This is my story (a performance piece)

Note: This is a monologue/performance piece I wrote in response to this medium article. Seeing that picture of that woman and how she was being used for this cause, even if it would help people like her, felt ethically weird. I don’t want to see women portrayed as the victim, I want to see them portrayed as amazing survivors and that’s how this piece materialized. 

Lights up. 

Woman stands center stage. There is a projection of a image of her covered in blood, walking through a crowd- like something you would see on CNN. That kind of photo. 

SONYA

This is my story:

When I was young, things were bad. People were constantly dropping and setting bombs off. Everywhere. Some of my earliest memories were of panic, blood, and fire.

You can smell fear. You can smell pain. sometimes I still think people can smell it on me.

One day one of those bombs dropped on my house. I crawled out, alone. bloody and broken I walked and walked and walked to the nearest hospital.

There, standing in front of the hospital, a man took a photo of me and sold it to the Associated Press. Years later- far away from there, in a completely different life, I still see my face. People post it on social media telling other people to care. Telling people to notice.

This is not my story, but I like it a lot:

Light change.

Three players enter in Shakespearian garb. They will be doing Richard II, Act 4 Scene I

HENRY BOLINGBROKE

Lords, you that here are under our arrest,

Procure your sureties for your days of answer.

Little are we beholding to your love,

And little look’d for at your helping hands.

KING RICHARD II

Alack, why am I sent for to a king,

Before I have shook off the regal thoughts

Wherewith I reign’d? I hardly yet have learn’d

To insinuate, flatter, bow, and bend my limbs:

Give sorrow leave awhile to tutor me

To this submission. Yet I well remember

The favours of these men: were they not mine?

Did they not sometime cry, ‘all hail!’ to me?

So Judas did to Christ: but he, in twelve,

Found truth in all but one: I, in twelve thousand, none.

God save the king! Will no man say amen?

Am I both priest and clerk? well then, amen.

God save the king! although I be not he;

And yet, amen, if heaven do think him me.

To do what service am I sent for hither?

Sonya enters the scene during DUKE OF YORK’s Line and taps KING RICHARD out, taking his crown. She will be him for the rest of the excerpt.

DUKE OF YORK

To do that office of thine own good will

Which tired majesty did make thee offer,

The resignation of thy state and crown

To Henry Bolingbroke.

SONYA

Give me the crown. Here, cousin, seize the crown;

Here cousin:

On this side my hand, and on that side yours.

Now is this golden crown like a deep well

That owes two buckets, filling one another,

The emptier ever dancing in the air,

The other down, unseen and full of water:

That bucket down and full of tears am I,

Drinking my griefs, whilst you mount up on high.

HENRY BOLINGBROKE

I thought you had been willing to resign.

SONYA

My crown I am; but still my griefs are mine:

You may my glories and my state depose,

But not my griefs; still am I king of those.

HENRY BOLINGBROKE

Part of your cares you give me with your crown.

SONYA

Your cares set up do not pluck my cares down.

My care is loss of care, by old care done;

Your care is gain of care, by new care won:

The cares I give I have, though given away;

They tend the crown, yet still with me they stay.

HENRY BOLINGBROKE

Are you contented to resign the crown?

Lights change and the players exit.

My cares are mine. Of course an old white playwright from hundreds of years ago is the only person that understands me. Richard was a terrible King. Just awful. The whole play is just boring and awful but in this one scene, when the insurgent new King tries to erase Richards experience. He says no. My cares are mine. People will always try to use you, people will always try to spin your experience. And although that girl is far away, with me my cares stay. They take my face and they plaster it up and I know it’s good. I know that they’re just trying to fix something. They say “look into her face” and say how scared I am, how weak I am. That this is an important story. But they’re missing the point.

My story, it’s the same story. Repeated again and again and again and again. The headline shouldn’t be “Help this woman”, the headline should be, as it has been through the entire history of the world “WOMAN SURVIVES”.

Because that is what we do.

I’m not gonna die alone muttering to myself in a tower. And those other women you see on your Twitter feed, on CNN and Facebook — they won’t either.