Rachel Corrie Died 21 Years Ago Today

Forgive the very inconsistent pacing of this newsletter: six weeks without a post then two within a week, but this is how it’s going, so here I am again. As a Tl;dr, here are some “calls to action” coming out of today’s essay.

• As I mentioned in my last missive, I’m going to be on a panel on Wednesday after a reading of My Name is Rachel Corrie at Intiman Theatre. I’d be touched to share it with you, and you can get your tickets here.

• In honor of Rachel Corrie’s death, please contribute to the Nasrallah’s family’s GoFundMe to flee Gaza.

Today is the 21st anniversary of Rachel Corrie’s murder at the hands of the IDF. Corrie was a 23-year-old from Olympia, Washington who went to Gaza at the height of the second Intifada with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a Palestinian-led organization. Rachel put her body between an Israeli bulldozer and the home of her friend Dr. Samir Nasrallah (whose family is now fundraising to flee Gaza—donate here). The bulldozer, which could clearly see her, ran her over. Within three days, ten Palestinians had also been killed in the same violence.

In a moment when dozens of Palestinians are being massacred daily, I am turning to Corrie’s story not because her death is the most tragic, courageous, or worthy of grief and outrage, but because her clarity inspires me: She knew that if those bulldozers would stop for anyone, it was for her white American body. In her last email to her mother before her death, she wrote:

Three weeks after Aaron Bushnell’s death, and witnessing Victor Cazares’ HIV meds strike, Rachel is among those within the imperial core who are giving, or have given everything. I have prayed, sincerely, in these last weeks, if that is my part to play. And what I can hear right now tells me that it is not, but it is my duty to honor those whose part it is. They might guide me towards the next faithful action, towards doing the next thing that scares me.

I saw My Name is Rachel Corrie when I was seventeen and I wrote my college essay about it. In the past two years, I’ve read hundreds of college essays while teaching students. It’s a fucked-up, exploitative form, wringing trauma from children and imposing a false and often cruel narrative of progress: “How have you overcome these challenges?” I was trained (in a factory of essay coaches) to ask this—even of the child who had lost both her parents, or the kid whose classmate had died of a Fentanyl overdose, or the kid struggling mightily with ongoing learning disabilities. The prize goes to the kid who has suffered the most and Stanford-ed their way out of that suffering.

But I also witness their budding articulations of self. I get to ask them, at the end of basically every single paragraph, “What did you learn from this experience?” Then, they tell me how they are proud of themselves for stepping out of their shells, seeing things differently, asking for help, making new friends, leading a team. It’s a holy thing to witness—like I’m watering the synapses, watching them grow in real-time.

I wish I could say that after writing my college essay I dove headfirst into anti-Zionist organizing then and kept it up for the last fifteen years. That college essay admitted me to the University of Chicago: the Mordor of neoliberal politics—from its campus culture, to its pillaging and policing of the south side, to its propagation of the global capitalist economic order. I began my political development in prep school and came of age at UofC. There is so much to unlearn and so many fractures to heal.

I’ve re-read my essay multiple times these last few months, in this season of both genocide and college applications. The prose is surprisingly lovely. The structure works. My passion is so palpable and overflowing. I have one hell of a martyr complex. I want to be an actress so bad I want to die (and that cause takes on the same importance as a liberation movement).

Both my seventeen-year-old self and I are clumsy creatures, easily falling into melodrama and saviorism, but also able, at times, to feel things so large only opera is the right scale. She and I are proud of each other—for writing, for making art, for developing our politics. And we are frustrated with each other: She wishes I had more courage; I wish she had more self-awareness.

To honor this younger self, and to honor Rachel and the inspiration she has offered me, both now and long ago, I am going to publish the essay here. May we all find comradely love with ourselves, past, present, and future.

Autumn 2008

“Today was a day with a thesis. It was trying to tell me something, and it used surprisingly good rhetoric.” So reads a line in Jesse’s journal entry for the fourth of May, a school day in which she travels through a surreal day resembling a looking-glass tunnel that reflects themes and conceits from step to step, hour by hour. The line seems heavy-handed, even to her. But the feeling is genuine.

The curtain rises on a daytime performance of My Name is Rachel Corrie, a one-woman show that tells the true story of a young woman from Olympia, Washington who goes to Israel/Palestine to promote the rights of Palestinians. The play ends with her tragic death when she is run over by an Israeli bulldozer. Jesse leaves the theatre not knowing which way is up. “What was it about that play?”

Jesse then goes to her Modern European History class. Mr. Hundley taught no ordinary class. His objective was to incite revolution: his tactic was to play the dictator— Stalin, the Sun King, Creon, Kurtz. He stifled his population with strict, harsh classroom policies, and at least one thesis-driven, five-paragraph deductive essay a week, with rigid rules and expectations. Under his repressive regime, the students sought (with his implicit encouragement) ways to stage personal revolutions. Sixty sophomores dared to disturb the universe of that epic history class.

Jesse staged her own civil disobedience: she wrote inductive essays. Innumerable “Hundley essays” bored her, whereas she found inductive essays thrilling—guiding the reader through labyrinths of rhetorical arguments before springing the mousetrap,  catching the conscience of the reader. However, if she led her readers even slightly astray they would lose the thread of her argument, resulting in Hundley’s dreaded sketches of clouds next to her prose.

On this day, Mr. Hundley steps out of character and sincerely speaks to the class about ambition. “People will see your race; they will say, ‘Sorry.’  People will see your gender; they will say, ‘Sorry.’ People will even see your haircut, and they will say, ‘Sorry.’” He tells Jesse and her peers to say, “Yes!” to their objectives, regardless of who says “sorry.”

It was as if the day was using Hundley’s words as a theatrical device, prompting a flashback to the summer before. A dozen-odd students of Antigone sat in a little black box theatre, listening to Richard, their teacher. They were riveted to his speech. He asked, “What would you give your life for? Would you die to bury your brother? To save family? Friends? To act? Why would anyone want to be an actor? You don’t choose acting; acting chooses you.” Jesse’s years of “play” in theatre finally aligned.

Richard took the stage and orated the legend of the origin of acting. In ancient Greece, the theatrical model was a chorus reciting the myths of the gods until Thespis, a chorus member, leapt from the line proclaiming, “I am Dionysus.” Despite convention and consequence, Thespis “acted” the passion. 

Jesse’s notebook that day reads, “This is my meaning of life.”

Prophetically, “passion” screams from that black box into Jesse’s day this May. In a frenzy she turns to the OED for “passion’s” etymology. “The sufferings of a martyr, martyrdom.” Jesse begins to understand the thesis of this tortuously inductive day.

The thesis of the day is to live a thesis-driven life—In Jesse’s case, to follow in the footsteps of Antigone, Rachel Corrie, and Thespis: to revive the passion behind the archetypes.

In the end I see, regardless of Jesse’s thirst for conclusion, that life itself is endlessly inductive.