlitos has me he doesn't have to face what's happening in their marriage. I think that all the time myself and then I think, but there would be another woman, a worse one than me, with no history with him. I truly am his friend and he truly is my friend.”
Patria turned to Raquelita who spoke with her hands in fists. “Fairy tales, excuses, lies. Can you blame me for wanting to beat her to a pulp? He's an emotional batterer whose actions batter my soul and he has this woman to collude with him.”
Elba interrupted, “Maybe he's sick of being berated and battered verbally by you.”
Patria put her fingers gently on Elba's lips, “Raquel's turn now.”
At this kindness Raquel sobbed, llorando a moco tendido. Then a wave of fury rose through her. She lunged at Elba and it took Tanama, Beatricita and Inaru to hold her back. In their embrace her tears and fury turned to shaking. “Le entró el santo,” someone said behind me. She collapsed in Patria's arms. “I'm left with no one. I don't have the man, and I don't have the women.”
“Because you stay victim,” the same woman called out behind me. Patria called out to the group. “What do we tell Raquel? How do we teach her?”
“When the men betray us and our women friends betray us, think of it as not quite them,” a deep voice behind me said.
“It's the oppression coursing through them,” the same woman said. “It feels personal but it's a hideous machine we're caught up in.” I turned to see who was speaking.
Beatricita!
“If they could, they wouldn't do it,” Tanama said. “Their true Taino warrior self wouldn't have done it. Their beautiful, good, true Taino warrior self, don't forget it, don't give up on it. Don't give up on theirs,
on yours. That's what we fight for. To create a world where oppression is gone, our true Taino warrior selves emerge, and we stop hurting each other.
“Be as angry as you have to at what they do, the hurts they show, the hurts they inflict. Even decide to have nothing to do with them.” I recognized Julia's voice.
“But ultimately, it's not about them, keep your mind on how to make your own Taino warrior self emerge.” Tanama again. “The other pieces of the puzzle will fall into place.”
Patria handed Raquel off to Tanama, Elba to Julia. She said she would partner with me and then invited the rest of us to find a partner, and in pairs, tell the stories of our sexual betrayals, those we perpetrated and those perpetrated against us.
“This is Marina's first Healing Story Circle in Karaya,” Patria said.
I laughed, “Not counting our first amanecida conversation when we stayed up all night telling each other stories.”
Patria nodded, “In the Healing Story Circle we tell our stories to heal them, to transform them, to take charge of them, fully embody our selves as protagonists, heroines of our own lives. We let ourselves feel the grief, the rage, the terror we didn't have the room to feel before, not to relive the pain but to resolve the riddle of the hurt.
“These things we did and that were done to us are real. The hurts we received and caused are real, and must be healed. The paradox is, until we know we are both completely blameless for the hurts, both as perpetrator and target, and at the same time completely in charge of healing them, we can't fully claim our power to heal our own hurts and be healers of others' hurts. Only as we heal do we begin to make different choices. Even, sometimes, we may decide to make amends or to confront. But think of the joyful power we have, to be both blameless and in charge at once. We are utterly blameless for how systemic oppression courses through us and emerges as our choices, what people used to call our individual psychology. But even though we are blameless we are responsible, for who we hurt, even for who hurt us. And certainly we are responsible, just as Tanama said, to keep our focus on healing our own hurts so that our own Taino warrior selves emerge. Feel the power of our position. Who knows what we will figure out to do then? The more we heal, the smarter we get. Because we can only heal together, we get smarter together. What will we figure out to end injustice? The adventure continues, the marvelous unfolding of how we will birth and birth again and keep birthing, the world where there is no oppression, no exploitation, where we get better and better at thinking well about each other, the world where everyone lives well and not just a few live better, and there is more and more room for our Taino warrior selves to emerge. It is our privilege and power to think well about both Elba and Raquel, all of us.”
One on one with Patria I had another of my raptures of disclosure. The relief from years of secrecy compelled me to keep talking. I launched into the tale, unable to stop myself. “I remember the cad first tried to dump me in Moon Park, during the intermission of a touring summer musical. I made a scene there, smashed a beer bottle on a big boulder in the ground. Listen to me! Dump is the word I've used about myself. Why would I show you what a fool I was? I was humiliated then. Why am I humiliating myself now? Why am I sitting here in La Fabrica talking with you, not writing about the present? Just the way this morning I had my head in the past and not on the beautiful dune where I was writing, the perfectly calm sea, where I was not swimming, the dawn pinking the sand I wasn't seeing? I feel shame even as I say this.
“You are listening, and without eyebrows slightly raised in judgment, the way I am used to women looking at me when I tell them of my affair while I was married, with a married man...You have your usual benevolent, nada humano me es ajeno look. Not the way you used to look when I first met you. What changed?” (But it was my turn so Patria said nothing, simply offered me her mind.)
“I smashed the beer bottle on one of those big rocks by the park concert hall after he told me he was going back to his wife. He'd gone back to her already. He told me after the fact. Part of my mind always knew he never left her at all, he was just getting even for her lover and having some fun of his own while he waited for her lover to lose interest in her. Why he didn't lose interest in her is a mystery, even though he must have known it was only a matter of time before one of her lovers took. She did leave him for another man in the end. I don't know how many times she and I met but she never remembered me. “
Patria laughed, and spoke. “You are memorable, believe me. If you're sleeping with my husband I remember you.”
“As I was smashing the bottle I was screaming, 'What is it, does she have ridges in her cunt?'
How could I tell you this? You just looked at me and I felt washed clean of some filth of shame I've carried with me." I realized that I was sobbing, shaking, that my fists were clenched with rage.
“In those days, when I thought I wouldn't be with him again I got dizzy.”
“And now?”
“I think Ted Bundy passed me by." Now, I was laughing like a mad woman. "He had me in the parking lot, standing there with his fake broken arm, and when I was about to get into the killing volks another woman more like the one in his mind's eye caught his attention and here I am, still alive. Pobrecita ella. Now, I'm dizzy, dizzy and ashamed. Dizzy with shame. Sometimes I still wake up with that thought and feel as if I'm careening through air on my own sawn off tree limb.”
I sobbed when Patria put a finger gently on my cheek. “You didn't leave for him. You were looking for something in yourself, about yourself. You're right that he was a mirage.” She put her arm around me. “Who am I to judge? You're looking at a woman who had three children with Ignacio and was an army widow most of the fifteen years I was his wife. He has a third new family now, stayed with that woman now five years so he figured something out, but too late for us.” She pressed my hand. “You are blameless. And here's something you probably aren't ready to hear, that cad is also blameless of the oppression coursing through him.” I pulled back and tore my hand away. She shook her head. “Blameless and completely responsible for his choices at the same time, with the same power to become conscious, acknowledge his privilege, his domination, claim his power to make a different choice. Blameless for the oppression and completely in charge to end it.”
“I don't intend to forgive him.”
“I said nothing about forgiving. You have to be angry, erupt the anger until you are free of it, and who knows what your mind will find on the other side of that. I know this, your mind will surprise you.”
I looked at her and said, “Who are you? Not the woman I knew twelve years ago.” I looked around at the others, speaking with heads close together, or arm in arm, or holding hands, completely rapt in the telling or the listening, laughing, sobbing, shaking. “Who are we?”
She smiled. “Taino warriors in training.”