Decisions

I do not feel well today, but the atmosphere outside is warm and inviting. It's only 13 days into Spring, and it already feels like Summer. The wind blowing through the parks, treetops and small city-spaces between apartment buildings rushes my windows and tears artwork off of walls.

I live between two college campuses. A campus alert went out a few days ago that a girl was raped in the middle of the day- the day after Naw-Rúz, in broad daylight between the campuses in my neighborhood. She was walking home from class.

In the middle of the day a man walked up to her, showed her his gun, and forced her to walk with him to the river, where he raped her. What is extraordinary about this story is that she was raped by a stranger. Most women who are raped are raped by someone they know and trust.

On the 13th day of Spring-Sizdah Bedar, you throw out the sabzeh, wheatgrass spouts, that have been growing in celebration of the New Year on your haft sin table. As it grows from seed before the first day of Spring and the New Year, it symbolizes new life, rebirth, and fertility. Afterwards- on the 13th Day, you throw it out- into a body of water, if possible, outside of your home. It takes with it and absorbs all your bad luck.

The part of the river in my neighborhood where the rapist took the girl by gunpoint and then raped her is where I threw my sabzeh into the Chicago River on Sizdah Bedar last year.

This is what violence does to women. It marks every location and memory with danger. It erases freedom.

The man hasn't been caught. And the police aren't doubling their efforts, because rape is "normal," especially near college campuses. But they are asking the women in the neighborhood to: "Not be so raped." They tell us, "Don't walk home from school *in the middle of the day.* Don't be so raped. Double your efforts." As if that is a reasonable suggestion.

"Don't be so raped, ladies. Don't be so raped, women and girls."
Don't walk outside alone in broad daylight on a busy city street.

Fuck you, Chicago Police. Find me a safe place to walk in the middle of the day. Find me a safe place to throw my misfortune into the river.

So, what would you do, readers? Too sick today to trek out to where the real Sizdah Bedar banishing of the bad is going down- in a group, where, according to the Chicago Police, I am less likely to be raped because,
1) apparently, they can't read rape statistics and are unaware that rape is usually a crime of intimate violence where you know your attacker.
2) though it would involve broad daylight, apparently now a "Rape Risk," it would segue into the cover of darkness and a wicked dance party. Um...Known rape deterrents.
3) drinks are being served....also a popular deterrant in Bizarro-Rape Mythology...

I am struck by the notion that the Chicago Police, and other rape mythologists/apologists, believe the cause of rape is womanhood, rather than violent men. So, for public safety we are corralled out of the daylight for Walking While Female. We are corralled out of bars and nightclubs and college sidewalks. Maybe if we learn to be less female we can be less raped, is that it? Walk with less of a swish, ladies, because rape is your fault.

Maybe I wouldn't take this message away from the Naw-Rúz rape if I had seen a single additional police car in the neighborhood since it happened. If I had seen a cop looking for the rapist, instead of telling me what to do.

So, I didn't make it down to the river today. But I gathered up my sabzeh and went for a walk. As I walked I tried to think of how to dispose of my misfortune. When I was a religious schoolgirl, I would sneak out of class to say my daily obligatory prayers, and I remembered the provision in the Aqdas that says if you are traveling or cannot find pure water, or the use of water would be somehow harmful to you in performing your ablutions before prayer, you could instead five-times recite the verse: "In the Name of God, the Most Pure, the Most Pure." That no longer jives with my secular belief system, but it gave me an idea.

I walked past a school yard with multicolored children's chalk drawings of hearts and star & crescents and "We love our teacher," and "Jessica was here" scrawled on the blacktop- which seemed as sacred a space as any former glory of Lake Orumiyeh. On the sidewalk was a small broken off branch of a yew tree. In the first solo short play I wrote 10 years ago, a character travels to her mother's birth place and plants a yew tree upon her grave. The roots of the yew in mythology travel down to the dead and carry their voices above ground to speak to their offspring. I carried the small yew branch to a spot across the street, and thought of my verbal ablutions. A line of Tahirih's poetry entered my mind: "I would explain all my grief, dot by dot-point by point, If heart to heart we talked, and face to face we meet." I imagined the many women in my neighborhood, and in this world, who have suffered the pain of rape over the generations- 1 in 3 by today's statistics, and what they would say to me now. I felt land-locked. It was, after all, the middle of the day, between college campuses. And I was tired and sick. I could not safely access water. And there it was, suddenly, as clear as broad daylight in my mind-my verbal water-way, gushed up from the maternal burial ground under that Yew Tree: "In separation from you the blood of my heart gushes out of my eyes in torrent after torrent, river after river, wave after wave, stream after stream." Tahirih's words. Then Hafez, arguing with ascetics, directing them to perform love's ablutions with heart's blood, only.

We are the river.

I threw my sabzeh into a waste bin there on the corner, uttering poetry under my breath.

And yes, the blades of grass were knotted together. But 13 is still my lucky number.





Images:
http://www.persianmirror.com/Images/Articles/1271/Sabzeh.jpg
http://www.ancient-yew.org/treesinmythology.shtml