2015 Yoni ki Raat cast, via Facebook
I was mildly dreading the South Asian Vagina Monologues, but Rati got me a ticket. So I drank some gin and hunkered down for the two-hour show.
My dread was three-fold. 1. I was already sort of depressed and didn't want to sit through sad monologues about sexual abuse that would make me face my deep inner feelings. No. Deep. Inner. Feelings. 2. I didn't want to hear poems about people's vaginas being beautiful flowers or their menstrual cycles being flowing rivers, because that makes me throw up in my mouth. 3. I didn't want to experience weaponized identity politics that recalled jazz trolls.
But Rati is a refined and soothing presence, my sister from another reality. As she and I settled into our seats at Dixon Place and read the trigger warnings in our programs, the gin and company began to improve my outlook.
Word had spread about Yoni ki Raat, now in its third year. Audience members traveled from as far as Boston and Philadelphia to hear this "transformational storytelling performance project that seeks to give space for South Asian and Indo-Caribbean people experiencing gender oppression to share our stories."
My dread evaporated as Kirin took the stage, a cherub with a soft bare midriff. She performed a beat poem on the beauty of queer love that borrowed mischievously from Christian hymns.
Miranda peeled skeins of colored gauze from her wrists and dropped them to the floor as she lamented shedding her Guyanese accent to fit in with American schoolmates.
Benaifer, whose bio informed us that she was one of approximately 190,000 Zoroastrians in the world, spoke of being abused as a girl and how it trained her to hold her body in a way that hid its femininity. I thought of my own mother and my private theory that getting abused made Mom raise me to be more masculine: If I didn't present as feminine, I wouldn't be in danger. Benaifer recounted a fresher abuse, this time transforming it into a triumphant revenge fantasy, complete with costume change.
Sabrina took the stage, holding a jar of honey, which she compared to sex: It's sweet. You can have it. It never goes bad. The nonviolence and simplicity of the image made me wistful.
The power of Yoni ki Raat's collaborative process lifted up these individual stories, which had been workshopped over a period of months. The material was well compressed, and the stronger performers strengthened the weaker. Sure, certain aspects of the show made me roll my eyes, like the snapping to indicate approval and the mandatory sharing circle at the end, but I also kind of dug them. It was like being back at Brown, except with better costumes. And there were no poems about the menstrual cycle.
My favorite was Dee, whose preferred pronoun is "they" and who began with, "My girlfriend was sucking my dick the other day..." and proceeded to recount humiliating childhood visits to a waxing parlor and humiliating encounters on the street with strangers who shame Dee for having a mustache.
Amazing how memories of psychological pain linger in the body. It made me think of the book Citizen by Claudia Rankine. She writes brilliantly about the racism Serena Williams has experienced on the tennis court, how each new bad call jolts Serena out of tennis time and into some old dead zone:
Yes, and the body has memory. The physical carriage hauls more than its weight. The body is the threshold across which each objectionable call passes into consciousness -- all the unintimidated, unblinking, and unflappable resilience does not erase the moments lived through, even as we are eternally stupid or everlastingly optimistic, so ready to be inside, among, a part of the games.
Under the influence of new bad calls, Serena reacts as if to older ones. "She says in 2009, belatedly, the words that should have been said to the umpire in 2004...Now Serena's reaction is read as insane."
The question is, how do we break out of that nauseous loop? How do we play each point as it happens?
I think it has something to do with recreating the moment of insult, except safer, bound, witnessed. This time, you vow, you will connect instead of dissociating. Boxing can be about that. So can sex and storytelling.
Yoni ki Raat wasn't exactly art. It was a collective ritual of healing. Everyone was invited.
The other day, my friend Chris and I were talking about whether it's okay for a white author to write from the point of view of a person of color. Chris was saying that being a woman was, in itself, an inherently incomplete identity. Nobody ever feels like they are woman enough.
This was something of an epiphany for me. I've always felt like I am not a real woman, but I had never actually considered that *every woman* feels this way. Chris said he thought it was the same with being black or Dominican or South Asian: There is no monolithic experience of race or gender. Authenticity is a myth used to manipulate and demoralize us.
When the performers of Yoni ki Raat clasped hands and took their curtain call, I marveled at the assembled beauty, which represented so many ways of living and loving. Draped in red, black, and gold, their bodies were indistinguishable from what they held. Victory, at least for the moment.