Like a Lamb to the Slaughter

"I just want you to understand
that I know what all the fighting was for
and I just want you to understand
that I'm not angry anymore
I'm not angry anymore."

--Ani DiFranco

Last night, at the conclusion of the "Vagina Monologues" performance, held at the Birch Theatre in North Park, a friend shared his experience of being a man bearing witness to the show.  He alluded to feeling trapped within a suffocating box known as 'oppressor.'  "This is why men become violent," he shared.  "They're fighting to escape their own entrapment."  "And," he said, "it is these same feelings that drive us to create all of the technology and the systems.  Even the art."  I appreciated his viewpoint.  In fact, his words resonated deeply.  In my own personal experience, Self-Expression - through song, dance, art and story - was an early reprieve from the dysfunction found within my parent's home as well as from this BodyMind of mine that could not intimately communicate all of the confusion and the pain that came with my childhood.   

During my mid-twenties, I crafted my first dance for film as a entry point into graduate school.  In the eight-minute piece, I utilized the structure of the mandala.  For the opening sequence, which represented the square shape, I drew a direct parallel between these feelings of entrapment and how we can imprison ourselves within the four walls of our homes as well as our minds.  I called upon my friend Ben to be the lead dancer for this piece because he was this idea personified.  At that time, he identified with feelings of being an animal caged within the suffocating isolation of its own bone and tissue, skin and cells.  Of course, all of this was just an artful representation of me - an intimate look into my own anger and how I had fallen victim to myself.

Two years later, I was living back in San Diego where my repressed emotion had me suffering within the confines of an extremely unhealthy relationship.  On a spring day, as I rode my bicycle down that Golden Hill and past the ugly facade of Horton Plaza, I passed an anarchist rally protesting the then two-year-old invasion of Iraq.  With a blue purse slung over my shoulder, inside of which was a frisbee disc and a water bottle, I wasn't intending to stop for that small crowd.  It was, however, the sight of the SDPD, off at a short-distance, that made me turn my bike around and join the rally.  Gathered in a tight circle, the officers looked like a pack of wolves ready for the hunt.  I could see the invisible saliva glinting off of their chins.  Having participated in the monthly Critical Mass bike rides only months before, I knew full-well the ugly antics that some of these cops were ready to perpetuate - all in the name of aesthetic control. 

In an ironic turn of events, I got myself arrested right there on the city streets of the Gaslamp Quarter.  Naturally, I hadn't done anything wrong.  I simply told a captain that he had no right touching the young drummer who had stepped off of the curb.  My unsolicited advice turned me into the scampering, fearful rabbit that I had intuited.  I was harassed and harangued until I stopped my bike and tried to walk away from the vicious pack of blood hounds.  Too late, I was arrested for "evading arrest" and "interfering with a police officer."  I tasted the miserable waste of time and tax payer's money known as jail for two-and-a-half days.  Meanwhile, pregnant prostitutes came and went and I was never formally charged or brought before a judge.  I was, however, treated like a caged animal.

"She taught me how to wage a cold war
with quiet charm
but i just want to walk
through my life unarmed
to accept and just get by
like my father learned to do
but without all the acceptance and getting by
that got my father through." 

--Ani D.