Rachel’s Words

by Antony Wright

The Royal Court Theatre is one of the most intimate venues in London, ‘My name is Rachel Corrie’ is one of the most intimate productions you are ever likely to see. Put the two together and you will experience one of those all too few life enhancing events.

Alan Rickman and Katherine Viner have taken and edited Rachel’s journals and emails, which when performed on stage by Megan Dodds, give us privileged access to the short life of an intelligent, funny and passionate woman whose only crime was that she cared.

Rachel was a remarkable 23-year-old who traveled to Gaza with the International Solidarity Movement. Undoubtedly the fact that she was an attractive young white American gives visibility to her story, something denied to so many Palestinian victims of this conflict. But what makes Rachel special is that she was in Gaza out of choice rather than by circumstance.

To see this production is to be granted privileged access to the tensions in the Corrie family as Rachel awakens to a world that is inexplicably unjust, a world that is a thousand miles from Olympia, Washington and the safe comfortable home that has been nurtured for her. As Rachel travels on this journey of realisation strong ties pull her mother, Cindy, deeper into Rachel’s world as she tries to understand her daughter and vainly to watch over her.

When our daughter Rachel Corrie was killed by an Israeli bulldozer in the Gaza strip on March 16 2003, an immediate impulse was to get her words out to the world. She had been working in Rafah with a nonviolent resistance organisation, the International Solidarity Movement, trying to stop the demolition of Palestinian homes and wells. Her emails home had had a powerful impact on our family, making us think about the situation in the Middle East in ways we had never done before. Without a direct connection to Israel and Palestine, we had not understood the devastating nature of the Palestinians’ situation. Coming from the US, our allegiance and empathy had always been with the people of Israel.

After Rachel died we realised that her words were having a similar effect on others whose lives were being changed, as ours have been – not just by Rachel’s death, but by the window her writing provided on the Palestinian experience and by her call to action.