Page 84 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue2

I tell her that I have come about my daughter. She is sixteen or eighteen. She is the Daughter. She will not kill. I

will not allow it. It is not to protect the victim; it is to protect my daughter. She is a revolutionary, as we all are,

as we must be. But, I tell the teacher with whom I am now collaborating, who understands everything, I will send

the daughter away. She will go to another country. I cannot send her to the United States. It is not a country of

such women as we are or we have become. It is not a country that forbids killing.

That young man will go to another country, too. That young man who is her partner, in the way the man was my

partner earlier, when I held the photo and knew that he must not, and so would not kill. He/they will not kill.

I speak this to the Teacher. I am on my knees, and she is seated on the single wood chair by the windows in a

classroom empty of children. I fall to my knees and then I rise up. It is possible that I am also the teacher. It is

possible that there is only one person in this dream and it is myself and I am playing all the roles. No, I am not

playing roles. I am everyone in the dream as I must be, because it is a dream and that is how the dream teaches

us as there are no others in a dream; there is only what we know or what is being told to us by the dream—

which, ultimately, knows what needs to be known.

This is the dream. A dream from a world of the imagination that birthed me when I was a young girl or a young

woman, and when killing (despite Guernica, despite World War II, despite Hiroshima and Nagasaki) was not

killing a person, but an act that created another world. In such dreams of language, killing was a word, not an

act. It was a word that led to another world, an act that had to end in a dream of Life, of words come to life, like

justice or freedom. A dream of a world in which killing was not ever to have to kill a body that could not

understand the horror of killing. To kill and not to kill were the same, because they created the world we had to

create so that the killing would be over.

It was a world I recognized in an imaginary literature of Spain where I have never been. It was a world I was

born into through dreams I do not remember that have rhythms that might be flamenco and which I found again

in the rhythms of the poetry and the literature of Latin America.

In these dreams that are not dreams so much as patterns in other worlds, the women know what they have to

know, though their mothers wore veils and were silent and sequestered behind walls in cities called the Alameda

or Alhambra, the Red. In the languages of these worlds, the men told the stories of what the women were not to

know...The men who told the stories did not know what the women knew and were passing on to the daughters,

the daughters who come to me now at this time in my life in my dream. The daughters who are straight and tall,