The Beginning of the Artists Alliance Against Violence Inc.

There is a place where thing are not what they seem. It could be from another world, this place of rarity and splendor. Elusive as it comes and goes. Yet, wherever I am, I have always been able to find it. Whether by the sea or beneath a mountain, the flowering trees gather and when I have come under their transcendent company, I am changed. Blossoms release from branches, whispering down and across my face as white falls and flutters to the ground. To my eyes this could be winter. This falling white could be snow. But there is a heat that defies my vision. It rises from the black earth beneath my feet and pulses from the red sun above. The wet, loamy soil and the petals smell of life itself, and because these trees would never bloom in such barren desolation, I know the winter has passed.

Art is a healing force. I know this because I have lived my entire life immersed, sometimes unwillingly, in the world of the arts. I often tell people that I was raised by artists in the same way that one would say they were raised by wolves. My earliest memories are crowded with African drummers, mimes, modern dancers in full-body spandex, and piles of ballet shoes on the floor of my living room closet. My mother was a dancer, and director, who believed that art was the greatest healing power on earth. She danced every day in order to burn off the pain of atrocities she had suffered. She also produced full scale productions in which artists of every discipline could express themselves and support each other in healing. These men and women would come to the studio to work with her, and they would find themselves sobbing on the scuffed and battered floor as they recalled horrors that had weighed on their hearts for too long.

In my mother’s world I witnessed joy, healing, and life lived on the edge of this wound of creation. My playground existed within and between the spaces created by the myriad artists who searched for Duende, the spirit of art, in my childhood home. During these years, I sought out the quiet place where the flowering trees gather in spring. I would wait for this moment, in the long year, and the simplicity it offered. The simplicity of white petals and their silent promise that winter was over. For the earth, it was, but for me winter seemed endless. I let it hold my heart, this cold. On weekends I would leave my mother’s colorful world of fluttering artists and disgruntled administrators to go on court ordered visits with a man who did not deserve to be called my other parent. This was the dark side of my life, and in his hands my only solace was the cold. I lived in a perpetual state of shock to numb myself. I didn’t know how else to survive.

It was a hot Saturday afternoon in late May when the petals had all melted away for another year. My mom was preparing her flock of Kabuki dancers and tall, blond singers for a production in honor of peace, and the man who was not a father had lost control, again. He had always been so careful with me in the past, careful to hide the damage he did, but lately he didn’t seem to care. He was different and the difference had rendered my body useless.

I lay on the floor of his small apartment, drowning in pain, and biting my tongue to keep myself from screaming. My usual state of frigid shock had fled under the heat, this new level of pain. It pulsated through my chest and down my arm from the epicenter of my dislocated shoulder. He was out of control, but he no longer seemed angry and when the rushing and pounding in my ears subsided, my agony addled brain registered his laughter. There must have been something about my humiliation that was humorous to him. When I tried to move my arm to wipe tears and saliva from my face, he hooted and slapped his thigh. As I rolled to look up at him, my world spun around, and the tepid wood floor was the only thing that kept me from falling into oblivion. When I looked at him, his eyes were alight with mirth and his cheeks were pink with good humor. He mocked me in my pitiful, crumpled position. He was coaxing me, as if I were being unreasonable to be making such a fuss, and he laughed again when I gasped out that I thought my ribs were broken.

He wasn’t insane, only high, and he eventually realized that he would have to fix the mess he had made of me. If he wanted to keep himself free from blame, as he always managed to do, he could not leave me broken for someone else to find. He sobered himself and lifted me from the floor, my left arm dangling awkwardly at my side, without effort. He was a giant, with hands like dinner plates, and I was a skinny nine-year-old. When he latched onto my burning collar bone, his thick fingers grazed my mangled shoulder like serrated shards of glass. He grasped my useless arm with his other hard hand and I clenched my teeth. I wouldn’t embarrass myself by whimpering or give him the satisfaction.

He wrenched me, as if he were trying to pull me in two, and a sonic boom of bone on bone ricocheted through my universe. My vision was filled with red stars and darkness as he released his hold on me, and I crumpled to the floor again unable to hold myself up under the wash of sharp, beating agony that promised me unconsciousness. The stars turned white and purple as my head hit the old pine floor, but I didn’t go under. No mater how much I gasped, I could not bring air into my contracted chest.

I suppose he must have stood there watching me as I writhed silently because when his usual threat came he seemed not to have moved. “If you tell anyone about this, I will kill your mother.” He laughed again, thick and sickening. It sounded as if he had peanut butter lodged in the back of his throat when he chortled and snorted like that. He left me then, his threat and his ridicule wrapping their clammy fingers around my soul, but the shock finally came in to do its job for me and the pain subsided as my mind became numb. I stayed on the floor. It was a long time before my body allowed me to move, and when I finally did get up, he was gone. I didn’t know where he was, I didn’t know what else to do for my swollen shoulder but to hold a freezer-burned bag of green beans on it, and when that day was over, I didn’t tell anyone what had happened.

The swelling in my shoulder dissipated after two days, and within two weeks the ugly red bruises that had covered me like a gruesome high tide had faded to blue, green, and yellow. What had once looked like a flood had turned into oddly placed rivers and pools of the most peculiar colors. My body looked somewhat like an oil spill, or a child’s finger painting. I had become a canvas for my father’s rage.

During those years, my body ached most of the time, and I had more complaints than a sixty-year-old man. Still, the bruises that peppered my body did not really bother me, as strange as that may sound. I was in physical pain, but children are more resilient than adults. I played, slept, and ate, I didn’t do my homework. There were always new marks, smaller ones, I was bruised like a peach or an apple, but unlike fruit my bad spots could not be easily cut out. These grotesque tattoos healed quickly, but his ridiculing, and that sick laughter, dug into my soul and tore wounds into my heart. Some would heal, leaving twisted scars, and others were always raw. When, at times, I would lose my protecting blanket of cold, icy shock, my mind would fester with anger, his anger, that had become my own.

My mother was not fooled by my silences or the fact that I said I was not afraid of him. She knew what he was doing, if not in exact and full detail, and she was in court, monthly, fighting to end visitation with him. However, my father was very charming when it served him. He convinced mandated reporters and family therapists that he was harmless. If the need arose, he would cry, and women in blouses and pencil skirts would fall in love with the sensitive, handsome giant who was tormented by an evil ex-wife and cold hearted daughter who he only wanted to spend some time with. When my mother would plead with judges that she feared for my life, they would reply that they would wait for him to really hurt me before they would stop visitation. I could have shown them the bruises, I should have, but I knew he would kill her if I did.

My mother was helpless as she watched me go with him, week after week, and wondered if I would ever come home. So, she did the only thing she could to save her own sanity. She utilized her experience with the arts and healing and started a not-for-profit organization. The Artists Alliance Against Violence Inc. was a continuation of the work she had always done, but she needed clout and recognition in order to save my life. Within two years, my mother had created an organization, threatened to expose court corruption with the help of the media attention the AAAV Inc. was getting, and she had moved us, illegally, across state lines and into New York where they began to help me within a month.

It has been twelve years, half of my life, since I have seen him, and in many ways I am only now beginning to mend my soul. I often wonder if it is possible to truly heal or if a heart, once wounded, remains forever altered, but I have learned that there is another kind of wound that cuts deeper than the ones that cripple us. It is the wound that love creates, and it can replace the suffering with a deepest emotion that is impossible to define. This new emotion, this love, no matter what brings it crashing in, a child, a friend, a lover, a sensation, or an art form, will be a healing force more powerful than the darkest suffering. The mystery will be solved and fear will fall away. This, I believe, is the gravest nature of the feeling that has been referred to as Duende: when you have delved so deeply that you can no longer feel fear. However, the unrest of the Duende is this: when the moment has passed you will know fear again. It is what makes us human; this range of divinity and damnation, and the ability to know love, fear, joy and hatred all within the same raw spaces. I also know that, as long as we live, the cycle will continue. Hate will blend into love and one fire will be stronger than the other, if only for a moment.

There is a place where things are not what they seem. This remains true, though my winter is over. I still seek the place where blossoms fill the air and lay down in drifts and heaps. They still remind me of snow when they fall, but now my red heart has become the heat, my sun, that burns away desolation. The wounds that he put in me are still in this place, but they seem different, they are no longer alone. There are things that cut deeper and things that grow. Change rushes through and one beat is not like the last. I am making my own wounds now. I love and I hate, I crave as I search for Duende. Yet, these new wounds are not so different from the old and neither are the petals from the snow. -  Rachel Morgan