| Rachel CorrieStudy Purpose
The Courage of Rachel Corrie
By
Amy Wilentz, Truthdig. Posted May 26, 2008.
Reviewed: Let Me Stand Alone: The Journals of Rachel Corrie by Rachel Corrie (W.W. Norton, 2008) By all rights, Let Me Stand Alone
should not be an easy book to read. Doom hangs over this collection of
the journal writings of Rachel Corrie, who was a 23-year-old American
peace activist when she was crushed to death by an Israel Defense
Forces bulldozer in Gaza five years ago. And yet most of this book
whizzes by in a series of delights: in descriptions of autumn football
games in Washington state, and ice in the winter mornings, of war seen
on television, of the wind, of Corrie's grandparents' house in Des
Moines, the used-book store in Aitkin, Minn., her mother tending to her
dying grandmother, her own face. And this is all before the age of 14.
When she was 2 years old, she looked at Capitol Lake in Olympia, Wash.,
her hometown, and said (famously, in her family): "This is the wide
world, and I'm coming to it." It turns out that Rachel Corrie was
first of all a miraculous child; then, an amazing changeling of a girl;
later, a difficult, challenging, brilliant teenager, and finally a
demanding, charismatic young adult. Most important, she was a very able
writer from a remarkably early age -- about 10 years old, or 11 -- an
immediate, sensory observer, a good thinker, a rebel eventually. Above
all, she was always human, never caustic (though she could be casually
cruel to her parents, like all adolescents), and almost painfully alive
to the give and take within families, among friends, between lovers,
between siblings. She would go on to carry this feeling of
connectedness to its logical extreme, because among the many things she
was, Rachel Corrie was above all a natural extremist. She felt other
people's pain really and truly. As a grown-up, she feels connected not
only to her parents, her sister, her unpredictable boyfriend and to
others around her, but also to the mentally ill people with whom she
worked in Olympia ("Don't we all hear voices?" she asks her journal),
and to the world. She also felt responsible for mankind's lapses in
humanity. That natural extremism and dedication to goodness took her
into activism, and that's how she ended up in Gaza -- her shoulder
blades, face, six ribs and spinal cord broken under the blade of that
bulldozer. But this book is not all about Rachel Corrie's
progression toward this terrible fate. It's really three books in one.
It's a coming-of-age book about a certain kind of American girl, an
upstanding, stalwart child of the Pacific Northwest, who loves freedom
the way a pioneer child would, as part of the normal course of things.
As a child, Corrie is like a Mark Twain character: You would not be
surprised to see her in a thin dimity dress or in smocked gingham, with
her blond hair in a braid, playing barefoot in the reeds near Huck's
river. As she gets older, she flirts with all the syndromes American
girls now flirt with: drinking, smoking, anorexia. "Then she cursed
herself for spending so much time thinking about herself," she writes.
But she survives; she's an American survivor -- and if you didn't know
beforehand the wrenching end of her story you would assume she could
survive anything. The first half of the book reads like a best-selling
Oprah-endorsed literary tell-all memoir (or anyway, almost all … there
is an editorial hand involved in culling the journals, and that hand
belongs to the Corrie family), written by an exceptionally creative and
gifted girl. Let Me Stand Alone is also a writer's
notebook. One can easily imagine it being read in a workshop. It
includes poetry, and a long (some might say too long) half-fiction,
half-confessional love story; rapturous descriptions of nature, and
loving details about Olympia (having read "Let Me Stand Alone," I now
vote Olympia, Wash., the No. 1 city to visit in the United States,
although I haven't been there). A love poem about driving on the
highway with her mother and seeing a flock of herons is particularly
accomplished; here's a bit of it: continued at:
Amy Wilentz, Truthdig. May 26, 2008.
The
journals of protester Rachel Corrie, killed by an Israeli bulldozer in
Palestine, reveal her untimely death all the more tragic./http://www.alternet.org/tags/rachel%20corrie/
THE BEST OF THE COMMENTS:
Rachel Corrie changed my life. I now donate money every year to
activist groups and into a peace community instead of paying federal
taxes that purchase military bulldozers that kill young people from our
colleges. Rachel could have been my student; in fact, I know the
professor who sent her there. How dare the US government supply these
murderers with $billions annually? Yes, the government may come after
my wages or take my house. It is a high price and NOTHING compared to
what Rachel suffered. When will we as American citizens simply stop
supporting the military while we piously rant against Bush? Rachel died
for peace, for justice, and for nonviolence. Those who commit violence
in the name of justice dishonor her memory and only further additional
injustice. I personally reject Palestinian violence, Israeli violence,
and I have withdrawn my support for any of it insofar as I am able.
Rachel's backbone was crushed by militarism; when will we act as though
we have one? When will we stop supporting any violence by anyone?" FROM ONE AMERICAN READER...
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