On Friday, my friend Tori Lane held a benefit to raise money for HEART, a program of healing for victims of sexual assault. As a poet and visual artist, Tori thinks in metaphors and striking images. As a performer, she thinks of ways to bring groups of people together to participate in art that leads to action.
The event on Friday night was a little bit of all of that. People played music, spoke from their hearts and read copies of her “zine,” a self published magazine of writings and photographs printed on a copier with regular white copy paper and sold for $5 or given out to anyone who will read it. The title: “For the Waking Dead.”
Lisa Cole Smith
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The project centers on writings about sexual assault with photographs of young people dressed as zombies wandering through the woods. The effect was both disturbing and beautiful, like a magazine layout for some bizarre other world. I shuddered as I looked at the photos of my friends dressed up like these half-dead creatures. To see them in that light made me consider things I didn’t want to about them. How could these young vibrant faces look so glowing and yet have such shadows over them?
Zombies are classic fixtures in horror movies. I’m not a fan of horror in general, but I really can’t watch zombies. They terrify me. Just thinking about the concept makes me afraid to go out of my house or into the basement. For a little while after I looked at the pictures in the zine, I started seeing people on my street differently, watching fearfully to see if they were moving funny, looking for any sign of humanly emotional responses.
I think this visceral response is exactly why Tori chose zombies as a metaphor for this work. The idea of people being alive and yet dead, walking around in our midst with no way to relate or reach out or communicate, no way for us to reach them, is really disturbing. All they can do is survive and that is just barely. And it is a destructive kind of survival, to themselves and everyone around them. I see too many people living that kind of half-life and it is heart breaking.
That was exactly the point of the “For the Waking Dead” project. We should see sexual assault and all victimization as that kind of disturbing and unnatural. It is unnatural for people to have to walk around, so often suffering in silence afraid of the ramifications of that story being known. As one of the band members who spoke that night said, until we see sexual assault the way we see cannibalism in our culture — as revolting — we are not really seeing what is going on and we contribute to a culture where it will continue to occur.
Whenever a disaster hits, a celebrity special is soon to follow with pleas to help those affected. Some send money, others buy tickets or albums, but most of the time it feels so far away and we feel too helpless to do anything. We feel as if our only options are to go or send money “there” in order to help. Yet we are often blind to the walking dead in our own back yard. We forget what a big difference making a small difference can make.
Last Friday night, a handful of musicians, a poet and a photographer most of whom are under the age of 26 were able to pull together some friends and raise $600, enough money to send one person to the HEART retreat. In Tori’s experience it was the equivalent of potentially saving one life. In addition, that night a group of young people challenged one another to think differently about the way they relate to one another and to take seriously the goal of creating truly safe communities within their punk DIY scene.
I was inspired by these young people who believe so much that their music and art, their voices, are valuable gifts they can give to help others. And they give them so freely. Some-times I’m amazed by what is possible when people simply share what they have to give like the little boy with the loaves and fishes. Last Friday night I witnessed an act of faith by a small group of young people who barely know what the word “faith” means and was challenged to be bolder in my own life. I imagine it won’t be the last time.
More information about HEART (Hope Exists After Rape Trauma) is available at http://www.h-e-a-r-t.info/. Tori Lane blogs at http://www.thefusionproject.net/.
Lisa Cole Smith ([email protected]) is pastor of Convergence: A Creative Community of Faith, in Alexandria, Va.