On April 11 the Vagina Monologues created a V-day celebration that in fact lasted two days. It wasn’t just another Madison Square Garden event or a photo opportunity to show where someone like Oprah Winfrey spends her tax deducible dollars. This was a convening of women from around the world to bring attention to the depressed condition of New Orleans, once the music capital of the world. Today New Orleans is the murder capital of the United State with the fear of the angry children with guns ever present. And every four months another gun show comes to town distributing their goods for $50 each, to be bought by anyone, no credentials required.
This antediluvian New Orleans is palatable with its fear, rage and insidious depression at the United States Government’s failure to secure in working order the essential levees that kept the water out of the city in years past. This compounded with the Government's apparent subsequent lack of interest or intent to restore New Orleans to even the barest minimum of days past has created an atmosphere that is sad or angry depending on whom you speak to, when. Underlying the depression is the fear from loss of homes, neighborhoods, and a way of life enjoyed by millions of Black people living outside of the city proper.
For me this city looks like I imagine Cuba before Castor with its huge money making casinos at the center of the city and its ever looming skyscraper hotels to accommodate those who have never seen nor ever intend to see the likes of the New Orleans Ninth Ward.
This is a city ripe for Revolution where loss of livelihood prevails, where a promise for a better life is not even brought into the fore. This is a city where “Government” is a word not to be spoken, where hope has sunk deeper then the deluge that caused the holocaust, where the guns preventing people from coming into the city to help the afflicted and guns keeping the afflicted at the mercy of nature will forever be drawn, pointed at the innocent victims of hurricane Katrina and the subsequent hurricane Rita.
This weekend, even with the American Airlines cancellation of thousand of air flights, women from around the world came into town with their flaming pink and red colors, their spirit of nurturing, helping, feeling and just being there for this afflicted city.
Their purpose: to bring back the Super-doom, to reclaim it and divest it of the memory of five days of starvation without water, hygiene, hope, where thousand died and dead bodies were brought out to the curb deposited by the trash receptacles would be erased forever. To erase this memory, the women from the Vagina Monologues set about creating an artful healing environment with the Vagina monologue warriors leading the way, with hair salons, and prayer centers, with massages, and healing teas, all free, and with so much more of what we know, about bringing life back into the lifeless, bringing hope, fun, music and dance to rekindle the soul.
As the houses emptied of the New Orleans people so did the love, the pervasiveness of the music, Jazz originated and grew and flourished in the past, is seldom heard . And the quiet that now covers the city is mirrored in the lack of the scrabble of squirrels up the backside of trees and the paucity of birds singing gently in the sky.
There will come a time when this city will be rebuilt but what all seem to fear is who will prevail. Will it be the music of a human voice, or the sound of the slot machines and money exchanging hands while all too many beg for the spare change. Who will do the building? Will the black men be brought into the economic recovery or will they be marginalized as I saw while I was here. Will they, the former workers in New Orleans, be replaced by immigrants? That is the ever present question.
Thank you, Eve Ensler and the Vagina Monologues for bringing the plight of New Orleans in 2008 to the attention of the World, for saying people do matter and life is a precious commodity, even the life of a woman, a young girl who will never become president of the United States or an ambassador in the government’s administration.
Let us use this spirit of hope to bring about a change for the better, not for the already wealthy few.
Maybe one day the birds will again sing in Louis Armstrong park where even the homeless will be able to enjoy life and the mentally ill not feel dumped.
Maybe we are all mentally ill, dumped by the powers that be. But we need not let others do to us what we foresee in the not too distant future.
If ever a place was ripe for revolution, it’s here, in New Orleans.
Congratulations, Vagina Monologues on a job well done.
And thank you Eve Ensler for your inspiration
Linda Zises
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