Maryah Converse, New York, USA, SSH Blog Correspondent
“Do you think that women can be their own worst enemies? When they act as if the harassment were a compliment, or don’t speak up. Aren’t you your own worst enemies?” asked a man in the audience after a performance of #SpeakUp: The Street Harassment Play.
I did not just assume his good intentions, as Flux Theater Ensemble’s “Rules of Engagement” asked us to do in the facilitated discussion after the performance. I felt his good intentions, saw it in the dismay on his face at the reactions of all the women in the circle.
I thought, how many times have I said this to myself? “You shouldn’t have walked away. You should have stood up to that man. You’re your own worst enemy, woman!”
Then I remind myself that it is a psychological defense mechanism. I cannot confront or even take seriously every incident of street harassment in my life. I would have no time or energy for anything else. And sometimes—no, often it is physically dangerous. On my computer, I have a quote by the writer Margaret Atwood: “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.” I hate that she is right.
Some of the others in our circle have responded to his well-intentioned but jarring question. Then Shaun Bennet Fauntleroy said, “The worst enemy is the one who makes us feel small.” It felt like the perfect note to end our discussion.
* * *
Bennet Fauntleroy was not just the facilitator of our discussion group. She is also the woman behind the event, #SpeakUp: The Street Harassment Plays, and wrote one of the seven short monologues in the project.
Each of the monologues approached harassment from the many ways that women respond, all different, all equally valid. The second piece, “Just the Way It Is” by Nicole Pandolfo, was the only male voice, and it provoked that too-common fear response. There is the trauma response of the seventh voice, “What I Would Do to You” by Maria Alexandria Beech.
The third voice, “God Bless You Mama: A Woman’s Guide to the World” by Sol Crespo, was by far the funniest. The text dripped with sarcasm, on the verge of farce, but was played absolutely straight by Holly Chou. With heartfelt innocent sincerity, she declares, “If he hadn’t reminded me to smile, I would never have known I had the ability … or the permission!” She keeps declaring with a bright smile, “Men are SO HELPFUL!”
I could not help but notice that the loudest laughter in the room came from the men. Every time I laughed, I felt guilty, because under the humor, this can be deadly serious.
The fifth voice was like a punch in the gut. I knew from the first sentence that this was the work of Lauren Ferebee, titled “Rogue Agent.” It was no surprise that my friend Lauren would want to write a theater short for a production of this kind. Another full-length play of hers, “Somewhere Safer,” is a nuanced reflection on terrorism and the wars in Afghanistan and Syria, gender, and the choices we have to make between morality and making a living.
Here in “Rogue Agent” was the anger response to harassment, raging against the machine. “I never wanted to be a woman writer,” the narrator spits out, played with the perfect low, gravelly voice by Hanna Cheek.
I asked Lauren about her piece, and she described the lack of women’s voices in the standard literary canon, saying, “To me, the silence of women artists across history is, on a structural level, related to the silence of a woman who has been called out over and over again in public. On a societal and personal level, women who live, write and work in the public space are told over and over again ‘you don’t belong here.’ I struggle with having internalized that voice telling me that I don’t belong here, and I struggle with having internalized that larger dynamic that my work doesn’t belong here.”
When I asked Lauren why she chose theater as the medium for her message, she said she wanted to tell audiences “that it’s ok to be impacted by those experiences. It’s ok to be angry. And that we should be angry, whether anyone tells us it’s ok or not.”
That is exactly what I heard in her piece in the lines, “All I ever learned about anger was to turn it into a secret … so I talk.”
Maryah works for the Unitarian Church of All Souls in New York City where she has provided particular leadership in the Racial Justice Initiative. She has an MA in Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, and was a Fellow at the Center for Arabic Study Abroad in Cairo. Read her blog “Arabs I’ve Known.”
