OYSTERS

While I worked along the border, the realities of life made it impossible to write about the experience of helping set up these shelters and safe houses for a group of people who can only be called gender crimes refugees. Our youngest occupants were newborns. Behind the secret walls, stories and wounds emerged of human cruelty on a level of complexity and barbarity that I found impossible to comprehend even while I bore witness. Over time, the differences between the lives of the “helpers” and the “helped” seemed to merge into a continuum of female experience that I had not – previously – entirely conceptualized.  The constant level of secrecy, confidentiality, high security, and omnipresent fear of retaliative violence underscored the degree of power than men and male perpetrators maintained at all levels of society. Several years later, I am beginning to excavate the lives we led at that time, one story at a time.